[
    {
        "id": 212141,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 83,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "60 \n\na year after the erection of the Sian tablet. During his stay in the Chinese capital he met the Nestorian archbishop, and the two men embarked on an ambitious project:\n\n\"He collaborated with Ching-ching, a Persian priest of the Ta-ch'in monastery, on a translation of the Satparamita-Sutra from a Uighur text, and translated seven volumes in all. But at that time Prajna was not familiar with the Uighur language, and did not understand Chinese, and Ching-ching did not know Sanskrit and was not familiar with the teaching of Shakya. Although they claimed to have translated the text, they did not really extract its real value. They wanted to make a name for themselves, and gambled that they would not be caught out. They submitted their translation to the emperor [Te-tsung], expecting that he would have it published. But the emperor was not fooled at all. He was a shrewd man and a fine scholar, and had a great respect for the canon of the Shakya. He examined their translation and found that they had muddled the author's thought and obscured the clarity of his language.”\n\nThe passage concludes with a direct quotation from a decree of the emperor Te-tsung:\n\n\"The monastery of the Shakya and the Ta-ch'i monastery have different customs and conflicting religious beliefs. Let Ching-ching hand down the teachings of Mi-shi-he ba (i.e. Messiah) and the Shakya monks publish the scriptures of Buddha. The boundaries of the two doctrines must be kept distinct, and their followers must not intermingle. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy are two different things: the King and Wei rivers flow in two different courses.\n\nIt may be possible to go further still. Besides the reference to Adam in the Sian tablet inscription already quoted, the Syriac notes at the end of inscription make another reference to a man named Adam. He is described as Adam mesamsona bar Idbuzid qurapisqupa, ‘Adam, minister, son of Jazedbouzid country-bishop'. We know from a number of references in the inscription rather more about this Adam. His grandfather, dead by 781, was a man named Milis, who had been a priest in the city of Balkh in the eastern Persian province of Tocharistan,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212146,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 88,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "6.5\n\nwas prepared to mix with the practitioners of other faiths; that he had scholarly interests; and that he was an ambitious man, used to mixing in court circles. The Sian tablet inscription demonstrates, unsurprisingly, that he was a far more sensitive and effective communicator when dealing with his own, Christian, faith. We are left to wonder what circumstances produced such a man, and here the possibility that Adam was the son of Jazedbouzid is suggestive. If his father was indeed a high-ranking general who came east from Balkh in the 750s to enter the Chinese service, Adam may well have grown up in China. If so, he would have been exceptional among Nestorian clerics of metropolitan rank in knowing something about the culture of China, and his familiarity with the imperial court and his interest in translating Christian and Buddhist thought into Chinese would be more easily explained.\n\nAdam and the invention of the term 'Syrian Brilliant Teaching'\n\nThe term 'brilliant teaching' was almost certainly invented by Adam. A man of his background, whose sensitivity to Chinese culture was displayed in the skilful composition of the Sian tablet inscription, would doubtless have realised that the old term 'teaching of the scriptures' did not convey the essence of the Christian religion. Besides general probability, one very significant feature of the inscription points to Adam as the term's inventor. Seventy-two monks are listed by name at the bottom of the main inscription, probably monks from the Ch'ang-an and Lo-yang monasteries who were present in Ch'ang-an for the tablet's unveiling ceremony. In most cases the names of these monks are given in both Syriac and Chinese. Adam is one of only three men whose Chinese name includes the character ching, 'brilliant'. His Chinese name Ching-ching (37) signifies 'brilliant purity'. Perhaps his Chinese name suggested the new term for Christianity, or perhaps it was the other way round. But it is difficult to believe that this was mere coincidence.\n\nIt is likely that the term ching-chiao, ‘brilliant teaching’, was first publicly used in the Sian tablet inscription. Firstly, it is probable that a new term would be used in the capital before spreading to the provinces, and the erection of the Sian tablet in 781, in China's first Christian monastery, offered a suitable occasion for the 'unveiling' of the new image. Furthermore, the inscription self-consciously, as if of a new term which requires explanation, draws attention to the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]