Inch by Inch: Xuanzang, Hu Shi, and the Ethics of the Translational Subject
Written in Palimpsest — A studio for long-form thinking
A few weeks ago, at a roundtable in ROOM, a Japanese scholar Michiko Oki asked me who my inspiration figures were — who, between East and West, I looked to as I tried to do psychoanalytic work across two traditions.
My first answer was André Green.
Green has been with me for years. He worked inside French psychoanalysis but carried English object relations into it; he was a translator in the strict sense, bringing Bion and Winnicott into conversation with Lacan, and a translator in the looser sense, producing a body of work that lived in the friction between two traditions without dissolving into either. When I said his name, it felt true. He is someone I have been reading carefully for a long time.
But almost immediately, another name surfaced — one I had not rehearsed, one I had never given as an answer before. Xuanzang.
The seventh-century Tang Dynasty monk who walked from Chang’an to India, alone, against imperial prohibition, and returned nineteen years later carrying hundreds of Buddhist texts that he would spend the rest of his life translating. The monk who crossed the Taklamakan Desert carrying almost nothing. The monk who, in the legend that grew up around him, was born as 江流儿 — the child of the river — a baby set adrift, his father murdered, his mother lost to him, raised by monks in a temple, and sent, eventually, to retrieve something that would remedy a loss he had carried from the beginning.
I said his name at the roundtable too. But I noticed, as I said it, that there was something strange about the recognition. It did not feel like discovering a new inspiration. It felt like remembering one I had already been carrying, silently, for a long time.
Later that evening, I remembered why.
Years ago, in the early days of my podcast, I interviewed two editors from Wanqian Psychology — a Chinese press that has been translating Western psychoanalytic and psychological literature into Chinese for decades. We spent most of the conversation talking about what it meant to choose which books to translate, how to handle concepts that did not exist in Chinese, how to carry meaning across a gap. At some point in the conversation I said something that, at the time, felt like a passing remark but now feels like the whole essay I am trying to write:
What you are doing is Xuanzang’s work.
I meant it as a tribute. I am a Buddhist. Xuanzang is a figure I have lived with since childhood, and calling someone’s labor Xuanzang-like was the highest form of recognition I knew. The editors were moved. We moved on.
What I did not say — what I could not say, because I had not yet recognized it — was that the same description applied to me. I was, already then, doing a version of the same work. Reading Western psychoanalytic theory in English, thinking about how it could be rendered into a Chinese clinical and cultural frame, asking what needed to be brought back, for whom, and in what form. I saw it clearly in the editors across from me. I did not see it in myself.
It has taken years for that recognition to travel the short distance from them to me. And I think the distance itself is part of what I want to talk about.
Most accounts of Xuanzang treat him as a figure of religious devotion, or as a scholarly translator, or as a symbol of Sino-Indian cultural exchange. All of these are accurate, and all of them abstract away what I think is the most important fact about him: he was a body. A specific body that walked, for years, across terrain that regularly killed people. He crossed the Taklamakan Desert with almost no water. He traversed the Pamir mountains. He studied at Nalanda for years, in a language not his own, under teachers who did not need to take him seriously. And then he came back — still a body, now carrying manuscripts — and spent the next nineteen years in a translation bureau in Chang’an, working through the texts one scroll at a time, sometimes collaborating with assistants, sometimes alone, until his health gave out and he died still holding a brush.
The legend of 江流儿 — the child of the river — was composed later, long after Xuanzang’s actual life, and attached to him as a way of explaining who such a person could have been. In that legend, Xuanzang is orphaned before he can remember his parents. His biological father is murdered. His mother survives long enough to set her infant adrift on a river in a wooden box, leaving a letter behind. The child is found by monks and raised inside a temple. He grows up surrounded by scripture, by chant, by a tradition that is neither exactly his inheritance nor exactly not. When he finally learns the truth of his origins, the loss is already absolute; the father he finds is a father he cannot fully recover. And it is from inside this condition — raised by adoptive fathers, haunted by unreachable ones, fluent in a tradition he entered sideways — that he is sent West to retrieve something.
The legend is not historically accurate — it was composed centuries later and eventually folded into Journey to the West, the sixteenth-century novel through which most Chinese people know Xuanzang at all. The actual journey he made was so physically impossible-looking from inside Chinese experience that the culture had to surround it with myth before it could be metabolized: a monkey king, a pig-demon, a sand-spirit, as if to say no single human body could have done this; therefore it must have been done with help we can imagine but cannot see. He is not a distant scholar in Chinese consciousness. He is somewhere between a saint, a folk hero, and a figure of collective impossibility.
But the legend of 江流儿 is psychologically accurate, in a way that matters here. Whoever attached this story to Xuanzang recognized something about the kind of subject who does translational work. The 江流儿 is someone who has never had a single, clean home tradition. He has had, instead, multiple fathers — some real, some adoptive, some silent, some textual — and the question of which one is the father has no clean answer. The condition of being split across sources is not a wound that translation heals. It is the condition from which translation becomes possible, and maybe even necessary.
It would be wrong to say Xuanzang did not think of India as higher than China. For a Buddhist of his era, India was the 佛国, the Buddha-land — the place where the Dharma had originated, where the great monasteries stood, where the sutras existed in forms no Chinese copy could fully approximate. India was higher. But the register in which it was higher is the crucial thing. India was higher devotionally — as the source of something sacred — not higher comparatively, as a more advanced civilization against which Chinese civilization should be measured and found wanting. These two kinds of “higher” are easily confused but structurally very different. The devotional register produces pilgrims who go out to retrieve something and carry it home. The comparative register produces exam-takers who go out to learn how they themselves fall short. Xuanzang was a pilgrim. He went because the sutras were in India and Chinese Buddhists needed them. He did not go in order to demonstrate that Chinese civilization had failed.
This is the distinction I want to dwell on, because it is the one that keeps getting missed.
There is also something worth noticing about the word West itself in the Chinese imagination. Xuanzang’s own travelogue is called 《大唐西域记》 — The Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang. The novel that folds him into Chinese popular consciousness is called 《西游记》 — Journey to the West. The “West” in both of these titles is India. It is not Europe. It is not the modern North Atlantic. It is a direction, from Chang’an, and a space of sacred origin, and — for more than a thousand years before the first Chinese student sailed for Britain or France — it was already a place one went West to retrieve something from. The structure of the journey — leave the home country, cross difficult terrain, enter a foreign space where the needed thing exists, bring it back — was already deep in Chinese cultural memory when the late-nineteenth-century students boarded their first steamships. They were not inventing a new shape. They were stepping into a very old one. What had changed was the content of the West. It had shifted from sutras to science, from the Dharma to Darwin, from monasteries to laboratories and parliaments. And the question the new West put to those students was whether they could hold the structure’s original clarity — I am retrieving this for my people — while the content itself encouraged a very different stance.
Many could not. And I think this is why the distinction between the devotional and comparative registers becomes so important.
The standard framing of figures who move between traditions is some version of the comprador: someone who recognizes the foreign source as better and brings it back in order to improve, modernize, or correct the home tradition. This framing was available — sometimes aggressively so — to the early Chinese students who went abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They carried real responsibility. But many of them, under the pressure of crisis, began to put the West in a position Xuanzang never put India in. They began to treat the home tradition as a site of failure to be corrected rather than a site of suffering to be served. I do not mean this as an indictment; the historical pressure they were under made the clarity of for whom almost impossible to hold. The point is structural: under crisis, the addressee of translational work is the easiest thing to lose, and when the addressee drifts — from the people who need the work toward the tribunal measuring it — no amount of technical skill can repair the damage.
Xuanzang does not do this. When he translates the Yogācāra texts, or the Heart Sutra, or the massive Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra, his addressee is not a tribunal. It is not History. It is not Civilization. It is Chinese Buddhist practitioners, many of whom he will never meet, who need access to texts they cannot otherwise reach. His translation is not evaluative. It is not comparative. It does not treat Sanskrit as a higher register that Chinese must be corrected against. It treats Sanskrit as the language in which certain texts happen to exist, and Chinese as the language of the people who need them. The work is painstaking, technical, and sometimes controversial — he invented new compounds, argued with earlier translators, insisted on precision where earlier renderings had smoothed things over — but the operation is oriented by a single unwavering question: who is this for?
This is the difference I want to name. It is not East versus West. It is not hybridity. It is not bridge-building. The translational subject, as I am trying to describe him, is defined by the clarity of his for whom.
When that clarity is present, you can work in any direction, with any source, across any gap, and the work retains its integrity. When that clarity is missing — when you begin to translate in order to please an imagined tribunal, or to rescue your home tradition from its own backwardness, or to prove that you have mastered the foreign source — something goes wrong that no amount of technical skill can repair. The work becomes a performance. The addressee becomes a judge. And the people who actually needed the work to be done for them find that it has drifted out of reach.
The other figure I keep returning to is Hu Shi.
Hu Shi is often miscast. In the common short description of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, he shows up as the philosopher who pushed for Westernization, the champion of science and democracy, sometimes the foil to more radical revolutionaries, sometimes the target of the charge that he was too willing to measure China against foreign standards. There is enough textual evidence to support all of these readings. But the Hu Shi I carry with me is a different Hu Shi. He is the Hu Shi who led the vernacular language movement — who insisted that knowledge should be written in the language ordinary Chinese people actually spoke, not in the classical register reserved for an educated elite. He is the Hu Shi whose work, for all its openness to Western sources, was oriented toward a very specific addressee: the Chinese reader who had previously been locked out of the conversation entirely. In the terms I am using here, his for whom was extraordinarily clear.
Two sentences of his have stayed with me for years, and I think they name the ethic I am trying to articulate better than anything I could write from scratch.
The first: 进一寸有进一寸的欢喜 — every inch of progress carries its own inch of joy.
The second: 功成不必在我，功力必不唐捐 — the fruit of the work does not have to be mine; the force of the work is never wasted.
Together, these two sentences describe a stance that is almost unrecognizable to the twentieth-century revolutionary imagination, and to its contemporary inheritors. It is a stance without grandiosity. It does not require the work to culminate in your lifetime. It does not require you to be the hero. It does not require you to be right in some large, historical sense. It only requires that you continue to do the small, concrete, local work of moving something one inch closer to where it needs to be, and that you trust — without needing to verify — that no effort honestly offered is ever fully lost.
This is, I think, exactly the ethic that sustained Xuanzang in the translation bureau. The nineteen years of post-pilgrimage work are the part of his story that most retellings skip, because there is no narrative drama in them. No monsters, no desert crossings, no imperial audiences. Just a man, older every year, sitting in a room with scrolls and assistants, arguing about the best Chinese compound for a Sanskrit technical term, checking variant readings, drafting, revising, drafting again. He did not know whether the texts he was translating would survive. He did not know whether they would be read correctly, or at all, by the generations that followed. What he had was a direction of work and a willingness to keep doing it by inches.
And this, I think, is what bent the early Chinese students who lost the clarity of their for whom. It was not that they lacked intelligence or commitment. It was that the historical crisis they lived inside made the inch-by-inch register feel morally insufficient. The country was dying; inches felt like betrayal. They reached, understandably, for registers that matched the scale of the emergency — revolution, rupture, total reform, civilizational indictment. And those registers, whatever their necessity in other domains, are structurally incompatible with the translational subject’s ethic. You cannot translate at revolutionary scale. Translation is an inch-by-inch discipline. The moment you try to accelerate it past that pace, the addressee drifts — from the people who need the work, toward the tribunal that is measuring it.
Hu Shi understood this, I think, in a way that is not fully captured by the standard histories. So did Xuanzang. So, in his own French-English mode, did André Green, who spent decades quietly folding British object relations into French psychoanalytic thought, one concept at a time, without ever trying to overthrow anything.
I am writing this on a Sunday afternoon. There is no frame around the writing. I have read some books, talked with some patients, had some conversations with colleagues, and sat down to put into words something I have been carrying for a long time.
I am not claiming likeness. I am trying to name an ethic — one I see most clearly in figures I have learned from across decades and centuries: Xuanzang, Hu Shi, Green. The distance between what they did and what I can do is the actual proportion of things.
Tomorrow morning I will open another paper, or another case, or another draft. The addressee will be clear. The scale will be small. The work continues.
Thank you for this text.
this is so beautiful