When India Asked for the Tao Te Ching

There is a fatal irony in cultural exchange: the more you adapt a message for a foreign audience, the more you risk losing the very thing that made it worth sharing. In the year 647, an Indian king sent word to the Tang court that he wanted a copy of the Tao Te Ching in Sanskrit.Every standard story of Chinese Buddhism runs the other way. Sutras flow east. Pilgrims travel west. India is the source; China is the receiver; the great drama is Xuanzang 玄奘 walking seventeen years to bring back a great number of Buddhist texts. Almost nobody knows that the same Xuanzang, three years after his return, was assigned by Emperor Taizong to lead a translation team running in the opposite direction: to render Laozi into Sanskrit for an Indian king who had heard rumors of a Chinese sage and wanted the book.The translation was completed. It was sealed, handed to the envoys, and sent west. Then it vanished. No copy survives in India, Nepal, Tibet, or Dunhuang. In 1912, the first modern scholar to…