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A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee

Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater

People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is.  The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.  

Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text".  No sweat there.  But biàn 變 is a thorny problem.  It has the following basic meanings:    

1. 1. (intransitive) to change (by itself); to transform
   2. (transitive) to change (something in some way); to alter; to transform
   3. (intransitive) to become; to turn into; to change into
   4. (transitive) to sell off (one's property)
   5. (intransitive) to be flexible (when dealing with matters); to accommodate to circumstances
   6. to perform a magic trick
   7. sudden major change; unexpected change of events
   8. changeable; changing
   9. grotesque thing
   10. (Buddhism) bianwen (form of narrative literature from the Tang dynasty)
   11. (Hokkien) to do (bad things)

       Lí tī pìⁿ sím-mi̍h khang-khùi? [Pe̍h-ōe-jī]

       What [bad thing] are you doing?

(Wiktionary)

A common meaning for hen 變 in Japanese is "strange"

Well, now, when the medieval biànwén 變文 manuscripts were first discovered in Cave 17 of the Mogao Grottos 莫高窟 at Dunhuang 敦煌, Gansu, far northwestern China at the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century, they had been sealed away for a millennium, and the genre was completely unknown to scholarship for all that time.  This was nonelite literature that was barely recognized, if at all, by the literati even during its heyday among the folk in the Middle Ages.  Moreover, it used the morpheme biàn 變 in a rare, Buddhist sense that would have been unfamiliar to Confucianists. Thus, when the biànwén 變文 were unearthed a little over a century ago, there was a welter of conflicting opinions on how to interpret its name.

In the early days of the study of biànwén 變文, there were dozens of different explanations proposed for its meaning.  Were they supposed to convert listeners into Buddhists?  Did they change classical / literary into vernacular?  Did they alternate between spoken / prose and sung / verse (shuōchàng 說唱)?  Translation from Indic to Sinitic?  None of these guesses were correct.

After spending a year of intense philological research on works written in Indic, Sinitic, Tibetan, and other languages, I was finally able to accurately comprehend the meaning of the term and translate it as "transformation", but in a very special sense.  I wrote about it in three books, esp. T'ang Transformation Texts, and many articles.

Here I will simplify things by saying that essentially biàn 變 in the term biànwén 變文 ("transformation text") and its related art genre, biànxiàng 變相 ("transformation tableau"), is short for shén biàn 神變 ("miraculous transformation", i.e., "manifestation").  It is equivalent to Sanskrit nirmāṇa (निर्माण)), which has many different, but related, meanings in Indian religions and philosophy.  Skip down to Buddhism here, and you will see that many of the different nirmāṇa described there are things that Monkey (Sūn Wùkōng 孫悟空 ["Monkey Who Is Enlightened to Emptiness"]) does in the celebrated Ming novel, Journey to the West (Xīyóu jì 西遊記).  He is a master of transformational manifestations biàn 變 (72! — a zodiacally magic number), right?  

The miraculous / transformational manifestations displayed by Sun Wukong were earlier commanded by Hanuman, the mighty, magical, majestic monkey in the Indian epic Ramayana (e.g., soaring through the air).  One of Buddha's leading disciples, Śāriputra (Shèlìfú 舎利弗), is adept at producing transformational manifestations and is featured in Dunhuang Pelliot ms 4524 showing them in the spectacular illustrations on that scroll.  See "A Few of Our Favourite Things #1: Victor H. Mair", International Dunhuang Programme, British Library (11/1/13)

Having repeatedly responded to inquiries about the meaning of biànwén 變文 ("transformation text"), I thought it would be better for all concerned if I wrote out a Language Log post as above.  In so doing, I realized that, nearly thirty years ago, I had written a paper that touches upon many aspects of Buddhist transformational manifestations as they impacted later Daoist / Taoist literature.

A Medieval, Central Asian Buddhist Theme in a Late Ming Taoist Tale by Feng Meng-Iung
Sino-Platonic Papers, 95 (December 10, 1997; rev. April 30, 1999), 1-36.

For Patrick Hanan, Meistergelehrte of Ming-Ch'ing fiction.

ABSTRACT

Feng Meng-Iung's 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) Stories from Yesterday and Today (Ku-chin hsiao-shuo 古今小說) includes a short story entitled "Chang Tao-ling Seven Times Tests Chao Sheng" ("Chang Tao-ling ch'i shih Chao Sheng" 張道陵七試趙昇). One of the most memorable episodes of the story is a contest of supernatural powers between the Taoist master Chang Tao-ling and Six Demon Kings. At first glance, the structure, development, and even some of the minutiae of the episode are remarkably similar to the celebrated contest of supernatural powers between Śāriputra and the Six Heterodox Masters recounted in the "Transformation [Text] on the Subduing of Demons" (Hsiang-mo pien[-wen] 降魔變文) from Tun-huang dating to around the middle of the eighth century. Consequently, several scholars have suggested that the Ming tale must have borrowed the contest episode from the transformation text. This poses the puzzle of how Feng Meng-lung had access to the mid-Tang Buddhist tale from the far western reaches of China since the latter seems to have disappeared from circulation by the first third of the eleventh century. The contest between Śāriputra and the Six Heterodox Masters is also to be found in an earlier collection of Buddhist tales, The Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish (Hsien-yü ching 賢愚經) (compiled in 445 on the basis of materials gathered in the Central Asian city of Khotan) which is a part of the Chinese Buddhist canon and would thus have been available to Feng Meng-lung. Yet, upon closer examination, the nature and arrangement of the episode's incidents in "Chang Tao-ling Seven Times Tests Chao Sheng" are not as close to those of the contest in the "Transformation Text on the Subduing of Demons" and in The Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish as they are to transformational encounters in such late Ming novels as Investiture of the Gods (Feng-shen yen-i 封神演義) and Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi 西遊記). Hence, we may say that the ultimate, but not the immediate, source of inspiration for the contest of supernatural powers in "Chang Tao-ling Seven Times Tests Chao Sheng" is the Buddhist tale about Śāriputra and the Six Heterodox Masters. Furthermore, inasmuch as the contest of supernatural powers is not included in any of the standard Taoist hagiographical accounts concerning Chang Tao-ling or his disciple Chao Sheng which constituted the primary materials for "Chang Tao-ling Seven Times Tests Chao Sheng", Feng seems to have picked it up from other sources, perhaps strictly oral, which have not been preserved for us.

Among the most important findings of this paper are its revealing the extent of Iranian influence on Chinese literature.  One of the main reasons I was able to make these discoveries was because I was most fortunate to happen upon this extraordinary book:

Coyajee, J. C. Cults & Legends of Ancient Iran & China. Fort, Bombay: Jehangir B. Karani's Sons, [1936].

I do not know of other Sinologists who were aware of this book when I was drafting this paper.  My recollection from nearly thirty years ago, in the days before you could send electronic copies of books around, it was hard even to find a physical copy to photocopy or to send through the mail.  I sincerely hope that copies still exist and that they are more readily available now than they were in the 70s and 80s when I was writing this paper.  I believe that, if the current generation of Ming-Qing fiction scholars mine the riches of Coyajee's remarkable book more deeply than I was able to thirty-forty years ago, the benefit to the study of the history of Persian influence on Chinese literature and culture would be immense.

Here's a sample of what might be learned from Coyajee's tome (the quotation is from Mair, "A Buddhist Theme", p. 12]:

In a brilliant but obscure work entitled Cults & Legends of Ancient Iran & China, Sir J. C. Coyajee convincingly demonstrated close parallels between numerous Chinese legends, on the one hand, and Persian myths on the other. Coyajee's main Persian source was the Shah-nameh [Šāhnāme] (Book of Kings, 1010 CE) by Ferdowsi, which was based largely on the Khvatāy-Nāmak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the seventh century. He also relied heavily on still earlier Iranian yashts (ancient Zoroastrian hymns). For the Chinese side, Coyajee's primary source was none other than Investiture of the Gods which is curiously laden with Iranian motifs and themes.[49] Precisely how this massive implantation of Iranian motifs and themes in Ming-period Chinese legend occurred is not clear, although I suspect that it had something to do with the huge influx of Westerners and Central Asians (craftsmen, artists, architects, administrators, physicians, scientists, religious teachers, merchants, military personnel, and so forth) under the Mongols.[50] The extensive international commercial enterprises and naval explorations undertaken during the Ming dynasty, which were in no small measure due to the West Asians brought to China during the Yüan period and which are attested by archeological finds of coins and pottery along the shores of the southern oceans all the way to west Africa' and the Arabian Peninsula, surely also contributed significantly to the continued importation of Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern influences in China in the centuries leading up to Feng Meng-Iung's own times.[51]

—–

49. Op. cit., ch. 4 (pp. 99-134), "The Shahnameh and the Feng-Shen-Yen-I" which was originally issued in the Journal and Proceedings, Asiatic Society of Bengal (January 9, 1933).

50. See, for example, Ch'ên Yüan, Western and Central Asians in China Under the Mongols.

51. The full documentation of the Iranian and Arabic impact upon Ming China would require book-length treatment and would need to discuss such outstanding statesmen as Hai Jui 海瑞 (1514-1587) and remarkable thinkers and critics like Li Chih 李贄 (1527-1602).  Here I will mention only one rich source of primary information, Captivating Views of the Ocean's Shores (Ying-yai sheng-ian 瀛涯勝覽), completed around 1451 by Ma Huan 馬歡 (see the entries under Ma Huan, Feng Ch'eng-chün, and J. V. G. Mills in the Bibliography). Ma was the Muslim interpreter of the renowned Cheng Ho 鄭和 (1371-1435), eunuch commander of the Chinese fleet, who was himself a Muslim from Yunnan Province.  Yunnan, incidentally, was a center of Islam in China during the Ming and had even been effectively administered by a Muslim governor of Confucian persuasion under the Yuan dynasty, the highly respected Seyyid Edjell Shams ed-Din Omar (1211-1279) of Bokhara.  Seyyid Edjell was the father of Nasr al-Din (d. 1292), eldest of five sons, who was also important in military and political affairs from Burma to Tonkin and Shensi, but especially assisting his father in the pacification of Yunnan for the Mongols. Nasr al-Din was the Nescradin mentioned by Marco Polo in his chapter 52, for which see Yule and Cordier, The Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 2, p. 101 and the helpful annotations on p. 104 note 1.  For a scholarly note on Nescradin, see Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2, pp. 793-794.

The Captivating Views, which covers events up to 1433, contains Ma Huan's descriptions based on personal observation of twenty countries from Champa (Central Vietnam) in the east to Mecca in the west. The first half of the fifteenth century, when Ma Huan accompanied Cheng Ho on his fourth, sixth, and seventh (the last) great voyages abroad, was the heroic age of Chinese naval expansion. Four Chinese fleets traversed the Indian Ocean simultaneously and flotillas explored "the four seas" from southern Africa to Timor. The imperial court was thronged with royal visitors and envoys representing some seventy foreign countries from Japan to Hormuz, and Chinese manufactures were sought after in the markets of Asia from Majapahit to Baghdad. In such an age of aggressive exploration and vigorous entrepreneurism, it is not surprising that Middle Eastern ideas would have flooded China.

—

[Notes 49-51 are from Mair, "A Buddhist Theme", pp. 20-21.  Because of current computer configurations, I have not been able to apply all diacritical marks.]

Just as I was about to make this post, I was overjoyed to discover that J. C. Coyajee's marvelous tome exists in a beautiful facsimile on Internet Archive, scanned from a copy in the Royal Bengal Society.

———-

J. C. Coyajee

Now that we are blessed with ready access to J. C. Coyajee's magnum opus, Cults & Legends of Ancient Iran & China, in homage to this great scholar, I have done a little digging around to find out more about who he was.  Heretofore, I knew very little about him, other than to suspect from his name and interests that he may have been a Parsee from Bombay.  Upon further investigation, it turns out that I was right on both counts.

Wikidata gives the following basic information about J. C. Coyajee:

Full Name:  Jehangir Cooverji Coyajee

Indian economist; university teacher  (was Principal at Presidency College in Calcutta)

Image

Citizen of the British Raj

Birth:  September 11, 1875 at Mumbai

Death:  July 14, 1943    

In 1928, he was conferred a knighthood and hence was called "Sir".

Other technical details are omitted here.

Biography and bibliography in Encyclopaedia Iranica.  Helpfully informative, but I disagree with the last sentence:  "In general, his arguments were considered interesting, but reviewers complained that he had not paid suffi­cient attention to the ways in which Iranian motifs might have passed into the literature of other countries."  Quite the contrary, no one did more than J. C. Coyajee to bring to light the impact of Iranian motifs upon Chinese literature, bless his soul.

 

Selected readings

• "Fundamental Sinitic linguistic issues solved through analysis of Chinese rap" (8/13/25)
• "The verbal and visual in traditional prosimetric literature" (4/19/23)

In my trilogy of books and dozens of articles about medieval picture storytelling in South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia, I stressed the alternation of sung and spoken passages as performed by the narrator:

Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Painting and Performance:  Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (University of Hawai'i Press, 1989)

T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Harvard University Asia Center, 1989)

• "Texts and Transformations" (4/3/18)
• VICTOR H. MAIR, ON "TRANSFORMATIONISTS" (BIAN]IA) AND "JUMBLED TRANSFORMATIONS" (LAZA BIAN):  TWO NEW SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF "TRANSFORMATION TEXTS" (BIANWEN), WITH AN APPENDIX ON THE PHONOTACTICS OF THE SINOGRAPHIC SCRIPT AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF OLD SINITIC (free pdf) 70 pages

Cf. "shapeshifting" and Dendera zodiac.  

August 20, 2025 @ 12:06 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and literature, Language and philosophy, Language and religion

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