The news has been full of portentous events from the war-riven West African nation of Mali in recent weeks. Mali, a predominantly Muslim country bridging the Sahara and the Sahel, has been torn in two by a violent uprising of Tuareg rebels combined with a force of Islamist fanatics armed to the teeth with heavy weapons from Gaddafi’s fallen regime. The Islamists, acting with the irrational ardor of fundamentalists of every creed, have descended on the ancient (“fabled” sounds even more clichéd!) city of Timbuktu, and are proceeding to cleanse it of all iniquity – destroying, for example, the mausoleums of Muslim saints, monuments said to contradict the commandment against the worship of manmade objects. Timbuktu’s greatest treasures, however, are arguably not its medieval stone buildings and saints’ graves; they are the vast troves of centuries-old Arabic texts squirreled away in a welter of dusty, ill-kept libraries, most of them in private hands, which scholars have barely begun to sift through. Islamic scholars outside Mali are understandably worried that the Timbuktu texts could be obliterated, just as Afghanistan’s massive Buddha statues carved out of cliff faces at Bamiyan were ruthlessly reduced to rubble by the Taliban not many months before they were driven from power by Western invaders. This is, after all, one of the touchstones of fundamentalism: the utter denial of the intractable Other, whether manifest in rock strata, starlight, archaeological ruins, or the written word.
It is this last that is, perhaps, the most intractable of all, the archives of texts that are mankind’s most enduring temporal legacy, from Ashoka’s engraved pillars and the Rosetta Stone to the vast repositories of literature that have effused from Western Civilization since the late centuries of the First Millenium. The impulse to write is, apparently, nearly as old as urban civilization itself – older, if we accept the Mosaic version of events in the Pearl of Great Price. Though we have no contemporary record of it, Adam was given a written language in which to record the events of his primordial age, a language that was “pure and undefiled,” which he then transmitted to his children. We may suppose that even the fallen portion of his posterity – the descendants of Cain, with their peculiar technological inventiveness -- must also have possessed some means to record their doings. And while the “Adamic language” has not come down to us – except, perhaps, fragmentarily in some of the world’s subtlest and most ancient languages, like Sanskrit and Hebrew – we are reassured that the full history of the antediluvian patriarchs has been written down and is somewhere replicated in the archives of heaven, to be conferred on Adam’s posterity at some future date.
It is writing, more than agriculture, urban planning, or even temple cults, that defines civilization. Without it, laws and contracts cannot be framed, poetry and literature cannot accrue, and science cannot advance. Illiteracy and organized religion go ill together, especially religion of the sacerdotal variety. And history, beyond the stylized and often highly mythologized oral histories that adorn pre- or proto-literate societies, will not be set down, absent writing. Not to disparage oral literature; some of the world’s finest literary specimens – the Vedas and the Homeric epics, for example – began life as such. But history in any permanent, non-mythic sense is written history. Although Schliemann found lost Troy, Homer is not history – but Thucydides is. The Mahabharata, composed in the preliterate epic Sanskrit period, is not history, but the Mahavamsa – the “Great Chronicle” of ancient India and Sri Lanka, written down in Pāli by literate Buddhist monks – is.
With enlightenment comes literacy. The Greeks, as Ventris proved, had writing of a sort during the Bronze Age, but, as far as we can tell, it was used purely to record warehouse transactions (proto-cuneiform functioned similarly, as Jerrold Cooper and others have shown, while such as we can discern of proto-Elamite, Englund tells us, amounts to a truncated system for noting amounts and numbers on mercantile records).
After the fall of Mycenae, the Greeks vanish from history, and do not reappear for a millenium, with Herodotus and his entertaining mix of history and fable. Historical writing was further refined by Thucydides and Livy, sacralized by the chroniclers of Byzantium and medieval western Europe, and modernized by the copious scholarship (however presumptuous) of Gibbon, Bury, Toynbee, Haskins, and a host of others. This is the pedigree of Western historiography, and with it, of classical and Western literature in all its forms, down to the lowliest ship’s log, personal diary, or family genealogy. These are the most enduring monuments of our civilization, and by them we shall one day be judged.
The 29th chapter of 2 Nephi attracts attention mostly for its indictment of those who cling to the Bible alone while persecuting the Jews who produced it. But there are other things in that chapter, which reads so much like a long aside in the larger context of Nephi’s description of the destiny of the Gentiles and his own descendants. “Know ye not,” he proclaims, “that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea?” (surprisingly cosmopolitan sentiments from the leader of a tiny monoethnic remnant of Israelites in a remote wilderness!). And then, a few verses later, the true breadth of Nephi’s sentiment becomes apparent: The Lord, he tells us, commands “all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I [the Lord] shall speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written.” The production of texts – history and sacred writ, especially – is not the exclusive province of the Lord’s Chosen People, although subsequent verses focus on them. The Lord has a hand in the writings of all literate peoples; their histories, their literature, their moral and religious musings – all these belong properly to the great repository of inspired writings that shall one day form the basis for the judgment of nations.
Now many scholars among the saints have tended to follow Nibley’s lead in focusing on the texts of the ancient Middle East and of the Classical world, while a cadre of others has poured commendable energy into Mesoamerican archaeology and epigraphy, supposing that these are a close approximation to Book of Mormon languages and culture. Beyond those particular horizons, though, there are other, even vaster troves of texts of immense value, whose surface has barely been scraped, by LDS scholarship or any other. Consider, for instance, the enormous body of preserved literature, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, and Manichaean, that has been recovered from countless monasteries and ruined libraries in the arid wastes of the Tarim Basin and elsewhere along the Silk Road. To penetrate these, we need scholarship in exotica like Tocharian, Uighur, Sogdian, and Pahlavi. Now that the peerless Klimkeit is gone, however, we are hard-pressed to find others who can convey these writings into modern English and other languages of scholarship.
With the Indian Subcontinent we are further along, but only just. The great monuments of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist literature have been translated, but enormous troves of documents, mostly in Pāli, still languish unknown in monasteries and temples of Sri Lanka, Burma, and further east. And we have barely begun to familiarize ourselves with the ancient and copious literature of the Tamils, that ingenious people of torrid southern India to whom Thomas the Apostle once preached the gospel (and who, according to tradition, returned the favor by martyring him near modern-day Madras). India is a land of literature, boasting more written languages, ancient and modern, than any other single polity in world history, yet her treasures are known – and very imperfectly at that – only to a small community of fairly eccentric orientalists.
Ditto for the immense literature of Tibet, with her idiosyncratic blend of Buddhism and folk religion, whose language is akin to Mandarin and Burmese, but whose writing arose from the Subcontinent.
And how well acquainted are the scholars of Zion with the literature of the Turks (to whom a source as old as the Zend-Avesta makes reference), whose Seljuk and Ottoman dynasties once held the world in thrall? Or of the Chinese, who boast one of the world’s oldest and most copious continuous literary traditions, and whose inventions, from noodles to gunpowder, transformed our civilization? Beyond these are others, as disparate as Javanese, Armenian, Georgian and Amharic/Geez, where written records have been kept for centuries, even millenia, but which almost nobody not born to such tongues can penetrate. How many are aware that Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion, and its Caucasian neighbor Georgia the second? Everyone knows about Constantine and the Milvan Bridge, but what of Tiridates the Great?
Nibley’s wistful longing for “another Vámbéry” notwithstanding, a comprehensive mastery of such materials is far beyond the abilities of even the most dedicated polymath, especially in an age that covets specialization. I myself have spent decades delving into several of the above-named tongues (while shunning Hebrew; who needs yet another LDS Semitic scholar?), but am still bidding fair merely to scratch the surface.
Still, to perceive the workings of the Spirit among some of those “in the East” that Nephi references, we need only consider the vast and aptly-named Subcontinent, home nowadays (and probably, in former days as well, thanks to its relative isolation from the broils of Central Asia and the Middle East) to roughly one fifth of the world’s population. Of India’s prehistory – prior to about 500 BC – we can learn little, except such as we choose to accept as history from her heavily embroidered twin national epics and from her mostly-devotional texts from the Vedic age. India, the “Island of the Rose-Apple Tree,” then as now, worshipped a plethora of gods, erected cities and temples, and anointed monarchs. But for millenia, she appears to have done this devoid of fully-developed writing. Then, in the middle of the first millenium BC (about the same time Homer was compiling his history), everything changed. A pair of unexampled sages arose and birthed a pair of new religions. One monarch, Ashoka, embraced one of these new religions (Buddhism) in a fit of contrition after carrying out genocide against the Kalingas, and voilà! Suddenly, we have a literate civilization. While Ashoka’s peculiar genius limited him to numerous self-serving pillar inscriptions in a brand-new script, his fellow Buddhists began writing down stories, sermons, and other suttas, and history was born. By the time of Christ, literacy was to be found everywhere in South Asia, in the immense Pāli Buddhist canon, in the poetry and epopees of the Tamils, in the chronicles of Lanka, in the Gandhara/Kharoshthi Buddhist texts of the northwest, which are only starting to come to light, and in numerous other Prakrits, as well as Sanskrit itself. And in the two millenia since, more than a dozen other literary languages, with their respective historiographies and devotional literatures, have emerged, from Canarese and Telugu in the south to Bengali and Punjabi in the north.
Meanwhile, ambitious Buddhist missionaries carried their creed – and their writing – to far-flung Tibet and Mongolia in the north, and to Burma and Thailand in the south, among many other spots -- and writing blossomed in those nations as well.
All of these, if Nephi is to be believed, are part and parcel of the literature inspired by the workings of the Spirit of God. Not all, to be sure, are of equal worth, but the better portion, at least, surely should be embraced by the scholarship of Zion.
May I offer the reader one humble example? In the West, Abraham (next to the Savior himself) is held up as the embodiment of self-denial and unquestioning sacrifice. Among the Theravada Buddhists of southern Asia, Dhammasondaka (“He who is drunk with true doctine”) is a comparable figure. He is a king who, after a few months of monarchic opulence, develops an abiding desire to discover truth at any cost. He offers princely sums to his privy councilors and his subjects to anyone who can acquaint him with the truth. When no one can do so, he relinquishes kingdom and worldly goods and goes into the forest to seek truth by self-imposed austerities. So strong is his virtue that Sakka, the prince of the gods, becomes aware of his determination. He decides to test Dhammasondaka’s piety, and appears before him as a gigantic demon. Desperate for understanding, Dhammasondaka implores the demon to teach him true doctrine. The “demon” agrees – on condition that Dhammasondaka give himself to the monster to be devoured. Sakka conjures up a giant mountain, and instructs Dhammasondaka to hurl himself into the demon’s open maw, promising to teach him the truth as he falls. The former king unhesitatingly does the demon’s bidding, but instead of devouring him, Sakka transforms back into his divine form and carries Dhammasondaka up to heaven, to be honored by the gods. Echoes of Abrahamic abnegation and vindication indeed, though discerned through a Buddhist lens!
That such a worthy tale is only accessible to those who can read Pāli (at least until my translation of it sees light of day) is one of the myriad reasons that the work of bringing forth to Zion the best earthly texts is so far from complete. I look forward to the day when the mountain of the Lord’s house is overflowing with the texts from every kindred and clime, from every age and creed.
