Mini- #Thread on some comparisons between #Indians and #Chinese according to the travel memoirs of one of the earliest Arab merchants, Sulaiman, in Akhbar Al-Sin wa’l Hind dated 851 CE :-
#History #India #Bharat #China #Medieval #science #astronomy #medicine

On Dharma (religion), science, medicine, transmigration of soul after death, philosophy and astronomy:-

“The Chinese have no science (‘ ilm). Their religion originated in India; they assert that it were the Indians who procured their idols for them, and that they are the people who possess religion. The inhabitants of both the countries believe in metempsychosis (transmigration),..

but they differ in the details of their religious practices.

.. The Indians have medicine and philosophy. The Chinese also have medicine, but their medical science is mostly cauterisation. They have knowledge of astronomy, but in India it is more popular.”

On being men of pleasure :-

“The Chinese are men of pleasure; but the Indians condemn pleasure, and abstain from it. They do not take wine, nor do they take vinegar, which is made of wine. This does not arise from religious scruples, but from their disdain of it...

.. They say, “The prince who drinks wine is no true king.””

Some of the observations like above recorded in several foreign accounts is a testimony of how India was before the full fledged Islamic invasion and rule began and what we lost during this long devastating rule of the foreigners...

.. But we still blame our Dharma and ancestors ONLY for all the degradations that have crept into us during the Middle Ages.

Sources and Credit:

1)THE INDIA THEY SAW (VOL-2) by MEENAKSHI JAIN

2) S. Maqbul Ahmad, pp.56-57, Arabic Classical Accounts of India And China, Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, 1989

3)Elliot and Dowson, vol. I, pp. 7, in The History of India As Told By Its Own Historians, vol. I, Low Price Publications, 1990.