Introduction
Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (1414–92) was considered a polymath in fifteenth century Central Asia. As a Naqshbandiyya scholar, Jāmī consciously undermined the religious designation of his writings and applied different strategies, such as multilingual writing and various forms of literature.Footnote 1 Over his lifetime, Jāmī completed more than forty works in different forms, including Sufi mystical prose, exegesis, biographies, poems and so on.Footnote 2
Take Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and Lavāʾiḥ, the main points of reference for this paper, as an example. These two treatises are Jāmī’s two important philosophical works focusing on Ibn ʿArabī’s Vaḥdat al-Vujūd. The Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt is a commentary on Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī’s (1213–89) Persian Sufi prose work Lamaʿāt. This commentary was written in response to Navāʾī’s (1441–1501) request to help him study Lamaʿāt, indicating that the target audience for the commentary was Sufi scholars.Footnote 3 In contrast, the Lavāʾiḥ is a short original work aimed at numerous readers of the civilian class, such as craftsmen and merchants, and had spread widely after the fifteenth century.Footnote 4 In order to meet the needs of different target audiences, Jāmī adopted different ways of interpretation in these two works. In the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, Jāmī frequently quoted Arabic terms and sentences from the Quran and Hadith since his target readers were familiar with Arabic and original Islamic classics. However, in the Lavāʾiḥ Jāmī rarely applied Arabic terms and wrote more poems than prose, which made it easy for Persian-speaking readers to understand the text.
Due to his diverse approach to writing, Jāmī’s works had gained a wide audience that transcended the Naqshbandiyya order, from the royal class, to clerical elites, and down to merchants and craftsman. During and after his life, his works spread in the Muslim world and beyond, including in the Ottoman Empire, the Arab world, South Asia, Malay and China.Footnote 5
In China, where the society followed Confucianism, Chinese Muslims lived as a minority group. There, Jāmī and his works were first mentioned in Zhao Can’s 趙燦 Jingxue xichuanpu 經學系傳譜 (1713), a genealogy comprising biographies of Chinese Muslim intellectuals in central and eastern China. According to this material, Jāmī’s Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt had been taught in local mosques since the middle of the seventeenth century.Footnote 6 In 1680 a Chinese Muslim scholar, She Qiling 舍起靈 (1638–1703), completed the Chinese translation titled Zhaoyuan mijue 昭元秘訣.Footnote 7 In the early eighteenth century, another Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi 劉智 (c. 1670–c. 1745) referenced Jāmī’s two Sufi prose works, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and Lavāʾiḥ, in his two Chinese original Islamic writings respectively.Footnote 8 Later, Liu released his full Chinese translation text of the Lavāʾiḥ, known as Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微. In addition to his two Persian philosophical prose works, Jāmī’s al-Favāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, an annotation of an Arabic grammar book written in Persian, had also been used as a textbook in Islamic education in China.Footnote 9
Based on our recent study on the circulation of Jāmī’s works in the Islamicate world, we summarize several characteristics owned by China from a global perspective.Footnote 10 Firstly, despite their wide dissemination in Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire and South Asia, Jāmī’s poetic works such as Dīvān and Haft Awrang were totally absent in China.Footnote 11 As far as we know, the three works that had spread throughout China before the twentieth century are all considered prose works focusing on the interpretation of Islamic teachings and Arabic grammar. Based on the content of these three texts, Chinese readers regarded Jāmī as “Zhami zunzhe 咋密尊者” (venerable Jāmī)Footnote 12 and “Tianfang daxian Zhami shi 天方大賢查密氏” (the Great Islamic virtuous person Jāmī),Footnote 13 or almost a sage, rather than a romantic poet.
Secondly, unlike other regions where Jāmī’s works were spread from royal courts to the lowest ranks of society, Chinese Muslim intellectuals kept Jāmī’s manuscripts in their private libraries and were unwilling to present them to the world. The Chinese ahong believed that whoever owned the original copies possessed the possibility of deciphering the scriptures, thereby gaining the right and authority to interpret and teach the Islamic doctrine.Footnote 14 The Muslim teachers did not even share the scriptures with their own students; at most they might allow students to copy the required chapters. When a teacher was nearing the end of his life, these scriptures would be passed to one of his heirs, usually one of his sons or possibly a student. This conservative attitude of Chinese Muslim scholars towards original manuscripts did not change even in the early twentieth century. From 1906 to 1909 the French d’Ollone mission visited the mosques in Beijing and Lanzhou to investigate the status of Islamic scriptures in China.Footnote 15 Their report pointed out that these Islamic transcripts, including Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and al-Favāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, were considered private property, and their owners were reluctant to show them to outsiders; they would agree only to provide a bibliography.Footnote 16 The private possession of Jāmī’s works by Chinese Muslim scholars, on the one hand, kept an air of mystery around these writings; on the other hand, it also demonstrates the authority of these works in the interpretation of Islamic teachings in China.
Thirdly, in contrast to their conservative attitude in guarding the original scriptures, Chinese Muslims seem to have had a tolerant and even positive attitude towards the production and circulation of Chinese Islamic texts, including translations and original works. Chinese translations of Persian and Arabic Islamic scriptures, including Jāmī’s Chinese translations Zhaoyuan mijue and Zhenjing zhaowei, had begun by the end of the seventeenth century, almost at the same time as their original scriptures were mentioned in China.Footnote 17 Moreover, most Chinese translations completed by Chinese Muslims from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century were based on Islamic philosophy. Gradually these Chinese translations and Chinese original Islamic works formed an important category of Islamic scriptures, known as Han ketabu 漢克塔布, an expression combining a Chinese word, Han 漢 (Chinese), with the transliteration of the Arabic word kitāb (book). They were widely read and studied by those Chinese Muslims who were unable to read original scriptures but had an interest in Islamic teachings.Footnote 18 These Chinese texts have even been adopted as classics by a local Sufi order founded in northwest China early in the twentieth century.Footnote 19
When we discuss the particularity of China in the process of the horizontal spread of Jāmī’s works on the world map, the vertical transmission and transformation of his works within the history of China also deserve our attention. In the eyes of Chinese readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Islamic scriptures composed in Central Asia and beyond had reached China geographically, but not every scripture was regarded as suitable for reading. Chinese Muslim intellectuals “carefully analyzed and firmly verified”Footnote 20 these original scriptures and identified about forty of them as belonging to the “authentic canon.”Footnote 21 In this highly competitive environment, Jāmī’s three prose texts Lavāʾiḥ, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and al-Favāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya had been successfully included in the list of these forty authentic scriptures and were widely applied in Islamic education in China. Of these forty authentic original texts, only about ten texts had been translated into Chinese before the twentieth century, two of which were Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt. If we regard these Chinese translations as the result of the second round of selection and interpretation made by Chinese Muslims, then Jāmī can undoubtedly be recognized as the winner of this round.
Furthermore, Liu Zhi’s “Benjing 本經” chapterFootnote 22 in his Tianfang xingli, which referenced seven original Islamic scriptures including Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, was carried by Ma Fuchu 馬復初 (1794–1874) on his pilgrimage in the year 1844. In Medina, Ma Fuchu translated “Benjing” into Arabic, and this translation was said to have greatly impressed a local Muslim scholar named Muḥammad al-ʿṬūshī al-Maghribī.Footnote 23 Later, a Chinese Muslim, Ma Lianyuan 馬聯元 (1840–1903), completed another Arabic translation of “Benjing.” Thus, it appears the Chinese translations of Jāmī’s works moved in a circuit, spilling out of China and eventually returning to the center of the Islamic world.
In the world map showing the diffusion of Jāmī’s works, China stands at the far end of the overland and maritime routes from Herat, giving the impression that China was the terminus of this process of dissemination. But shifting from the Herat-centric view to the perspective of Chinese readers located in China, as we discussed, Jāmī’s works continued their dissemination and transformation in this land, and even ultimately found their way back to their Islamic center by the aforementioned Arabic translations of Chinese Islamic literature like “Benjing.” To sum up, Jāmī and his prose works have experienced a unique journey in China, making him a legend in this land.
I therefore raise the main question of this paper as follows: Why Jāmī? Compared to other regions and other Islamic scriptures, why and how were Jāmī and his works selected for special attention in China? To address this question, previous research had normally been based on textual studies from a philosophical perspective. By comparing Jāmī’s Chinese translations with Chinese philosophical classics, researchers discussed some thematic similarities between Jāmī’s Islamic thought and Chinese traditional philosophies.Footnote 24 Distinct from these static research approaches, this paper would like to draw Jāmī’s texts into their vivid historical context. Based on the historical record, I will focus on the people who read, carried, studied, interpreted and translated Jāmī’s texts. These people participated in transporting and circulating Jāmī’s texts physically as well as interpreting and transforming them metaphysically. They acted as transcultural agents, playing essential roles in the diffusion of Jāmī’s texts from Central Asia to China from the fifteenth century onwards.
From Central Asia to China
Due to a lack of surviving materials, it is difficult to delineate precisely when and how Jāmī’s works were brought to China. Considering Jāmī as an influential and active member of the Naqshbandiyya order, the first hypothesis that comes into our mind must be the Naqshbandi community in the Gansu and Ningxia areas on the northwest border of China.Footnote 25 However, related studies show that local Sufis were more interested in the Quran and Hadith. Persian exegesis and literary writings, including Jāmī’s texts, seem to be absent in their reading list.Footnote 26 Therefore, we turn our attention to those recorded individuals who circulated original manuscripts in China.
In the Jingxue xichuanpu, the first original scripture mentioned by Zhao Can was a Persian Islamic scripture titled al-Muqāmāt. Zhao Can recorded that a Chinese Muslim scholar, Hu Dengzhou 胡登洲Footnote 27 (1522–97) met a chantousou 纏頭叟 (a turbaned elder) in Xinfeng 新豐 (a city in northwest China) in the 1570s. This turbaned elder claimed that he was from Tianfang 天房Footnote 28 and on his way to pay tribute to the Chinese court.Footnote 29 He showed Hu Dengzhou the manuscript of al-Muqāmāt, which Hu had never seen in China before, but he refused to sell it to Hu. Later Hu came across the same scripture in a market and bought it from an old Muslim woman. It is said that Hu had not precisely understood the meaning of this scripture until he met this turbaned elder again. When they met for the second time, the turbaned elder interpreted the scripture in detail.Footnote 30
In this story, Hu Dengzhou obtained the manuscript of al-Muqāmāt from a local Chinese Muslim but understood its meaning with the help of the foreign turbaned elder on his tribute trip. The identity of this turbaned elder suggests to the readers that the manuscript of al-Muqāmāt came from the center of the Islamic world, and the interpreter of this manuscript was officially dispatched by his country. Since this story is the only evidence that the tribute trip merchants brought Islamic scriptures to China, and according to the historical record the tribute trade between China and Central Asia was almost stagnant in the sixteenth century,Footnote 31 it is reasonable to question whether this so-called “tribute” is true. In any case, this story is a nice try by Chinese Muslims to authorize the scripture al-Muqāmāt and Hu Dengzhou’s interpretation of it.
Unlike the declining official communication between China and Central Asia, the friendly cultural environment in China promoted the missionary activities of foreign missionaries from the end of the sixteenth century. In 1595, the Catholic Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his colleagues arrived in Nanjing 南京 and started their missionary activities in China. Nearly concurrent with this, the records of travel and missionary activities of Sufis were found in historical materials.
According to a local gazetteer, a Muslim missionary called “Momu duha 默穆都哈” traveled from Tianfang 天方 and taught Islamic scripture in a Zhengzhou 鄭州 (a city in central China) mosque during the Wanli 萬曆 years (r. 1572–1620). He successfully converted many local people to Islam and was later called “Shaihai 篩海,” a transliteration of Shaykh.Footnote 32 Around the same time, a Chinese Confucian, Gu Qiyuan 顧起元 (1565–1628), mentioned a “monk” from Xiyu 西域 (Western region) living in a mosque in Nanjing (a city in southeast China). This man looked young, spoke Chinese, refused gifts, and subsisted on a few dates per day. With practice, he could stay in isolation for more than one month. After he came out, it was said he looked very well.Footnote 33 Based on this description, one might infer that the characteristics of this monk were very similar to those of Sufi dervishes who lived in poverty, practiced self-restraint, performed ascetic practices and wandered the world.
In addition to records from mainstream Confucian society, other footprints of Suf travelers appeared in the historical documents recorded by Chinese Muslims themselves. According to the Jingxue xichuanpu, nearly a thousand Muslims from Central Asia and beyond entered China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 34 Some of them, like Jiliaoli 极料理, Epudule zhilili 厄蒲杜勒直利黎 and others, played an important role in the dissemination and interpretation of Islamic scriptures, especially Persian mystical writings.Footnote 35 Moreover, a Chinese Muslim scholar, Zhang Zhong 张中 (c. 1583–c. 1663), mentioned that his book, the Guizhen zongyi 歸真總義, was a collection of class notes under an Indian Sufi named Ashige 阿世格, very likely a transliteration of a Persian Sufi term Āshigh (lover of God).Footnote 36
Mystical practices, miracles, Sufi titles, teaching of Sufi scriptures and so on all point to the presence of Sufi practitioners. As one target audience for Jāmī’s mystic writings, these Sufi travelers, therefore, can be regarded as likely bearers of books containing Jāmī’s works, bringing them from Central Asia into China.
To sum up, historical records suggest that rather than the influence of the Naqshbandiyya order and tribute trade, individual Sufi missionaries were the most likely cultural messengers, bringing Jāmī’s three prose works to Chinese Muslims. Through missionary activities, Sufi travelers not only brought Jāmī’s prose works to China, but also played an important role in enlightening local Chinese Muslims. From another perspective, these travelers were in line with the target audience of Jāmī’s texts circulated in China. Based on the interest and selection of such people, we may also speculate here that most of Jāmī’s poetry, which had been written and dedicated to royal courts, had been excluded from the journeys from Central Asia to China.
The Dissemination and Transition of Jāmī’s Works in China
Although we have narrowed the field of scriptures that might have been brought into China based on the interests of possible book carriers, as mentioned above, we do not know exactly how many scriptures were brought in. What we can be sure of is that until the end of the nineteenth century only about forty scriptures, including Jāmī’s three aforementioned prose works, were recognized as authentic textbooks by Chinese Muslim scholars and were read, taught and studied in mosques around China. Even today, almost all Chinese Muslim intellectuals still recognize these authentic scriptures as Islamic classics. Since today’s Muslim intellectuals also consider themselves to be descendants of a Chinese Islamic school, namely the Islamic Jingxue 經學 school, the success of Jāmī’s texts in the history of China is likely to be closely related to the interest and development of this Islamic Jingxue school.
The Chinese Islamic Jingxue school. The Islamic Jingxue school’s name was derived from the Confucian Jingxue school, specifically referring to the exegetical traditions of Confucian classics dating to the Western Han period (206BC–9AD). Focusing on Islamic teachings, the Islamic Jingxue school aimed to classicize Islamic scriptures and establish its own exegetical tradition of Islamic classics in China. At the beginning of its establishment in the seventeenth century, the Islamic Jingxue school’s legitimacy was challenged by other competitors and had not yet gained the authority it enjoys today.Footnote 37 In order to consolidate its authority, the initial work of this school began with identifying the authentic original scriptures and validating the Chinese translations.
To identify the original Arabic or Persian scriptures, the Chinese Muslim intellectuals of the Jingxue school assessed the moral and academic abilities of the distributors of the book and the content of the scriptures. Of the thousands of Muslims traveling from Central Asia and beyond in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only a few made efforts to disseminate and interpret the “zhengxue 正學” (orthodoxy).Footnote 38 They were described by the Jingxue school as “honest, upright and not corrupt.”Footnote 39 Through communications with these qualified foreign Muslims, Chinese Muslims broadened their academic horizons and gained a more thorough understanding of Islamic classics, thereby promoting the development of the school.
At the same time the Muslim records also mentioned people who had been criticized. In the Jingxue xichuanpu, a Muslim named Shilifu 失利夫, who came from Hulasa 虎喇撒 (a Chinese transcription of Khurāsān, located in the northeast of today’s Iran) at the end of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), was described as an ostentatious person. His interpretation of Islamic teachings was criticized and his argumentation considered unreasonable.Footnote 40 One of the scriptures brought by him related a story of a saint who cut his flesh to feed an eagle.Footnote 41 This anecdote was denounced by Zhao Can as
misunderstanding the principle [of Islam] and failing to grasp the meaning of aiding the robbers, [because] the eagle is undoubtedly the kind of bird that hurts other birds and harms human beings. This statement, which is contrary to the principle [of Islam], comes from the Buddhist classics.Footnote 42
In the eyes of Chinese Muslims of the Jingxue school, such unorthodox content would confuse the readers. Even if a Muslim has accomplished the five pillars of Islam, “instead of being blessed, he would be persecuted because of these scriptures.”Footnote 43 Furthermore, the conflicts and disagreements within the entire Chinese Muslim community could also be attributed to the spread of such scriptures.Footnote 44 Therefore, when Muslim scholars examined the scriptures, they “carefully studied to distinguish between true and false.”Footnote 45 Those scriptures that were considered “inconsistent with the doctrine” Footnote 46 or “completely meaningless”Footnote 47 were eventually discarded.
Regarding the Chinese translations of Islamic scriptures, the school had also encountered various debates and challenges at the very beginning of its establishment. As early as in Wang Daiyu’s 王岱輿 Xizhen zhengda 希真正答, a collection of sayings and ideas attributed to Wang Daiyu and his contemporaries, Wang was asked: “If [we] annotate the meaning of the scriptures of the orthodox religion [namely Islam] in hata 哈他 language, then isn’t it a big mistake?”Footnote 48 The word hata is a transliteration of an Arabic word khaṭā, meaning error or mistake.Footnote 49 Wang Daiyu answered:
This opinion truly existed, but in today’s view such opinion is not bright. The so-called hata refers to its teaching rather than its words. … It should be noted that words are like soil and wood, which can be used to build either mosques or Buddhist temples. [The words] are applied by either orthodox side or unorthodox side. The achievement and mistake are not related to the materials of [soil and wood, namely words], but only to how people apply them.Footnote 50
This is to say that words are only tools; they are carriers of the doctrine, and what is really at fault is the meaning ascribed to the words. It can be seen that the initial debate focused on whether it was legal to use Chinese to interpret Islamic doctrine, and how to apply this language.Footnote 51
In order to deal with such questions and challenges, the Jingxue school adopted a language called shuzi 書字 and confirmed the absolute legitimacy and authority of shuzi to explain Islamic teachings in Chinese. Shuzi, literally “book character,” was a type of Chinese language created by the Jingxue school to distinguish it from the Chinese colloquial language used in the mosque teaching, namely hanyin 漢音 (literally Chinese pronunciation). Compared to hanyin, which preserves the syntactic structure of the original language and transliterates original Islamic terminology, shuzi is a form of expression based on traditional Chinese philosophy, such as Neo-Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. In the translations written in shuzi, the translators borrowed the terms and interpretation from traditional Chinese philosophy to correspond to the original texts.
In practice, both shuzi and hanyin were used for Chinese translation of original Islamic scriptures. One Chinese Muslim author could apply shuzi and hanyin to complete his Chinese translations respectively, or one original scripture could be translated into both shuzi and hanyin by different translators. For example, She Qiling’s Zhaoyuan mijue was translated in shuzi but his Jueshi xingmilu 覺世省迷錄 is an annotated translation written in hanyin.Footnote 52
In the view of the Islamic Jingxue school, only Islamic works written in shuzi could completely replace the Arabic or Persian original scriptures, because these works would enable those readers who were unable to read the original texts to “eventually understand the entire teaching model and master the principles of the origin of Heaven.”Footnote 53 Chinese Islamic works written in hanyin, however, were more like reference books for reading the original scriptures. For readers who had some ability to read Arabic or Persian, they were not considered valid substitutes for the original scriptures.
By introducing shuzi, the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school divided its readers into two groups. According to the language used in Chinese Islamic texts, Muslims who were able to read Arabic or Persian could learn the original Islamic scriptures by means of the Chinese annotations written in hanyin. Those who were unable to read the original scriptures but had an understanding of traditional Chinese philosophy could learn Islamic teachings by studying Islamic texts written in shuzi. Therefore, the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school was able to expand its readership within the Muslim community. In addition, through the strategic use of shuzi, the Islamic Jingxue school also bridged the gap between the Muslim world and the Chinese Confucian society, thus expanding the readership of Islamic texts to mainstream society in China. By reading the Chinese Islamic texts written in shuzi, Chinese non-Muslims for the first time in history could systematically access Islamic teaching and begin to pay attention to and record the teachings of the Islamic Jingxue school. The attention given by the mainstream Chinese community in return strengthened the authority of the Jingxue school in the Muslim community in China, and promoted the original scriptures along with their Chinese translations identified by the school, and these gradually become the main body of Islamic classics.
Jāmī in the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school
As the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school continued to develop, Jāmī’s three original works, Lavāʾiḥ, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and al-Favāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, were widely studied by Muslims in Islamic education, the first two having been translated into shuzi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The recognition of Jāmī’s works by the Jingxue school shows that Jāmī’s three original works met the school’s standards for both the ethics of the book distributors and the content of the scriptures carried by them. The circulation of the two Chinese translations Zhaoyuan mijue and Zhenjing zhaowei indicates that Chinese readers who could not read the original scriptures were more interested in Islamic philosophy than Arabic grammar. Alternatively, the goal of Chinese Muslim translators may have been to expand the readership of Islamic philosophy through their choice of philosophical texts for Chinese translation.
As the Chinese Muslim community and mainstream Confucian society became more aware of the Islamic Jingxue school, the reputation and authority of Jāmī in the hearts of Chinese Muslim and non-Muslim readers gradually increased. As the copyist of the Zhaoyuan mijue wrote: “The venerable Jāmī was from Tianfang, his knowledge was extraordinary, his virtue was close to a sage, he comprehended the truth of [Ibn ʿArabī’s] Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam.”Footnote 54 “His virtue was close to a sage” indicates that the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school regarded Jāmī as someone almost deserving the status of religious sagehood. However, in most areas where Jāmī’s works spread, it was his secular achievements in the field of literature and philosophy that received greater recognition, rather than in the field of religion.Footnote 55 The statement “He comprehended the truth of Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam” shows that scholars of the Islamic Jingxue school believed that Jāmī’s understanding of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought was accurate and profound, which qualified him to interpret that thought. As a result, Ibn ʿAlabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam was not included by Chinese Muslims in their authentic textbooks of Islamic education in China. Rather, they adopted Jāmī’s commentaries and interpretations of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam as their school’s classics. This strategy in all likelihood facilitated the ability of Chinese Muslim scholars to understand Ibn ʿArabī’s original works. In any case, it is clear that Jāmī’s status and the recognition of his competence were strengthened and expanded by the Islamic Jingxue school through the process of classicizing these scriptures. The image of Jāmī that ultimately emerged from the printed pages of his works was, in the eyes of Chinese readers, that of an Islamic sage.
If we further read Jāmī’s two Chinese translations, namely the Zhaoyuan mijue and Zhenjing zhaowei, we will find that, compared with the original texts, Jāmī’s image has undergone subtle changes through the translation and interpretation by the two Chinese translators.
Comparing Jāmī’s Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt with She Qiling’s Chinese translation Zhaoyuan mijue, the translator almost literally translated the complete original text, including both prose and poetry. In terms of words, She Qiling typically used transliteration to convert names of people and places into Chinese while borrowing vocabulary from Neo-Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism to translate Islamic philosophical terms. In addition, translators preferred to use compound words, especially two-syllable words like miaoben 妙本 (wondrous root), hunhua 渾化 (to integrate and transform), dongjing 動靜 (movement and stillness), mingse 名色 (name and color) and so on.
From the perspective of structure and content, Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei can be seen as an abbreviated version of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ. For example, Liu Zhi only translated three of the ninety quatrains in the original text. Regarding the original names of the Sufi scholars mentioned in Jāmī’s citation, such as Ibn ʿArabī and Maḥmūd Shabistarī, Liu Zhi replaced all these names with “xian 賢” (virtuous person/sage) in his translation.Footnote 56 Unlike She Qiling, Liu Zhi mostly used monosyllabic words and applied terms derived exclusively from the Neo-Confucian context, such as li 理 (principle), ke 克 (subdue), yong 用 (attribute), ming 名 (name). Therefore, from the reader’s perspective, Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei was closer to the Confucian classics.Footnote 57
By comparing Zhaoyuan mijue and Zhenjing zhaowei, it can be seen that different translators presented different versions of Jāmī’s works to their Chinese readers. These differences on the one hand reflect the translators’ different educational background, life experience and interpretations of Jāmī’s philosophical thinking; on the other hand, the different translation preferences applied to the terminology, poems and so on also show the translators’ particular language strategy for their own target audience. If translation is a process of introducing unfamiliar content to readers in such a way as to make it familiar, then the choices of She Qiling and Liu Zhi illustrate the different readerships that the two translations targeted. To be precise, the Zhaoyuan mijue targeted Muslims and non-Muslims who had received only a fundamental education and understood popular religion, and Zhenjing zhaowei focused on those who were familiar with Confucianism.
A similar observation appeared in feedback from Chinese readers. Li Tingxiang 李廷相 (dates unknown), a reader of the Zhaoyuan mijue, wrote in the preface to the 1925 manuscript:
Just because of the barriers of the written language [namely Arabic or Persian], although the philosophy of nature and principle could be clearly expressed in the Arab world, it had not yet been understood in the Middle Kingdom [China]. Liu Jielian [Liu Zhi] gathered the essence of every classic and created the book Tianfang xingli. Also, because the words and arguments were too difficult and profound, not everyone could understand. Today, Ponachi [referring to She Qiling] was not afraid of hard work and translated Zhaoyuan mijue Eshen er’ting [Chinese transliteration of Ashiʿat, namely the Chinese translation of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt] into shuzi. He did not seek the depth and profundity of the words, [but] intended to make the words appreciated by both scholars and layman.Footnote 58
This author believed that Liu Zhi’s Tianfang xingli, which is similar to Zhenjing zhaowei from the perspective of philosophical interpretation and terms, was too esoteric for some readers. Zhaoyuan mijue was comparatively easy to understand and made Islamic teachings accessible to readers of lower educational levels as well as those at more advanced levels.
Regarding Zhenjing zhaowei, Peng Hui’e 彭辉萼 (dates unknown) commented in the preface to this text:
Therefore, this book explores the hidden meanings of the truth and carefully analyzes the order from the beginning to the end, the changes between boundaries, the false and true intentions, and the subtleness of the results. [The author writes in various ways like] from surface to inside, then to surface; or from profound meaning to the obvious meaning, then from obvious to profound; or distinguishing the truth by unreality, or distinguishing principle by desire, or using metaphor, or using reverse reasoning, or using circumstantial evidence, or using criticism. From both horizontal and vertical perspectives, each point returns to its origin, and has been pointed out one by one.Footnote 59
The translator of Zhenjing zhaowei applied various rhetorical and argumentation approaches to give his translation a clear structure and logical arguments, thus revealing the subtleties and beauty of Islamic philosophy. In other words, for those who could read the Zhenjing zhaowei, this text was not as vague and difficult to understand as the Zhaoyuan mijue’s readers might have thought. Here the comment verifies that the target audience of Zhenjing zhaowei was a well-educated group who were familiar with Chinese traditional philosophical classics.
Interestingly, although the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt was originally written for Jāmī’s student and friend Navāʾī, the readership of its Chinese translation, Zhaoyuan mijue, turned out to be the Chinese Muslim group who were not only unable to read Arabic and Persian but also had a lower level of education. The Lavāʾiḥ was written by Jāmī for merchants, craftsmen and other civilians, but through Liu Zhi’s translation, the Zhenjing zhaowei was admired by readers from the intellectual class who were familiar with Confucian classics. Paradoxically, then, the target audiences of Jāmī’s two original works and their Chinese translations were reversed in terms of knowledge level and social status.
In these two translations, She Qiling and Liu Zhi prioritized the reading ability of the target readers in the translation process. In order to match the educational level of the target audience, the translator compromised the integrity of the original structure, content, language style, vocabulary selection and so on. The resulting divergence from the original created different perceptions of Jāmī for readers of the original scriptures and of the Chinese translations respectively. However, as far as we know, there is no written material questioning the transformation of the Chinese translation texts or the change in Jāmī’s image in China. On the contrary, as mentioned earlier, Jāmī’s reputation and status have not only been enhanced through the translations in China, but have also been elevated from a global perspective.
This result may be attributed to the success of the Jingxue school’s linguistic strategy of using shuzi. Although She Qiling and Liu Zhi’s translation languages are different in style, both are classified as shuzi. Under the premise that the Jingxue school had established the legitimacy of using shuzi to translate and interpret Islamic philosophy, the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese translations were guaranteed. Therefore, whether through the easy-to-understand Zhaoyuan mijue or the more complex and subtle Zhenjing zhaowei, all Chinese readers had the ability at least potentially to understand Islamic teaching. Through these two translations, therefore, Jāmī became one of the legendary writers of Islamic philosophy whose status as a sage was firmly established in the hearts of Chinese readers.
Concluding Remarks
As one of the most influential and prolific philosophers and writers in Central Asia in the fifteenth century, Jāmī and his works gained extensive and in-depth influence throughout his life and beyond. In China, Jāmī’s three works, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, Lavāʾiḥ and al-Favāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, stood out among many other competitors and were identified as authentic Islamic textbooks in Islamic education. Moreover, the former two texts had been translated into Chinese as Zhaoyuan mijue and Zhenjing zhaowei by She Qiling and Liu Zhi respectively in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extending the readership from Chinese Muslim scholars to the Confucian society. From a global perspective, Jāmī acquired a distinctive image with higher prestige in China compared to his reputation in other parts of the world where his works have spread.
In answering the question why this particular writer achieved such status in China, we found that in the process of transmission and transformation of Jāmī’s texts from Central Asia to China, Chinese Muslim intellectuals as well as Chinese readers served as transcultural agents, providing the impetus for Jāmī’s success in China. They acted not only as knowledge receivers, but also as decision makers, filtering out other competing scriptures, transforming Jāmī’s texts into Chinese translations, and exporting the translators’ own interpretations of Islamic teachings via Chinese translations of Jāmī’s texts.
Individual travelers, especially Sufis, most likely were the first agents of transmission of Jāmī’s works. As actual readers of Jāmī’s works, they filtered out a large number of other Islamic works as well as his poetic writings, bringing Jāmī’s works, especially philosophical scriptures, to prominence in China. The Muslim intellectuals of the Chinese Islamic Jingxue school that emerged in the seventeenth century became the secondary agents. On the one hand, through the selection, identification and interpretation of the scriptures, they created a classified corpus of Jāmī’s works, strengthening his status and authority in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy; on the other hand, in legitimizing shuzi as a medium for interpreting Islamic teachings, they made possible the translation of the original philosophical texts into Chinese, thus conferring on the Chinese translation the same authority to interpret Islamic teachings.
Through textual comparison, we found that the two translators, She Qiling and Liu Zhi, chose different translation strategies in terms of structure, content and vocabulary, showing that the target audiences of the two translations were different. Considering the original readership targets, the educational levels and social status of types of readers of the two translations were reversed. Nevertheless, the different translation strategies of the two translators resulted in Jāmī’s philosophical thinking becoming more widely and deeply disseminated in China and gaining a high degree of acceptance among Chinese Muslims and Confucian scholars. Thus, not only the original texts of Jāmī, but also their Chinese translations, have become important means for interested Chinese readers to understand Islamic philosophy. The image of Jāmī has indeed been enhanced to legendary status in China.
