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How a jobs crisis helped Tibet become the centre of the Buddhist world

Once in demand as far as Japan, over the course of the 10th and 11th centuries, Indian Buddhist translators found both international and domestic opportunities drying up.

Cockroach Janta Party protests continue across India, drawing a membership of young people with “three certificates, zero callbacks”. Too many credentials, too few seats, not enough jobs home or overseas: The CJP’s grievances, strangely, mirror those of India’s best-regarded medieval specialists—multilingual Buddhist translators. Once in demand as far as Japan, over the course of the 10th and 11th centuries, Indian Buddhist translators found both international and domestic opportunities drying up. The rising monasteries of Tibet, capitalising on the opportunity, would go on to dominate the global Buddhist imagination for the better part of a millennium.

In the early medieval Indian subcontinent, c. 600–1100 CE, Buddhist translators were specialists. They were the medieval equivalent of those who hold several degrees before going in search of a career today. Think of them as more akin to PhD holders than your average graduate.

As I argued in an earlier column on the decline of Nalanda (the North Indian mega-monastery), even getting admitted for a course of scriptural study here required literacy and mobility out of reach for most. It required you to get past gatekeepers whose job, as historian RK Mookerji put it, was to be “expert religious controversialists”, asking questions from both Brahminical and Buddhist materials, poking holes in candidates’ answers. Even if you were accepted into a coveted Nalanda guru-sishya-parampara (teacher-student-lineage), those credentials didn’t get you far in the bureaucracy of the subcontinent’s own courts, which by the eleventh century preferred Brahmin administrators and ritual experts.

What an elite Buddhist parampara did get you, though, was international demand. Tansen Sen, distinguished historian of India-China relations, studied this in his paper “The Revival and Failure of Buddhist Translations during the Song Dynasty”. From the early centuries CE onwards, various Asian kingdoms had actively sought experts to render Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into other languages. (In Northern India, in contrast to the south and the island of Lanka, Buddhist sects wrote in Sanskrit rather than in Pali.)

The early wave of translators in China tended to be Central Asians, with either direct or indirect ties to India. Translations were ordered for political, ritual........

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