street and living on alms, translates the twenty volumes he still has of The Jatakas (the complete Jatakas comprises fifty volumes, but thirty had been stolen from him along with all the other sutras in Pali that he took with him). The Jatakas, or “nativities,” consist of some five hundred accounts, in a mixture of prose and verse, relating the former lives of Buddha. All specialists in the field agree on one point: Buddhabhadra’s translation is a masterpiece of Chinese literature, a veritable miracle if its translators foreign origins are taken into account. Nothing more beautiful has ever been created before or since those twenty volumes of The Jatakas in Chinese, volumes in which Buddhabhadra evokes every hardship suffered by the future Buddha, whether in animal, human or divine form, his sentences stripped of all weight, unremarkable in themselves yet dazzling when put together, like simple bricks which together make the edifice of a magnificent shrine.
These two adversaries die within a day of each other. Kumarajiva, whose lack of children thwarts the emperors wishes, sees his popularity decline and is increasingly challenged by Chinese scholars who openly accuse him of mixing his own ideas in with Buddha’s in his oral translations. Feeling, at his more than respectable age, quite ready to breathe his last, he begs Buddha that justice be granted to him after his death by ensuring that, during his incineration, his whole body should be reduced to ashes except for his tongue, as sacred proof of the fidelity and veracity of his oral translations. Perhaps we should see this extreme spectacle as a final bit of spin from Kumarajiva, the great master of communication, but also as a sincere need to justify himself. Kumarajiva’s wish is granted. In the largest temple in the capital, before the emperor and his entire court, the pyre is set alight and eventually delivers a verdict in favour of the late great translator. The emperor immediately declares the Mahayana doctrine Chinas official religion.
In response, Buddhabhadra sets off for Ceylon in pursuit of the remaining Jatakas in Pali, intending to translate them in their entirety. But that same evening he is assassinated by a fanatical disciple of Kumarajiva’s in a miserable inn near Prome, an ancient kingdom in Upper Burma known at the time as Pyu. After committing his crime, the murderer rips the filthy patched robes from his victims body and, screaming frenziedly slices them with his knife, cutting them into pieces no larger than a fingernail, a symbolic gesture representing the annihilation of Buddhabhadra’s beliefs.
It seems to have been at the mention of the name Prome, or Pyu, that in late July 1990, on a night when my “glass menagerie” was plunged deep in silence, I decided to make use of my long summer holiday to set off in search of historical documents at the scene of the crime, in Burma. But the most likely determining factor, as I acknowledged on my way there, was my reading a footnote by Paul d’Ampère who, in order to check the name of Prome, which was barely mentioned by Marco Polo in his book, had gone to see the place for himself:
Having walked for nearly two weeks without seeing anything except for jungle trees and the course of the Irrawaddy, suddenly a huge rounded hump, several dozen metres in height, I would think, loomed out of the river mist. It was an imposing sight, which drove everything else into the background. This was Bebe Paya, the temple of Sriksetra, so like its Indian forerunner in name and physical form: monolithic, solid, tall—so tall I was almost afraid to look up—sculpted and hollowed out of blocks of granite, topped with a tiered pyramid embellished with miniature pavilions populated by sculpted figures, alone or in twos, and narrative bas-relief designs, symbolically representing the universe; and at the top stood an elaborately carved polygonal cupola, which can be seen shining from far away on land or sea.
Later the visitor discovers the complex of eighty-three stupas, Buddhist reliquaries, each constituting a complete microcosm: a square base rising in increments and representing the divine residence analogous to the mountain at the centre of the cosmos; a central staircase inside, signifying the central pivot of the world; and the secret chamber housing the relics, identified as the receptacle for the embryo of the universe. Finally, faithful to the Indian model, beside the entrance to each stupa stands an isolated column topped with a capital shaped like an upturned lotus or a