When China Was the Edge of the World

China in Chinese, 中国 (Zhōngguó), means “Middle Kingdom.” For most of its history the country believed it. But for several centuries the imported Buddhism told a different story: that the Chinese lived at the rim of the world, and that the true Middle Kingdom was in India.Around 400 CE a Chinese monk named Faxian (法显) traveled to the Ganges plain and found himself standing at the real ‘Middle Kingdom,’ the Sanskrit Madhyadeśa: “the middle land.” It was the Buddhist name for the region where the Buddha was born, taught, and died. Buddhist geography placed the center of the world there. Everything beyond it was borderland.When Faxian reached the Jetavana monastery in Śrāvastī, where the Buddha had lived and preached the longest, the Indian monks were stunned to see a Chinese face. His Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (佛国记) records their reaction, “How remarkable, people from the borderland can actually come seeking the Dharma here. Our teachers, and our teachers’ teachers, have never seen a…