Kṛṣṇa’s Final Word: Examining Bojiafan song, a Chinese Hindu Scripture

The Hindu scriptural corpus is most readily associated with Sanskrit, “the language of the gods,” and to a lesser degree, togues like Tamil and Bengali. However, in recent years, as Hinduism has gone increasingly global, this body of writing has come to include texts composed in new and unexpected vernaculars. Throughout the proposed paper, I will offer an introduction to and analysis of one such work—Bojiafan song (Ode of the Bhagavān), likely the world’s first Chinese Hindu scripture. In 2009, a woman surnamed Li began distributing the 171-page text in northeast China, proclaiming it to be Kṛṣṇa’s final revelation. Its title a clear play on Bhagavad-gītā (Ch.: Bojiafan ge), Bojiafan song offers a cosmogony, cosmography, and detailed ontology. In addition, it warns against environmental degradation and prophesizes a magnificent future for China once it adopts Hinduism. My paper will make the following arguments about this truly unique religious text: (1) that its emergence is in keeping with what historian Vincent Goossaert (2022) calls China’s “revelatory ecology,” (2) that it adopts specifically Daoist understandings of scripture, and (3) that its advent and circulation appear to mark the start of a largely internal or “one-sided” dialogue between Chinese and Hinduism akin to the one Buddhologist Robert H. Sharf (2002) indicates has been occurring among Chinese and Buddhism now for hundreds of years.

Goossaert suggests that five principal revelation types have emerged in the Chinese context: “sutra, possession, encounter, visualization, and presence” (p. 3). I will demonstrate how Bojiafan song is “an encounter-type text” (p. 61). According to Goossaert, such works are “revealed on this planet by a deity . . . in an encounter with one or a few humans, and we are told how, where, and when . . .  this encounter took place. We are, however, not informed of any ritual technique used by the receiver to make it happen . . . because what counts is the moral merit or exceptional circumstances of the receiver” (p. 61–62). More specifically, I will show how Bojiafan song is the result of what Goossaert calls an “open encounter,” that is, “one human [was] chosen to receive the revelation and spread it” (p. 62).

I will also argue that, in many respects, Kṛṣṇa’s revelation to Li resembles and is understood similarly to those bestowed upon the well-known Daoist mystic Yang Xi (330–386). The sacred texts produced by Yang were the recorded dictates of celestial beings who would often (as Kṛṣṇa does with Li) check and confirm the accuracy of his manuscripts. Rarely did revelations come to Yang all at once but, as appears to have been the case with Bojiafan song, in fragments over time. In addition, he and his successors understood the scriptures which they recorded to be only approximations of transcendent originals and therefore subject to edits in light of new contact with one or more of their transmitters (Pettit and Chang, 2020). Li evidently holds a similar position. She has already added to Bojiafan song at least once and ends her afterword requesting reader feedback due to the “inevitability of errors and inaccuracies.” 

Finally, I will illustrate how, despite claiming to be for all beings of the three worlds (sanjie zhongsheng), Bojiafan song is, in fact, a revelation intended first and foremost for the people of China. Kṛṣṇa communicates in China’s national language, for instance, and even speaks as mainland Chinese do of “our China” (women Zhongguo), exhibiting a kind of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) which he fails to extend to other countries mentioned in the text, such as Greece or Egypt. Moreover, the scripture works to incorporate into the Hindu pantheon numerous figures who are eminent in Chinese religious, political, and philosophical contexts yet absent from traditional Hindu scriptures. The Jade Emperor, the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin), Lord Lao, and the Immortal Lady of the Moon (Chang’e) all appear in the text. So too does Karl Marx as Kṛṣṇa’s eighth son and overseer of the Peony constellation (Mudan xingxiu) where the philosophers Confucius, Mencius, and Zhuangzi also live. It is noteworthy, as well, that Bojiafan song contains elements borrowed from Chinese Buddhist cosmology like its eighteen hells and speaks of concepts which have been relatively permanent fixtures of Chinese thought since at least the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), such as yin, yang, and the five phases (wuxing). Imported yet incredibly important ideas within contemporary China, such as dialectical materialism, are also present. Finally, the scripture focuses on environmental degradation, an issue of major concern for many Chinese at the time of its revelation, especially in the northeast where Li, Kṛṣṇa’s chosen recipient, was then located. Revealed in Mandarin to a Chinese woman in China and dealing with issues of local concern, Bojiafan song is in many ways a Chinese Hindu scripture and quite likely the world’s first. In being so, the text’s production and circulation might well mark the start of a largely internal dialogue between Chinese and Hinduism, which—if at all similar to the one ongoing between Chinese and Buddhism—will likely continue for centuries to come.