An Exploration of Shijie 世界 (“World”)

00

Introduction

We use the word shijie 世界 every day.

We speak of the whole world, world history, worldviews, virtual worlds, and even a person’s inner world.

When someone leaves their hometown, others may say that they are going out to “see the wider world.” When someone remains silent for a long time, we may say that they seem to live entirely “in a world of their own.”

The word has become so ordinary that its origins are almost invisible. Yet once we separate its two written components and examine them individually, the matter becomes considerably more complicated.

Shi 世 is commonly associated with time: a lifetime, a generation, a previous life, or a future life.

Jie 界, by contrast, is commonly associated with extent and division: a boundary, a territorial limit, or a line of demarcation.

One points toward time; the other toward space, scope, and distinction. When, then, did these two elements begin to be used together as the word shijie 世界 that we know today?

A common answer is readily given: the Chinese word shijie came from Buddhist scriptures.

There is good reason for this answer. Yet stated too quickly, it risks reducing several thousand years of linguistic change to a convenient piece of etymological trivia.

For the claim that shijie “came from Buddhist scriptures” involves at least four separate questions.

First, before Buddhism entered China, what meanings and usages did shi 世 and jie 界 already possess?

Second, before the translation of Buddhist scriptures, had the two graphs 世 and 界 ever appeared together in Chinese? What role did Buddhist translation play in their development into a compound word?

Third, what did shijie actually mean in Buddhist texts? To what extent does the Buddhist usage overlap with that of modern Chinese, and where do they differ?

Fourth, how did the meanings and uses of shijie develop from the medieval period into the modern era?

These four questions must be considered separately.

01

I. Before the Introduction of Buddhism, How Did Chinese Describe the Totality in Which Human Beings Lived?

Buddhism began to enter China around the first century CE.

Among later accounts of Buddhism’s earliest arrival, the best-known is the story of Emperor Ming of the Han dreaming of a golden figure. Fan Ye 范曄, writing in the fifth century, records in the “Treatise on the Western Regions” of the Hou Hanshu 後漢書:

“Tradition has it that Emperor Ming dreamed of a golden man, tall in stature, with light shining from the top of his head.”

The emperor questioned his ministers, whereupon someone reportedly answered that there was a divine being in the West called the Buddha.[1]

The passage begins with the expression shi chuan 世傳, “tradition has it.” It therefore demonstrates that by the fifth century this story had entered official historiography. The details concerning the emperor’s dream and the dispatch of envoys in search of Buddhist teachings, however, cannot simply be treated as eyewitness records of the first century CE without further historical analysis.

More concrete evidence is found in the biography of Prince Ying of Chu in the Hou Hanshu. An imperial edict dated to the eighth year of the Yongping era, or 65 CE, already contains Buddhist expressions such as yipusai 伊蒲塞 and sangmen 桑門. This suggests that by the middle of the first century CE there were already signs of Buddhist lay followers and monastic activity among the upper strata of Han society.

By the latter half of the second century, the translation of Buddhist scriptures had become a historical activity that can be traced with increasing continuity. During the reigns of Emperors Huan and Ling of the Eastern Han, translators from Central Asia, including An Shigao 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖, arrived in Luoyang and produced a number of Buddhist translations. Chinese consequently began, on a comparatively large scale, to confront a conceptual system derived from Indian and Central Asian religious traditions.

These materials help us establish an approximate chronology for the introduction and gradual spread of Buddhism in China. They do not, however, tell us when any particular Chinese word first appeared.

To investigate the origins of shijie, we must therefore return to earlier Chinese texts and examine the actual usages of shi 世, jie 界, and the two graphs 世界 together.

Let us begin with shi and jie.

In pre-Qin texts, shi 世 is frequently associated with generations and temporal continuity. The Analects, for example, states:

“If a true king were to arise, it would surely take a generation before humaneness prevailed.”

Here shi refers approximately to a generation, conventionally understood as a period of around thirty years.

Jie 界, meanwhile, carries the meaning of boundary or demarcation. The Mencius states:

“The people are not confined by the boundaries of frontier and territory.”

Here jie denotes the line by which a geographical area is delimited.[2]

It is therefore clear that both shi and jie were established Chinese morphemes long before the introduction of Buddhism. Buddhism created neither shi nor jie.

Was Chinese, then, lacking in expressions for the totality of heaven, earth, and all things before shijie became a common word?

Certainly not.

One important expression was tiandi 天地, “heaven and earth.”

The “Zhengyue” 正月 poem in the Book of Songs already juxtaposes heaven and earth:

“One says that heaven is high, yet dares not stand upright; one says that earth is thick, yet dares not take long steps.”

The Xici zhuan 繫辭傳 of the Book of Changes later states:

“The great virtue of heaven and earth is life.”[3]

In such texts, heaven and earth constitute the fundamental sphere within which the myriad things exist. Taken together, the two terms refer to more than the sky overhead and the ground beneath one’s feet. They are also connected to generation, movement, and the order through which things come into being.

Tiandi thus emphasizes the natural totality within which the myriad things are generated and sustained.

Another important expression is tianxia 天下, literally “all under heaven.”

In its most literal sense, tianxia may refer to the entire territory beneath heaven. Yet in pre-Qin texts it entered political discourse at an early stage. Expressions such as “obtaining tianxia,” “governing tianxia,” and “losing tianxia,” as found in the Shangshu, Zuo zhuan, Mencius, and other texts, commonly involve land, population, royal authority, and political order simultaneously.[4]

To “obtain tianxia” does not merely mean to acquire territory. It also means to gain legitimate rule over a political community. Likewise, to “lose tianxia” does not simply mean to suffer territorial contraction, but also the collapse of an established order of rule.

Tianxia therefore possesses both a spatial dimension and a distinctly political meaning. It describes a political whole maintained through the interrelationship of rulership, population, territory, and order.

There was also yuzhou 宇宙.

The “Qiwulun” 齊物論 chapter of the Zhuangzi already uses the expression in the phrase “beside the sun and moon, encompassing the yuzhou.” The “Gengsang Chu” 庚桑楚 chapter separately explains yu 宇 and zhou 宙:

“That which has substantiality yet no fixed location is yu; that which has duration yet neither beginning nor end is zhou.”

By the Western Han, the Huainanzi expressed the distinction even more systematically:

“From antiquity to the present is called zhou; the four directions, above and below, are called yu.”[5]

Here zhou points toward temporal extension from past to present, whereas yu points toward spatial extension in all directions. The compound yuzhou is therefore capable of encompassing both time and space, and of expressing a totality less dependent upon political order than tianxia.

This does not mean, of course, that every occurrence of yuzhou in pre-Qin and Han texts was equivalent to the “universe” of modern astronomy. A semantic distance remains between ancient and modern usages. What can nevertheless be established is that, before the large-scale translation of Buddhist scriptures, Chinese already possessed conceptual resources for thinking of time and space within a single framework.

Buddhism, then, did not provide the Chinese with their first conception of the totality of heaven, earth, and the myriad things.

Before the introduction of Buddhism, Chinese already had expressions such as tiandi, tianxia, and yuzhou. Tiandi tended to emphasize generation and natural order; tianxia foregrounded territory, population, and political rule; yuzhou was capable of referring simultaneously to temporal and spatial extension.

Their meanings overlapped, but each had its own emphasis.

The more important question is therefore this: if shi and jie had already existed independently, and if Chinese already possessed several ways of describing a totality, when did shi and jie begin to be used together? And what role did Buddhist translation play in that process?

02

II. Did the Word Shijie Already Exist Before the Introduction of Buddhism?

To determine the role of Buddhist translation in the formation of shijie, we must first address a more fundamental question: before Buddhism entered China, had the two graphs 世界 already appeared as a lexical unit?

On the basis of currently searchable transmitted texts from the pre-Qin and Han periods, together with relevant linguistic research, no unambiguous example has yet been identified in which 世界 functions as a single noun before the introduction of Buddhism.[6]

This claim requires particular caution.

Failure to locate an example in surviving texts does not prove that the word categorically did not exist. A substantial portion of ancient literature has been lost, and the materials available today represent only a fraction of historical linguistic evidence. Databases also differ in textual coverage, dating, editorial practices, and search methods.

The conclusion must therefore be restricted to the evidence presently available: in the surviving pre-Buddhist Chinese corpus, shi and jie had long existed independently, but there is as yet no secure example of the two being stably combined to designate a single domain of existence.

The earliest relatively clear surviving examples of shijie as a lexical unit occur mainly in Chinese Buddhist translations from the late Eastern Han onward.

The investigation therefore turns to the earliest period of Buddhist translation.

03

III. Where Does Shijie First Appear Clearly as a Compound Word?

During the latter half of the second century CE, Luoyang was not only the political center of the Eastern Han but also increasingly an important center of early Buddhist translation.

Translation at this time was often collaborative rather than the work of a single individual. A foreign monk might orally recite or expound an Indic text; individuals familiar with different languages might provide an intermediate rendering; Chinese scholars or lay followers might then transcribe, revise, or polish the resulting Chinese text. The precise procedures differed from one translation project to another, and the highly organized translation bureaus of later periods had not yet fully developed, but the collaborative character of early Buddhist translation can broadly be established.[7]

The translators were confronted with more than a handful of unfamiliar sounds.

Concepts such as Buddha, bodhisattva, nirvāṇa, kalpa, and Buddha-land were embedded in a larger system of ideas concerning life, time, space, religious practice, and liberation. Existing Chinese expressions such as tiandi, tianxia, and yuzhou could convey certain related meanings, yet often failed to correspond precisely to Buddhist concepts.

A difficult and highly practical problem therefore confronted translators: how were concepts originating in another language and intellectual tradition to be accommodated within Chinese writing?

Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖 worked within precisely this historical environment. Originally from the Yuezhi region, he was active in Luoyang during the latter half of the second century and is among the earliest translators known to have produced a substantial corpus of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts in Chinese.

The received Achu foguo jing 阿閦佛國經 is traditionally attributed to Lokakṣema. It contains the following sentence:

“The Buddha said to Śāriputra: ‘There is a shijie named Abhirati; its Buddha is named Damu, and there he teaches the bodhisattva-mahāsattvas and expounds the practice of the six perfections.’”[8]

The sentence may be rendered straightforwardly as stating that there is a shijie, or world, called Abhirati, within which there is a Buddha.

Syntactically, shijie here already functions as a single noun. It follows the existential verb you 有, “there is,” and is followed by ming Abiluoti 名阿比羅提, “named Abhirati.” It designates an identifiable and nameable domain of existence.

At this point it is difficult to interpret shi and jie as two independent words. Together, they perform a single referential function.

A similar use occurs in the Foshuo Banzhou sanmei jing 佛說般舟三昧經, also traditionally attributed to Lokakṣema:

“Suppose that the shijie of a single Buddha-land were completely shattered and reduced to dust.”[9]

Here too shijie functions as an integral lexical unit rather than as an accidental juxtaposition of shi and jie.

These passages demonstrate at minimum that by the latter half of the second century CE, shijie was already being used as a compound noun in at least some Chinese Buddhist translations.

This does not, however, prove that Lokakṣema himself—or any single participant in a translation project—“invented” the word on a particular occasion.

The Buddhist texts that survive today passed through long processes of manuscript transmission, copying, revision, collation, and incorporation into canonical collections. Even where traditional catalogues attribute a translation to a specific Eastern Han translator, we cannot automatically assume that every graph in the received text reproduces the original translation without alteration.

Moreover, lexical formation is rarely an event that can be assigned to a single moment. A new expression may appear repeatedly in oral discussions and translation practices among different translators, then gradually become established through continued use, adjustment, and selection.

A more cautious formulation would therefore be as follows: among the earliest surviving and verifiable materials, clear written examples of shijie as a compound noun occur in Buddhist translations associated with the late Eastern Han. The translation of Buddhist texts was at the very least a major environment in which the term was written down, disseminated, and gradually stabilized.

By the Western Jin period, its usage had become considerably richer.

In 286 CE, Dharmarakṣa 竺法護 translated the Guangzan jing 光讚經. One passage states:

“At that time the World-Honored One emitted the pure, wondrous radiance of the Tathāgata’s nature and intention, illuminating this three-thousandfold great-thousand shijie, and extending throughout the ten directions to Buddha-lands as numerous as the sands of the rivers.”[10]

Here shijie has entered the fully developed Buddhist cosmological expression sanqian daqian shijie 三千大千世界, the “three-thousandfold great-thousand world-system,” and occurs alongside expressions such as “the ten directions” and “the lands of the Buddhas.”

At this point, shijie is no longer merely an occasional term for a particular Buddha-land. It can be combined with numerical expressions, spatial directions, and different Buddha-fields, and has become a productive term for describing Buddhist cosmology.

If we restrict ourselves to surviving evidence, a broad chronological outline can therefore be proposed. Clear early examples of shijie appear in Chinese Buddhist translations of the latter half of the second century. By the latter half of the third century, its combinations and range of usage in Buddhist literature had become considerably more extensive.

This chronology still does not tell us who first uttered the word shijie.

What it reveals instead is a gradual process of lexical formation: the pre-existing Chinese morphemes shi and jie were combined, reused, and adjusted across generations of translation practice until they came to bear a spatial and cosmological meaning that earlier Chinese had not conventionally expressed in precisely the same form.

Shijie may have had no identifiable inventor.

It became a word through translation.

04

IV. What, Exactly, Did Shijie Translate?

At this point, the question appears to become more specific.

If shijie emerged prominently in Buddhist translations, which Sanskrit word did it translate?

A common answer is that shijie is a semantic translation of Sanskrit lokadhātu.

This is well founded, but incomplete.

Buddhist translation did not operate through a perfectly ordered one-to-one glossary. The same Indic term could be translated differently by different translators or in different textual contexts. Conversely, the same Chinese expression could be used to render several concepts that were related but not identical.

It must also be noted that the source texts of early Eastern Han Buddhist translations were not necessarily written in what is now called Classical Sanskrit. In the case of at least some works translated by Lokakṣema, scholars have argued that the underlying language may have been related to Gāndhārī or other Middle Indo-Aryan languages.[11] Comparison between surviving Sanskrit versions and Chinese translations can therefore help establish correspondences in particular passages, but it cannot directly reconstruct the lost manuscript that lay before an Eastern Han translator.

Consider first lokadhātu.

The element loka is commonly associated with the world, the realm of beings, or the domain in which sentient beings live. Dhātu has a wider semantic range, including constituent element, component, sphere, field, or domain. As a compound, lokadhātu in Buddhist contexts generally refers to a “world-system” or “world-realm.” It should not be mechanically decomposed according to the later Chinese interpretation of shi as “time” and jie as “space.”[11]

Kumārajīva’s translation of the Diamond Sūtra contains the statement:

“World-Honored One, what the Tathāgata calls a shijie is not a shijie; therefore it is called a shijie.”

The corresponding passage in the surviving Sanskrit text uses lokadhātu. Earlier in the same text, where the Chinese refers to the sanqian daqian shijie 三千大千世界, the Sanskrit uses the compound trisāhasramahāsāhasra-lokadhātu.[12]

In this passage, then, there is a clear correspondence between Chinese shijie and Sanskrit lokadhātu.

The shijie in question is not the planet Earth in the modern geographical sense. It refers to a Buddhist world-system containing Mount Sumeru, the sun and moon, four continents, and multiple levels of sentient existence. Numerous basic worlds of this kind can in turn be combined, according to fixed numerical relationships, into larger world-systems.

The expression sanqian daqian shijie, therefore, does not mean three separate “thousand-worlds,” nor is it simply the sum of three thousand worlds. It names a cosmological structure built through successive thousandfold aggregations.

Yet shijie in Chinese Buddhist translations does not correspond only to lokadhātu.

In Kumārajīva’s translation of the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha emits light from between his eyebrows, which “illuminates eighteen thousand shijie in the eastern direction.” The corresponding Sanskrit passage, however, contains aṣṭādaśa-buddhakṣetra-sahasrāṇi—that is, “eighteen thousand Buddha-fields.” The central term is buddhakṣetra, not lokadhātu.[13]

Buddhakṣetra is formed from buddha and kṣetra. The word kṣetra originally denotes a field, region, or domain. In Buddhist usage, buddhakṣetra generally refers to a territory presided over, taught within, or manifested by a Buddha. Chinese translations commonly render it with terms such as foguo 佛國, “Buddha-country”; fotu 佛土, “Buddha-land”; foguo tu 佛國土; or focha 佛剎.

The semantic fields of shijie and “Buddha-land” can overlap, but they are not identical.

Lokadhātu tends to emphasize a world-system within a cosmological structure, whereas buddhakṣetra tends to emphasize the domain associated with a particular Buddha’s teaching and activity. In actual Buddhist texts, however, a Buddha-field may encompass one or more world-systems, so the two concepts can overlap. It is therefore unsurprising that translators rendered them according to context as shijie, guotu 國土, foguo, or focha.

It follows that shijie was not a permanently fixed Chinese label for a single Indic term. In some passages it corresponds to lokadhātu, with an emphasis on the structure of a world-system; in others it corresponds to buddhakṣetra, pointing toward a Buddha-field or Buddha-land. The precise correspondence in any other passage must be established through comparison among the source language, parallel translations, and surviving Indic versions rather than assumed in advance.[11]

This fluidity of translation is particularly visible in the earliest Chinese Buddhist texts.

Lokakṣema’s Daoxing bore jing 道行般若經, for example, contains a range of expressions including “a thousand tianxia,” “a three-thousand great territory,” and “Buddha-fields as numerous as the sands of the Ganges.”[14]

Terms such as tianxia, guotu 國土, and focha appear within closely related Buddhist cosmological contexts. This shows that early translators did not from the beginning rely exclusively on shijie to accommodate Indic cosmological concepts.

They already possessed a wide range of Chinese lexical resources: tiandi, tianxia, guotu, shijian 世間, and jiangjie 疆界, together with Buddhist expressions such as foguo, fotu, and focha that became increasingly common.

Translation did not simply replace a foreign word with two Chinese graphs. Translators continually selected among existing Chinese meanings and conventions. Some expressions were directly reused; others acquired new meanings; still others were formed through the recombination of pre-existing morphemes.

Shijie was very likely stabilized through just such a process.

Both shi and jie were Chinese morphemes that predated Buddhism. Buddhist translation brought them together into a compound that could refer to realms inhabited by sentient beings, lands associated with Buddhas, and cosmological systems composed of multiple worlds.

This remains, however, a historical interpretation based upon surviving linguistic evidence.

No text records a translator explicitly declaring: “I shall use shi to represent time and jie to represent space, and then combine them to create a new word.” What survives are the translations themselves, together with the evidence of their increasing frequency, semantic expansion, and stabilization over the following centuries.

Buddhist scriptures introduced a new range of cosmological structures; Chinese supplied the available lexical materials. Translation placed old characters into new relationships.

Within that encounter, shijie gradually became shijie.

05

V. Is “Shi Denotes Temporal Flow; Jie Denotes Spatial Direction” the True Etymology?

At this point, many readers may recall a famous line from the Śūraṃgama Sūtra:

“Shi denotes temporal flow; jie denotes spatial direction.”

The text continues:

“You should understand that east, west, south, north, southeast, southwest, northeast, northwest, above and below constitute jie; past, future, and present constitute shi.”[15]

According to this explanation, shi consists in the temporal flow of past, present, and future, whereas jie consists in the spatial differentiation of the directions. When combined as shijie, the two graphs appear to encompass both time and space.

Yet this passage provides a semantic interpretation of the word rather than direct evidence for its original historical formation.

The first reason is chronological.

The received Śūraṃgama Sūtra is traditionally dated to the first year of the Shenlong era under Emperor Zhongzong of the Tang, or 705 CE. Its title page attributes the “translation” to the Central Indian monk Pāramiti 般剌蜜帝, the “recording” of the Chinese text to Fang Rong 房融 of Qinghe, and the interpretation of the source language to the monk Mijia Shijia 彌伽釋迦 from Uḍḍiyāna. The Kaiyuan shijiao lu 開元釋教錄, however, preserves another account according to which Huai Di 懷迪 and an unnamed Indic monk jointly translated the text. Early records of the scripture’s transmission are therefore not entirely consistent.[15]

By contrast, examples of shijie in texts such as the Achu foguo jing and the Banzhou sanmei jing can be traced through traditional translation attributions to the latter half of the second century CE.

The two bodies of material are separated by roughly five centuries.

Modern scholarship has also long debated the composition and translation history of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra. Some scholars have regarded it as a Chinese apocryphon or as a text substantially shaped by Chinese compilation, whereas others have reexamined the transmission evidence and argued for a basis in an Indic source and genuine translation activity.[16]

Regardless of which position one adopts, one point remains secure: the explanation “shi denotes temporal flow; jie denotes spatial direction” is substantially later than the formation and established use of the word shijie itself.

It is therefore better understood as an exegetical interpretation of an already existing word within the Buddhist Chinese of the Tang period.

After several centuries of Buddhist usage, shijie had become an ordinary term in the canonical vocabulary. In the Śūraṃgama Sūtra, the compound is once again separated into its two constituent graphs. Shi is situated within the temporal structure of past, present, and future, while jie is situated within the spatial structure of the ten directions.

The two morphemes of an already established compound thereby receive a symmetrical and conceptually complete explanation.

This may be described as a later semantic elaboration. It tells us how shijie could be understood in the Buddhist Chinese of the Tang period, but it does not demonstrate that Eastern Han translators originally created the compound according to the explicit formula “time plus space.”

For the same reason, the Indic terms discussed above—loka, lokadhātu, and buddhakṣetra—cannot simply be decomposed according to the literal meanings of the Chinese graphs shi and jie. The semantic structures of Indic languages and the associations carried by individual Chinese characters do not coincide perfectly.

A foreign concept was first expressed through Chinese. After long transmission, the semantic associations inherent in Chinese writing and Chinese modes of interpretation began in turn to reshape how the borrowed concept itself was understood.

A word arose through translation and was subsequently reinterpreted by its users.

The formula “shi denotes temporal flow; jie denotes spatial direction” explains how shijie later came to be understood. It does not tell us exactly how the word was first formed.

06

VI. How Large Was a Buddhist Shijie?

In modern everyday Chinese, shijie can refer to the Earth and to the human societies that inhabit it. A “world map” is generally a representation of the Earth’s surface, while “world population” refers to the total number of people living on this planet.

In Chinese Buddhist texts, however, shijie is not a unit of fixed scale.

Depending on the scripture and the context, it may refer to a region inhabited by sentient beings, to a land governed or taught within by a Buddha, or to an entire cosmological system composed of the sun and moon, Mount Sumeru, the four great continents, and multiple heavenly realms.

The Achu foguo jing, for instance, refers not only to a shijie named Abhirati, but repeatedly to “other-direction shijie.” One passage states:

“If there is a bodhisattva-mahāsattva in this shijie or in another-direction shijie …”[8]

Here “this shijie” means “this world,” while “other-direction shijie” refers to worlds located elsewhere.

Such language indicates that in the spatial imagination of Buddhist texts, shijie may be plural. Beyond one world there may be other worlds. Individual worlds may be named and distinguished from one another, and they may occupy different directions.

Buddhist cosmology also distinguishes a small chiliocosm, a medium chiliocosm, and a great chiliocosm.

Xuanzang’s translation of the Abhidharmakośa, fascicle eleven, states:

“The four great continents, the sun and moon, Sumeru, the heavens of the desire realm, and the Brahmā world—one thousand of each are called a small-thousand world-system. A thousand such small-thousand systems are called a medium-thousand world-system. A thousand of these in turn form a great-thousand world-system; all arise and perish together.”[17]

The text thus explains that one thousand basic worlds, each containing the four continents, the sun and moon, Mount Sumeru, the heavens of the desire realm, and the Brahmā realm, form a small chiliocosm. One thousand small chiliocosms form a medium chiliocosm, and one thousand medium chiliocosms form a great chiliocosm.

The “three thousand” in the expression sanqian daqian shijie 三千大千世界 does not mean that the total consists of only three thousand worlds.

Rather, it refers to three successive stages of thousandfold multiplication: the small-thousand, medium-thousand, and great-thousand levels.

There is no need here to calculate the precise number of suns, moons, mountains, continents, or heavenly realms involved.

The central point is simpler: the shijie of Buddhist literature is generally not equivalent to a single isolated planet Earth. It can be named, counted, and distinguished as “this” or “another” world, and it may be incorporated hierarchically into larger cosmological systems.

This spatial structure differs in emphasis from the typical political uses of tianxia in pre-Qin and Han texts.

Although tianxia could refer to an extremely extensive territory, expressions such as “governing tianxia,” “obtaining tianxia,” and “losing tianxia” commonly conceptualize it as a political whole capable of unified rule, involving sovereign power, population, territory, and order.

Buddhist worlds, by contrast, may exist simultaneously throughout the ten directions. Beyond this world lies another world; beyond one world-system lie still further world-systems.

The comparison concerns the dominant emphases of these concepts in particular textual contexts. It does not imply that ancient Chinese thought possessed only one uniform and closed conception of tianxia, nor that Buddhist cosmology lacked centers, directions, or hierarchies.

A more precise formulation is that the introduction of Buddhist scriptures confronted Chinese readers in a particularly concentrated form with a plurality of worlds.

The totality need no longer be represented only as a single tianxia capable of unified description or rule.

It could also consist of many shijie, existing alongside one another and unfolding across multiple levels.

07

VII. How Did a Buddhist Term Leave the Buddhist Scriptures?

The presence of a word in a translated Buddhist scripture demonstrates only that it had entered the language of translation.

To enter Chinese more broadly, the word had to be copied, recited, explained, and reused repeatedly. It then had to be taken up by poets, scholars, writers of fiction, and eventually ordinary speakers.

This process did not require the Buddhist meaning to disappear. More often, an older meaning remained in place while additional meanings gradually developed alongside it.

The late Tang poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 writes in “Bei Qingluo” 北青蘿:

“Within worlds like motes of dust, why should I cherish love or hate?”[18]

Li Shangyin lived in the ninth century. By this time, shijie could enter literati poetry quite naturally and no longer functioned solely as a technical term requiring explanation.

The line nevertheless retains a strong Buddhist resonance. “Motes of dust” (weichen 微塵) is itself a common Buddhist image, while attachment to love and hatred is a recurring theme in Buddhist discourse. By placing shijie beside “dust motes,” the poet also reduces human gain and loss, love and resentment, to a smaller scale.

This suggests that by the late Tang, shijie had moved beyond the syntax of translated scripture while continuing to carry meanings inherited from Buddhist texts.

By the Southern Song, Zhu Xi 朱熹 used the term in a remarkably colloquial way while discussing the relationship between normative principle and expedient exception:

“If one were to use it every day and at every moment, what sort of shijie would that become!”[19]

The “expedient” in this passage refers to a temporary measure adopted under exceptional circumstances. Zhu Xi’s point is that if exceptional measures were treated as ordinary rules, what kind of state of affairs would result?

Here cheng shen shijie 成甚世界, literally “what sort of shijie would that become,” approximates later expressions such as “what kind of situation would that produce?” or “what kind of world would that be?”

In this usage, shijie no longer specifically denotes a Buddha-land, the dwelling place of sentient beings, or a cosmological system. It begins instead to refer to the condition, order, or state of the human world.

By the late Ming, the opening chapter of the Journey to the West states:

“After Pangu opened heaven and earth, the Three Sovereigns governed the age, and the Five Emperors established human relations, the shijie came to be divided into four great continents.”[20]

Here shijie has already become an ordinary term of fictional narration. The author can use it to establish the broad spatial setting of the narrative without pausing to explain its origin.

Yet the four great continents mentioned in the passage—Pūrvavideha, Aparagodānīya, Jambudvīpa, and Uttarakuru, rendered in Chinese as Dongsheng Shenzhou 東勝神洲, Xiniu Hezhou 西牛賀洲, Nanzhan Buzhou 南贍部洲, and Beiju Luzhou 北俱蘆洲—derive from Buddhist cosmology.

Chinese myths of Pangu, the Three Sovereigns, and the Five Emperors are thus placed in the same narrative opening as the Buddhist four-continent cosmology. Concepts from different traditions have become intertwined to such a degree that no simple boundary can any longer be drawn between them.

These examples do not constitute a complete semantic history of shijie, nor are they necessarily the earliest attestations of each respective sense.

They nevertheless reveal the general direction of semantic expansion.

In Buddhist scriptures, shijie could refer to a realm inhabited by sentient beings, a Buddha-land, or a world-system. In poetry, it could become a vehicle for reflections upon love, hatred, and human existence. In recorded philosophical discussions, it could denote a social condition or state of affairs. In popular fiction, it could function as the ordinary spatial background within which a story unfolded.

Even today, Chinese speakers still use expressions such as Jile shijie 極樂世界, the “Pure Land” or “World of Ultimate Bliss,” and sanqian daqian shijie 三千大千世界, while also speaking of the huahua shijie 花花世界, the bustling sensual world; the “world of children”; the “online world”; and a person’s “inner world.”

These usages originated in different historical periods.

Yet they now coexist within a single word.

08

VIII. Was the Modern Chinese Shijie Reintroduced from Japan?

During the nineteenth century, shijie underwent another major semantic expansion.

As Western geographical, historical, political, and philosophical knowledge entered East Asia, different regions of the Earth were increasingly organized into a global structure linked by states, trade, warfare, transportation, and systems of knowledge.

Existing Chinese-character vocabulary began to be used to accommodate these new concepts.

In Meiji Japan, sekai 世界, the Japanese reading of the same written form, was extensively employed in translating and organizing Western concepts. After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, and especially after 1895, large quantities of Japanese publications, translations, and modern terminology reached China through print culture and Chinese students studying in Japan.[21]

This has led some to claim that modern Chinese shijie was actually a word reintroduced into Chinese from Japanese.

The claim must be divided into separate questions.

In terms of its written form and earlier semantic history, shijie was clearly not created in Japan. It had already been used for more than a millennium in Chinese Buddhist texts and had subsequently entered poetry, philosophical discourse, and fiction.

Moreover, Chinese translators working in China had already begun to use shijie to correspond to the English word world before the Sino-Japanese War.

In 1822, the British missionary Robert Morrison published the English-Chinese portion of his Dictionary of the Chinese Language. Under the entry “world,” he listed several Chinese equivalents, including diqiu 地球, “the globe”; putianxia 普天下, “all under heaven”; shijian 世間; and shijie 世界.

Wilhelm Lobscheid’s English and Chinese Dictionary, published between 1866 and 1869, likewise listed shi 世, shijie 世界, tianxia 天下, and huanyu 寰宇 among the equivalents of “world.”[22]

Thus, by at least the 1860s, shijie could already function in Chinese translation as one of the principal equivalents of the English word world.

This development predates the Sino-Japanese War and cannot be explained exclusively through Japanese influence.

Yet it would be equally misleading to deny the importance of Japan.

Japan did not create the word shijie, but during the Meiji period it used and reorganized the term extensively within emerging modern systems of knowledge. Compounds such as “world history,” “world literature,” “world economy,” and “cosmopolitanism” gave shijie/sekai greatly increased productivity as an element in modern terminology. It gradually became a foundational word for describing global politics, history, society, and culture.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese readers encountered these systematized expressions in great numbers through Japanese publications, translations, and study abroad.

What entered China from Japan, therefore, was not the written form 世界 itself.

Rather, what returned or circulated through Japan was a series of new usages, compounds, and conceptual positions occupied by this old word within a modern system of knowledge.

Jin Guantao 金觀濤 and Liu Qingfeng 劉青峰 have examined the changing frequencies of tianxia 天下, wanguo 萬國, “the myriad states,” and shijie 世界 in a corpus of Chinese texts dating from 1830 to 1926.[23]

Within the corpus they analyzed, shijie remained comparatively infrequent before the Sino-Japanese War.

After 1895, however, its frequency rose rapidly. After 1898 it surpassed wanguo, and after 1903 it also surpassed tianxia.[23]

This quantitative analysis is limited by the scope of its corpus and cannot be taken as representative of every Chinese text.

It nevertheless reveals a significant transformation in the political vocabulary of the late Qing.

In traditional political discourse, tianxia was often conceptualized as a totality that could be obtained, governed, and maintained. It included land and population, but also a political space structured through a particular center and order.

Wanguo, “the myriad states,” acknowledged more explicitly the coexistence of multiple states. China and foreign countries increasingly came to be situated within a system of relations among states.

In the modern discourse of the late Qing, shijie went further by designating a continuously changing global whole. States did not merely coexist; they affected one another through trade, warfare, technology, and institutional competition.

China itself increasingly came to be understood as one state situated within this larger whole.

The Sino-Japanese War was not the sole origin of this transformation, but defeat subjected older structures of political understanding to a particularly direct shock. In its aftermath, Chinese intellectuals were compelled with new urgency to ask where China stood among the states of the world and how it should enter a rapidly changing global order.

Shijie therefore ceased to refer only to the cosmological systems of Buddhist scriptures, or to the condition and order of the human realm.

It became a fundamental category of modern political and historical space.

Japan did not return to China an ancient word that China itself had lost.

What entered through Japanese channels were modern uses of an old word, and these usages were in turn received and reshaped within China’s own history of translation, war, and intellectual transformation.

09

IX. Did Buddhism Ultimately Bring Shijie into the Chinese Language?

We may now return to the question with which we began.

Was shijie truly introduced into Chinese by Buddhism?

Neither shi nor jie was created by Buddhism. Long before Buddhism entered China, both graphs had existed independently in Chinese. Shi was commonly associated with generations and temporal continuity, whereas jie commonly referred to boundaries, domains, and divisions.

Nor did pre-Buddhist China lack ways of conceptualizing the totality of heaven, earth, and the myriad things. Expressions such as tiandi, tianxia, and yuzhou each performed different functions. Pre-Qin and Han thought already contained rich reflections upon space, time, generation, and order.

Buddhism did not cause Chinese people to perceive heaven and earth for the first time, nor did it provide the first Chinese conception of a totality encompassing all things.

Nevertheless, on the basis of currently verifiable transmitted materials, the earliest clear examples of 世界 functioning as an established compound word do indeed occur predominantly in Chinese Buddhist translations of the latter half of the second century CE. By the latter half of the third century, the range of its uses and combinations in Buddhist literature had already become substantially broader.[8][10]

This does not mean that a particular translator “invented” the word at an identifiable moment.

A more plausible historical scenario is that translators working with religious concepts from India and Central Asia continually selected among, modified, and reused expressions such as tianxia, guotu, foguo, focha, and shijian. Within this process, the older Chinese morphemes shi and jie also came to be combined more regularly, eventually stabilizing as a lexical unit capable of sustained referential use.

Nor did Buddhist shijie correspond permanently to a single Indic original.

In some passages it renders lokadhātu, with an emphasis on a world-realm or world-system. In others it corresponds to buddhakṣetra, denoting a Buddha-field or Buddha-land. Concepts that remained distinct in Indic languages could therefore sometimes be rendered by the same Chinese expression.[11]–[14]

The shijie of Buddhist texts thus both overlaps with and differs from the shijie of modern Chinese.

In early Buddhist literature, a shijie could be named, counted, and differentiated. There could be “this world” and “other worlds,” and individual worlds could be assembled hierarchically into larger cosmological systems. Such a shijie was generally not equivalent to the planet Earth, nor did it inherently contain all the political, social, and historical meanings associated with the modern concept of “the world.”

Those meanings developed gradually through prolonged use.

From the Tang and Song periods onward, shijie entered poetry, recorded philosophical discussions, and popular narrative. It could retain Buddhist resonances while also coming to denote the human realm, a state of affairs, social order, or the conditions of everyday reality.[18]–[20]

In the nineteenth century, Sino-Western translation and Sino-Japanese lexical exchange gave this old word yet another position. It came to serve widely as an equivalent of English world and entered such modern classificatory compounds as “world history,” “world literature,” and “world economy.” Increasingly, it designated a global whole composed of multiple states connected to and competing with one another.[21]–[23]

The answer most consistent with the surviving evidence may therefore be stated as follows:

Buddhism created neither shi nor jie, and Chinese already possessed multiple ways of conceptualizing heaven, earth, and the totality of existence before the introduction of Buddhism. Nevertheless, the early formation, written stabilization, and dissemination of shijie 世界 as a Chinese compound word were directly and profoundly connected with the translation of Buddhist scriptures.

Buddhism brought with it a new range of cosmological structures. In the process, two Chinese morphemes that had long existed independently acquired a new way of being combined.

Over the nearly two millennia that followed, monks, poets, Neo-Confucian scholars, novelists, missionaries, and modern translators continued to enlarge what the word could contain.

The shijie we speak of today therefore still preserves distant echoes of Buddhist scripture, even as it encompasses modern geography, the international order, social life, and individual experience.

We use it to describe the Earth, history, the internet, and games.

We also use it to describe the private inner realm into which a person may not wish others to enter.