Beijing, Nov 4: China has had footprints of the stories of Ramayana cloaked in Buddhist scriptures for centuries, scholars here have said, bringing to the fore perhaps for the first time, the influence of Hinduism in the country’s checkered history.At a symposium on “Ramayana- A Timeless Guide” organised by the Indian Embassy here on Saturday, a host of Chinese scholars associated with longstanding research on religious influences, made candid presentations tracing the historical routes through which Ramayana reached China and its influence on Chinese art and literature.
“As a classic intertwining the religious and the secular world, the influence of Ramayana has grown ever more significantly through cross-cultural transmission,” Dr Jiang Jingkui, Professor and Dean of the Institute for International and Area Studies of Tsinghua University said.
China, too, has absorbed elements of this epic, which not only left traces in Chinese (majority) Han culture but was also reinterpreted and given new meaning in Chinese Xizang (Tibetan) culture,” he said. China officially refers to Tibet as Xizang.
“This cultural migration and adaptation demonstrate the openness and flexibility of Ramayana as a classic and worldly text,” Jiang said.
The earliest content related to Ramayana in China was introduced into the Han cultural sphere, primarily through Buddhist scriptures, he said.
While it was not fully incorporated as a complete work into the Han cultural sphere, parts of the epic were incorporated into Buddhist scriptures, he said, citing Chinese translations of Buddhist scripts in which “key figures such as Dasharatha and Hanuman were noted as Buddhist characters”.