Christopher I. Beckwith

The Impact of the Horse and Silk Trade on the Economies of T'ang China and the Uighur Empire: On the Importance of International Commerce in the Early Middle Ages

With a few notable exceptions, economic historians dealing with the Early Middle Ages (circa 625-840 A.D. )) in Europe and Asia have agreed that international commerce consisted almost exclusively of a low-volume luxury trade affecting the upper class alone. 2) Accordingly, they consider the economies of individual states to have been essentially independent of other national economies. This view thus denies any real importance to early medieval international trade via both land and sea routes. 3)

COULD THERE BE A KOREAN–JAPANESE LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP THEORY? SCIENCE, THE DATA, AND THE ALTERNATIVES

The ethnolinguistic history of early East Asia depends on the comparative-historical study of the different languages. Scholars have long studied the early interrelationships among the major languages of East Asia, but only rarely according to the theory and methodology of scientific comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology, in which theories are expected to conform to the data. Among the many highly contested genetic relationship proposals in the region is the “Korean-Japanese theory”. Despite nearly a century of work by some very prominent scholars, no one has given a convincing demonstration of such a relationship, partly due to the paucity of supporting data, despite the fact that the two languages in question are vibrant and well attested. Now two leading scholars of Japanese and Korean linguistics who are familiar with each others work, J. M. Unger and A. Vovin, have almost simultaneously published new books on the topic, one in favor of the theory, one against it. The contributions and flaws of the two books, and their position relative to the development of a scientific tradition of comparative-historical linguistics, are discussed. Special attention is paid to Koguryo, the extinct Japanese-related language once spoken on the Korean Peninsula that is crucial to any discussion of the historical relationship of Japanese and Korean.

Early Buddhism and Incommensurability

Charles Goodman (henceforth G)’s Response to the thoughtful paper by Adrian Kuzminski (“Early Buddhism Reconsidered”) in this volume is actually devoted mainly to my book Greek Buddha (2015). Half a century ago, Thomas Kuhn famously coined the term incommensurability to refer to the inability or unwillingness of many scholars in a given field to understand substantially new (“revolutionary”) work. He describes their reactions against it and their attempts to suppress or discredit it. The reason for their response is that new discoveries advance science by challenging and displacing old beliefs and practices. Kuhn accurately describes G’s Response. When I wrote Greek Buddha, I assumed that the potential readership would be people interested in a major topic of intellectual history that has been neglected for a long time, people who are able and willing to think about an alternative to the problematic received views. In general, that has proved to be the case. Kuzminski, the author of an excellent book on later Pyrrhonism (especially Sextus Empiricus) and later Buddhism (especially Nāgārjuna), states in his paper that my book makes a significant contribution toward solving the problems it addresses. Unfortunately, by contrast, G takes selected bits out of their contexts in my book, puts them into new contexts of his own making, and then deconstructs his own creations. Thus at the very beginning of his Response, G gives a story that he has written himself, but attributes it to me, saying: “The second, more elaborate narrative summarizes the views stated or clearly implied by Christopher Beckwith in his book Greek Buddha.” However, I do not say or imply anything like it, as may be revealed by even a cursory reading of the relevant sections of the book, including my explicit conclusion on that particular topic on page 121. G’s basic argument throughout is that the truth about ancient Buddhism (i.e., actual “Early Buddhism”) is already known from the portrayal of antiquity in texts of late Normative Buddhism, which are centuries younger

Apocope of Late Old Chinese short *ă: Early Central Asian loanword and Old Japanese evidence for Old Chinese disyllabic morphemes*

The morphophonology of Old Chinese has usually been reconstructed as an earlier version of the traditional reconstruction of Middle Chinese, with exclusively monosyllabic morphemes. For Old Chinese some scholars have posited syllabic morphemes with long or short vowels, or even polysyllabic morphemes, and other theories have been proposed, but it is still assumed that by Late Old Chinese any longer morphemes that once existed were already monosyllabic. However, Central Asian loans in Chinese suggest some disyllabic morphemes still existed in Late Old Chinese. They seem to be confirmed by a new study of little-noted Old Japanese transcriptions known as nigōgana. Thus the hitherto problematic Old Chinese and Old Japanese transcriptions of foreign words such as Saka and Buddha, and the monosyllabic theory of Old Chinese morphology, must be reconsidered. This paper’s new reconstructions conform to the data and have great implications for the reconstruction of Old Chinese as well as for the reconstruction of the early Chinese loans into Japanese.

The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power Among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese During the Early Middle Ages . By Christopher I. Beckwith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. xxii, 269 pp.

This narrative history of the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia from about A.D. 600 to 866 depicts the struggles of the great Tibetan, Turkic, Arab, and Chinese powers for dominance over the Silk Road lands that connected Europe and East Asia. It shows the importance of overland contacts between East and West in the Early Middle Ages and elucidates Tibets role in the conflict over Central Asia.