my bed, small and inanimate as the puppets hanging on the walls: puppets on strings representing Chinese emperors and empresses, courtiers, scholars and concubines, their long sleeves wafting in the air, swaying slightly on the end of strings connecting their shoulders and hands to two crossed rods; two or three Indonesian glove puppets, their wooden heads attached to golden costumes with hands also made of wood at the ends of the sleeves; a few traditional French guignol puppets, a policeman, a baker and the like. I felt like them, connected to the world by a few invisible threads, my morning cup of coffee, my work and most of all the two volumes of my Hebrew dictionary, which I had had specially bound: a silk cover lined with moiré, decorated with a clasp and corners in gold. Ever since my return to France I experienced voluptuous pleasure in touching them, handling them, turning them over, opening them and closing them. Giving in to my natural tendencies, I had set my heart on these volumes which, for a couple of hours each day, helped me in my semi-autodidactic quest to conquer those unfamiliar words, to step over the sacred threshold into the temple, to embark on a new journey of indeterminate length and to an unknown destination. The peculiar need—that I experienced several times a day and sometimes even at night—to touch the dictionary, the need I had already felt several times in my life to cling to a foreign language, proved the most effective anti-depressant. I felt genuine love for the Hebrew language. Its right-to-left writing, its words written only in consonants, the vowels staying buried inside the readers head like a family secret … it all inevitably reminded me of the manuscript on the Tumchooq sutra, whose opening sentence, “Once on a moonless night,” still occasionally echoed around inside my head.
Time passed. In 1988 I published Being a Jew in China, a history book, but also the first work I succeeded in completing. Two years later, although I didn’t know why, perhaps guided by Paul d’Ampères ghost, I began work on another book about two great translators of the past—his precursors, you could say—who travelled the length and breadth of China as he did and became Chinese citizens. This was the synopsis:
The story takes place in fifth-century China and retraces the lives of two great translators of Buddhist sutras. The first, Buddhabhadra, was born in Kapilavastu, Buddha’s homeland, and was a follower of the strict Theravada discipline, Hinayana. He brings the Pali canon to Changan, then the capital of China, where the other protagonist, Kumarajiva, a native of Kutcha and a follower of the Mahayana tradition, reigns as absolute master of all religious activities. The latter owes his celebrity as much to the quality of his oral translations of Sanskrit texts into Chinese (each of his performances presided over by the emperor himself in the presence of hundreds of faithful disciples and scholars writing down every word he utters) as to his reputation for lax morals, particularly, if historians are to be believed, in his relationships with the fairer sex.
The differences in their doctrines rapidly create enmity between the two men, setting the court ablaze and dividing not only the court itself but also its intellectual following, while confronting the entire country with a dilemma as to the choice of a national religion. Buddhabhadra is appreciated for his erudition and talent and for the rigorous restraint of his behaviour, but his contempt for the great of this world, particularly with respect to the emperor, hampers the spread of Hinayana in China (in the same way that, a thousand years later, the Jesuits would miss the opportunity to convert that vast empire to Christianity).
Kumarajiva emerges triumphant from the dispute. The emperor, who dedicates what amounts to a religion to this great translators qualities, even comes up with the idea of perpetuating these by ensuring the monk has descendants, setting him up in sumptuous apartments with ten wives of unmatched beauty while the loser, Buddhabhadra, is forced to leave the capital and trail around southern China as a simple beggar, dressed in the rags dictated by his beliefs.
Nevertheless, driven by personal desire—the source of all our misfortunes—he decides in a final spasm of pride to challenge Kumarajiva with his written translations, given that the latter translates only orally into Chinese, aiming less at faithfulness to the original than at clarity and elegance. And so it is that Buddhabhadra, while begging in the