philosophy—both Madhyamika negative dialectics and Sautrantika pheno-
menalism—even though Nagarjuna formulated the Madhyamika doctrine in
opposition to the Sautrantikas and other Hinayana schools. Seven genera-
tions later Hsüan-tsang traveled to India and brought back texts which made
him one of the most famous figures in the history of Chinese philosophy. He
too sponsored two incompatible Indian schools, Yogacara idealism and Ab-
hidharma realism. Boethius became the last memorable Roman philosopher
through his eclecticism, attempting to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into
Latin in the early 500s, when knowledge of Greek was being lost under
barbarian rule, and also incorporating Stoicism into his Consolation of Phi-
losophy (DSB, 1981: 1:228–229). Ibn Massara (1 in Figure 8.4), the first
importer of philosophy into Muslim Spain, brought in MuÀtazilite, Sufi, Neo-
platonist, and Neo-Pythagorean schools alike. Among the Christians at the
Toledo translation school, the most eminent figure (ranked as a secondary
philosopher in Figure 9.3) is Dominic Gundissalinus (Gonzalez), a converted
Jew, who translated Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Avicebrol (Ibn Gabirol), the most
important Muslim and Jewish philosophers to date, then wrote his own trea-
tises based on both (Knowles, 1962: 204). Once again we see the eclectic stance
of a translators who makes a double-barreled impact, expounding two rival
positions. It is a sign that the contents are not taken as seriously as the prestige
of importing per se.
In some cases dependence on imports is brief, or imports do not swamp
the field at all but only become one faction among others engaged in indigenous
creation. In the Islamic world the first three generations of Greek translators
were themselves uncreative, but they never took over the attention space; as
falsafa became established, it became one faction entering into alliances and
oppositions with the ongoing arguments of the Muslim schools. In T’ang
China, Hsüan-tsang was unoriginal, but his translation bureau enriched the
contending networks and gave rise, through a former assistant, Fa-tsang, to
one of the great intellectual innovations in China, the Hua-yen totalist philoso-
phy. By this time the Chinese Buddhist schools had institutionalized their own
lines of argument; the continuing rounds of imports added pressures to reor-
ganize the attention space, resulting in simultaneous innovations, including the
Ch’an revolution taking place in the meditation school. In Japan the first round
of imports from China were sterile, but the second round, from the late 1100s
through 1300, coincided with indigenous outbreaks of Buddhist innovation,
starting with the Pure Land movements; the Japanese Zen schools which took
off at this time had Chinese links but diverged in their own pathways. And in
medieval Christendom, the striking thing is that dependence on translations
and imports was relatively short-lived; indeed, translation was a continuous
interest from the early 1100s through the early 1300s, but indigenous factional
448 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths