Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword by Prasenjit Duara
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: China’s Encounter and Predicament with the Indic World

Chapter One: Military Concerns and Spiritual Underpinnings of Tang-India Diplomacy
Chapter Two: The Emergence of China as a Central Buddhist Realm
Chapter Three: The Termination of the Buddhist Phase of India-China Interactions
Chapter Four: The Reconfiguration of India-China Trade and its Underlying Causes
Chapter Five: The Phases and the Wider Implications of the Reconfiguration of India-China Trade

Conclusion: From Buddhism to Commerce: The Realignment and Its Implications

Bibliography
Index
About the Author

About the Author

Tansen Sen is professor in the department of history at Baruch College, CUNY.

Reviews

China and India have held a trading relationship for thousands of years. Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of India-China, 600-1400 focuses on that relationship and how it evolved. The book includes a very detailed analysis of diplomatic relations between the ruling Chinese and Indian dynasties over these centuries. Early in this time period the Chinese held the Indians in high esteem and sought their teachings on Buddhism, diplomatic relations, and healing practices. What began as the migration of the religious culture of Buddhism from India to China eventually became a trade partnership over land and maritime routes.... Readers of Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade will make a significant investment in learning details of Chinese and Indian diplomatic and economic history. Sen left no stone unturned when it comes to describing the nature of this trade partnership during the time period.

Readers of Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade will make a significant investment in learning details of Chinese and Indian diplomatic and economic history. Sen left no stone unturned when it comes to describing the nature of this trade partnership during the time period.

Tansen Sen's book lifts Buddhist exchanges from the confines of the individual national histories of India and China and places them squarely in a broader regional context. Earlier generations of scholars who focused on the history of Buddhism in either India or China described a decline in the years after 1000, but Sen depicts a thriving Buddhist world with trade between India and China before 1000 and little after, Sen shows conclusively that the trade continued, though in the hands of Arab middlemen. His world is much more interesting as a result.

Tansen Sen's success in melding two disciplinary approaches, that of social history and the study of Buddhism, make this a seminal work in understanding the very complicated relation between the spread of religious beliefs and economic expansion. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the connections between the two great, vibrant neighboring civilizations that deeply influenced all of Asia in part because of the necessity of dealing with inaccessible texts written in very different languages, but Sen shows himself a master of a vast range of material. That it has seventy pages of bibliographic notes is an indication that Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade is a work of formidable scholarship. In showing how, in the period he is studying, the relationship between these two cultures is secularized and transformed, Sen opens up new vistas in both economic and religious history for specialists in Indian and Chinese studies and also for teachers in world history courses.

Tansen Sen's work offers the most thorough overview to date of Sino-Indian relations in the period between the seventh and fifteenth centuries. Forcefully argued, well-documented, and clearly written, it will be of interest to scholars specializing in the history of Buddhism, Chinese and Indian military history, foreign relations of India and China, and economic history in pre-modern Asia, and will also prove helpful to world historians and scholars interested in the roots of modern relations between the two countries.