7 CONCERNING A MISSION TO CENTRAL ASIA

At the moment there is much talk of the discoveries that Paul Pélliot, a former student of the French School of the Far East, appears to have made during a recent exploration of Central Asia. So many French and foreign missions have succeeded one another in this region without any appreciable results that one is permitted to be a little skeptical at first. No doubt, explorers have brought back documents that are interesting from the geographical point of view, especially photographs, as well as zoological, botanical, and mineral specimens, but nothing more. But here is what Pélliot himself relates about his expedition, first at a conference held at the Sorbonne on December 11 [1909] and then in an article that appeared in Echo de Paris on December 15 and 16. To learn of his archeological discoveries we can best refer to his own account.

Near the village of Tumchuk in Chinese Turkestan, he says he first found a group of ruins almost entirely buried, from which he was able to extricate some Buddhist sculptures exhibiting very clear traces of Hellenic influence. Then, at Kutchar, one of the principal oases of Chinese Turkestan, he excavated 'some artificial grottoes furnished as Buddhist sanctuaries and decorated with murals', as well as open air temples; 'in the court of one of these there one day came to light a thick pile of manuscripts all in confusion and mixed with sand and salt crystal,' in short, in rather bad shape.

To separate the pages required much time and the attention of expert hands; thus these documents have not been deciphered. All that can be said about them at the moment is that they are written in the Hindu script called Brahmi but translated for the most part into those mysterious Central Asian languages that European philology has hardly begun to understand.

Thus Pélliot himself recognizes that the philologists, of whom he is one, have only a very imperfect knowledge of certain Asian languages; this is a point we shall return to later. For the moment, let us note only that we have been assured that Pélliot 'knows the ancient Chinese, Brahmi, Uigur, and Tibetan languages perfectly' (Echo de Paris of December 10); it is true that it was not he himself who said this, but he is doubtless too modest to do so.

However this may be, it certainly seems that early in his exploration Pélliot, like his Russian, English, German, and Japanese predecessors, was the only one to discover

preserved by the sands of this desiccated country, the remains of an essentially Buddhist civilization that had flourished there during the first two centuries of the present era, and was abruptly destroyed around the year 1000 by Islam.

This is therefore not a relatively recent civilization 'where influences from India, Persia, Greece, and the Far East' mingled, and that simply came to be superimposed on earlier civilizations dating back many thousands of years. Now Chinese Turkestan is not far from Tibet; is Pélliot ignorant of the true age of Tibetan civilization, and does he believe it also to be 'essentially Buddhist' as many of his peers have claimed? The reality is that Buddhism never had anything but a completely superficial influence in these regions, and that in Tibet itself it would be difficult to find any traces of it, unfortunately for those who even now wish to make it the center of Buddhist religion. The ancient civilizations to which we have just alluded must thus have been buried under the sand, but to find them it would doubtless have been necessary to dig a bit deeper; it is truly regrettable that no one should have thought of this.

After spending some time at Urumachi, capital of Chinese Turkestan, Pélliot proceeded to Tuan Huang in Western Kan Su, knowing 'that about twenty kilometers from the city was a sizeable group of Buddhist caves called Ts'ien-Fo-Tong or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.' Here again it is thus a Buddhist civilization that is involved; it would really seem that there were never any others in this country, or at least that this was the first to have left any vestiges, and nonetheless everything proves to us the contrary. One is obliged to think that there are things that, while very apparent to some, are completely invisible to others. 'We examined these Buddhist caves for a long while,' says Pélliot; 'there were almost five hundred dating from the sixth to the eleventh century, still covered with the paintings and inscriptions with which the donors decorated them.' Thus, at Tuan Huang as in Turkestan, there is nothing prior to the Christian era; all of this is almost modern, given that, on the admission of the sinologists themselves, 'a rigorously controlled chronology allows one to go as far back in Chinese history as four thousand years,' and these four thousand years are nothing when compared with the period, considered legendary, that preceded them.

But here is the most important discovery. At Urumachi, Pélliot heard that ancient manuscripts had been found a few years earlier in one of the caves at Tuan Huang.

In 1900 a monk, who was clearing out one of the bigger caves, chanced upon a walled niche that, when opened, was found to be filled with manuscripts and paintings.

It is rather strange that all this remained in the same place from 1900 until 1908 without anyone being told that these manuscripts and paintings might be of some interest; even admitting that the monk was wholly illiterate, as Pélliot believes (which would be very surprising), he would nonetheless not have gone without announcing his find to people more capable of appreciating its value. But what is even more surprising is that this monk allowed strangers to examine these documents and to take away everything that they found interesting; never has any explorer encountered such compliance among Easterners, who generally guard everything that relates to the past and to the traditions of their country and their race with a jealous caution. We cannot cast doubt on Pélliot's account, however, but we have to think that not everyone attached the same importance to these documents as he, or they would long since have been safely stored in some monastery—let us call it Buddhist so as not to take from the sinologists all their illusions. No doubt, Pélliot was made to find these manuscripts just as curious travelers who visit Tibet are made to see many things so that they will be satisfied and not extend their investigations too far; it is both easier and more polite than to turn them away abruptly, and, as to politeness, the Chinese are known not to yield anything to any other people.

There was a bit of everything in this niche at Tuan Huang:

texts in Brahmi, Tibetan, Uigur, but also many in Chinese; Buddhist, and Taoist manuscripts on paper or silk, a Nestorian Christian text, a Manichean fragment, works of history, geography, philosophy, literature, the archetypes of the classics [sic], the oldest prints in the Far East, sales records, leases, financial records, accounts, many paintings on silk, and finally, xylographs from the tenth and even the eighth centuries, the oldest in the world.

In this enumeration Taoist manuscripts seem to be found there as if by chance, just as the Nestorian and Manichean texts, of which the presence is rather surprising. On the other hand, since the xylograph was known in China long before the Christian era, it is hardly likely that the prints in question here are really 'the oldest in the world' as Pélliot believes. Pélliot, well pleased by his discovery, which he himself proclaims 'the most extraordinary that the history of the Far East has ever recorded,' hastened to return to China proper; the letters from Peking, which are too polite to permit any doubt as to the value of the documents he describes, beg him to send them photographs of the discoveries that would serve as the basis for a large publication.

Pélliot has now returned to France with his collection of paintings, bronzes, ceramics, and sculptures collected all along his route, and especially with manuscripts found at Kutchar and Tuan Huang. While admitting that these manuscripts have all the value some wish to attribute to them, we are left to wonder how the philologists are going to go about deciphering and translating them, and this task does not seem to be a very easy one.

Despite all the scholars' claims, the much vaunted progress of philology seems to be rather dubious judging by how oriental languages are still officially taught today. Concerning sinology in particular, people still follow the path of the first translators and little seems to have advanced in a half century. We can take the translations of Lao Tzu, for example, of which the first, by G. Pauthier, is surely the most deserving and conscientious, despite the inevitable imperfections. Even before it was published, this translation was violently criticized by Stanislaus Julien, who seems to have tried to deprecate it in favor of his own, which is nonetheless much inferior and only dates from 1842 while Pauthier's dates from 1833. In his introduction to the Tao Te Ching, moreover, Stanislaus Julien shares the views of the following statement by A. Rémusat in Un Memoire sur Lao-tseu which could still be repeated by modern sinologists.

The text of the Tao is so full of obscurities, we have so few means to acquire a perfect understanding of it, so little knowledge of the circumstances to which the author alludes; in every respect we are so far from the ideas that influenced his writing, that it would be foolhardy to claim to discover exactly the meaning he had in mind.

Despite this admitted incomprehension, the translation of Stanislaus Julien (we shall see shortly what this is worth in itself) is still held to be authoritative and is the one to which official sinologists most readily turn.

In reality, leaving aside the very remarkable translation of the I Ching and its traditional commentaries by M. Philastre, a translation that is unfortunately very little understood by Western intellectuals, it must be recognized that nothing truly serious was done in this regard until the work of Matgioi. Before him, Chinese metaphysics was entirely unknown in Europe; one could even say wholly unsuspected without risking the accusation of exaggeration. Since the translations of the two books of the Tao and the Te by Matgioi have been seen and approved in the Far East by sages who retain the heritage of Taoist Science, which for us guarantees their perfect exactitude, Stanislaus Julien's translation must be compared to it.

We shall be content to refer to the eloquent notes accompanying the tradition of Tao and Te published in La Haute Science (2nd year, 1894) in which Matgioi presents a number of mistranslations such as the following: 'It is good to place a shelf of jade in front of one and to mount a chariot of four horses,' instead of 'Joined together they go faster and more forcefully than a chariot of four horses.' We could cite at random a host of similar examples where a term signifying 'the blink of an eye' becomes 'a rhinoceros horn', or where money becomes 'a commoner' and its true value 'a wagon' and so forth; but here is something even more telling, that is, the appraisal of a native scholar reported in these words by Matgioi:

Having in hand the French paraphrase by Julien, I then had the idea of re-translating it literally into common Chinese for the doctor who was teaching me. He first began to smile silently in the Eastern manner, then became indignant, and finally declared, 'The French must indeed be enemies of Asians if their scholars amuse themselves by knowingly distorting the works of Chinese philosophy and changing them into grotesque fabrications to be held up to the ridicule of the French masses.' I did not try to make my doctor believe that Julien imagined his to be a respectable translation, for he would then have questioned the worth of all our scholars. I preferred to let him doubt the sincerity of Julien alone; and thus it is that the latter has posthumously paid for the indiscretion he committed while living by tackling texts of which the meaning and import inevitably escaped him.

We think the example of Stanislaus Julien, who was a member of the Institute, gives a good idea of the value of philologists in general. Nonetheless there may be honorable exceptions and we even prefer to believe that Pélliot is one; it is now up to him to give us proof of it by accurately interpreting the texts he has brought back from his expedition. However this may be, as regards Taoist texts, today it should no longer be possible to demonstrate an ignorance of Chinese metaphysics that might have been excusable up to a point in the time of Rémusat and Stanislaus Julien, but that can no longer be so after the work of Matgioi, especially after the publication of his two most important works from this point of view, La Voie Metaphysique and La Voie Rationelle. But official scholars, always disdainful of anything that does not come from one of their own, are hardly capable of profiting from them precisely because of their peculiar mentality. This is a great pity for them, and if we are permitted to counsel Pélliot, we urge him with all our strength not to follow the unfortunate errors of his predecessors. If we move from Chinese manuscripts to texts written in the languages of Central Asia or even in the sacred languages of India, we find ourselves in the presence of yet graver difficulties, for as we observed above, Pélliot himself recognizes that 'European philology has hardly begun to interpret these mysterious idioms.' We can go even further and say that among these languages, each of which has a script of its own, without counting the cryptographic systems very much still in use throughout the East, which in certain cases make deciphering completely impossible (even in Europe one finds inscriptions of this kind which have never been interpreted) among these languages, we say, there are a great number of which everything, even the name, is and will long remain unknown by Western scholars. In order to translate these texts they will probably turn to methods that the Egyptologists and Assyriologists have already used in other branches of philology; the interminable arguments that arise between them at every moment, their inability to agree on the most essential points of their science, as well as the obvious absurdities met with in all their interpretations, sufficiently illustrate the minimal value of the results they achieve, of which they are nonetheless so proud. The strangest thing is that these scholars claim to understand the languages they study even better than those who spoke and wrote them in the past; we do not exaggerate, for we have seen noted in manuscripts so-called interpolations which according to them prove that the copyist was mistaken about the meaning of the text he transcribed. We are here far from the cautious reserve of the first sinologists mentioned above; yet if the claims of the philologists are always on the increase, their science is far from making a similarly rapid progress. Thus Egyptologists still use Champollion's method, their only fault being to apply it solely to inscriptions from the Greek and Roman periods when Egyptian writing had become purely phonetic following the degeneration of the language, whereas earlier it had been hieroglyphic, that is to say ideographic like Chinese writing. Moreover, the failing of all official philologists is to want to interpret sacred languages, nearly all of which are ideographic, as they do common languages, which are merely alphabetic or phonetic. Let us add that there are languages that combine the ideographic and alphabetic systems; biblical Hebrew is like this, as Fabre d'Olivet has shown in The Hebraic Tongue Restored; and we can note in passing that this is sufficient to make it clear that the true meaning of the Bible has nothing in common with the ridiculous interpretations that have been attributed to it from the commentaries of Protestant as well as Catholic theologians—which moreover are based on versions that are entirely erroneous—to the critiques of modern exegetes who are still at the point of asking how it happens that in Genesis there are passages where God is called אלהים and others where He is called יהוה, without seeing that these two terms, the first of which is a plural, have a completely different meaning and that in reality neither has ever designated God. Furthermore, what makes the translation of ideographic languages almost impossible is the multitude of meanings belonging to the hierogrammatical characters, each of which corresponds to a different if analogous idea according as it is related to one level or another of the universe; from this it follows that three principal meanings can always be distinguished, which are in turn subdivided into a great number of secondary and more particular significations. This explains why one cannot properly speaking translate the sacred books; one can only make a paraphrase or a commentary, and this is what the philologists and exegetes ought to resign themselves to, if only they could grasp the most outward meaning; unfortunately, up to now they do not seem to have attained even this modest result. Let us hope that Pélliot will be more fortunate than his colleagues, and that the manuscripts he possesses will not remain for him a dead letter, and let us wish him all courage in the arduous task he has undertaken.