Empire: World History - 131. Buddhism Goes to China

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Buddhism reached China in the 1st century AD, yet it remained a minor, foreign religion for the next 100 years. It was not until the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 AD and the cracking of the classical Confucian order that Buddhism began to make headway in the Middle Kingdom. Over the following centuries, the religion took hold and so China both transformed Buddhism and was transformed by it. Yet, a monk named Xuanzang, born in 600 AD, was worried about Chinese Buddhism. He feared it had strayed too far from its origin and so he undertook a journey to the Buddhist heartlands of North India and the great university of Nalanda. Listen as William and Anita discuss the early stages of Buddhism in China. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. And you join us in our Buddhism series and the spread of Buddhism. The Empire of Peace. The Empire of Peace.

I know. I know. How's that sticking for you? I don't know. Throw it well for me. Okay, good, good, good. For most people, I guess, of a certain age, particularly if you grew up during the 80s, and I think in early 90s as well,

there was one show after school which we would religiously watch, which was my entire introduction to Buddhism, and it was a thing called Monkey Magic. Do you know Monkey Magic? I never saw it, but I know what you're talking about. No, and my son Sam talks about it. And has watched what are those Japanese cartoon versions? Well, there's a manga version.

He likes the manga one. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure. He's quite cool. But I really liked the one with the polystyrene rocks and things. So it is the story of the Monkey King, which figures very largely in parts of the Buddhism story. And he's also, to me, always struck me a lot like Hanuman or the anti-Hanuman, Hanuman is a Hindu monkey king or a monkey god, whose main strengths are loyalty and strength and bravery. Whereas the monkey king, who like Hanuman is sort of half man, half monkey almost, but he's a god.

He is venal, vain and a bit silly, but also incredibly loyal. The monkey king in this TV series and also we're going to find out what is the scriptural and textual basis for this story leads a little Buddhist monk called Tripitaka into the West, into China, taking Buddhism into China with the company of Pigsy, who is a demoted god of the celestial heavens, who's been reincarnated as a pig, and fish monster. And there are all these characters and demons they meet along the way. And the theme tune for Monkey Magic, if you remember it, monkey is funky that ever was. If you know, you know, but it starts all, you know, born from an egg on a mountaintop, the punkiest monkey that ever popped. He knew every magic trick under the sun to tease the gods and everyone and have some fun.

Monkey magic, monkey magic. So that's the theme tune. We've never had you sing such an extended clip on this. No, no, no. It's my karaoke spot on this Empire podcast. But the last bit was exactly what we were talking about in our last podcast, the theme tune that closed it all off, a really haunting melody I thought. And it starts with gondoro, gondoro, they say it was an India and it's like the Gandharan start of Buddhism. So there was, you know, it was fantastical. This was out of tune. But you get my point. In popular culture, it was massive. And I think they've remade it because my children have watched a New Zealand version that they've remade. Well, if I'm not wrong, your TV series is based on a 16th century Ming era Chinese novel

called Journey to the West. It is. Yeah. And that leads us to the true story, which was the basis for the 16th century novel, which is the travels of my favorite character, Shwan Zhang, the Chinese monk. And we're going to be dealing with him throughout not only this episode, but the episode to follow. Oh, I'm very excited. It's a very good. I have to say in the course of researching the Golden Road, which is where these episodes are coming from, there was nothing that was more pleasurable to research or to write or a story that made a, had a neater shape than the story of Shwan Zhang. And very briefly, it's the story of this Chinese monk, who is a real character, a very important historical character, who lives at a time when the world around him

is collapsing. The Sui dynasty is coming to an end. There are bandits everywhere. But not only is the political structure of China falling apart. The Buddhism of China is also he feels corrupted. and he's very worried about the text that he's learning Buddhism from. And he decides that what he needs to do, despite this being the worst possible time ever to do this, when bandits are heading west to hold out in the desert, he decides he needs to go through the desert, through the gobi and the Tachlanakan, and cross the Pamirs and go to the font of Buddhism in India. And specifically, go to the great monastery of Nalanda,

which is something we're going to be focusing very tightly on. over the next episode and a half. So I'm very, very excited about this because, you know, obsessed with monkey as I am, I want to know where it came from. But before that, can we talk about just what is the state and spread of Buddhism in the first and second century AD? So, the Buddha lived probably in the 5th century BC. Ashoka, who projected Buddhism beyond India, was 250 BCE.

and Kanishka, who we talked apart in the last episode, the Kushan Emperor, the King of Kings. The man of the torso. The man with a fantasy torso. He was 127 C.E. A.D. So he's a contemporary of Hadrian. So around the time that Kanishka is spreading Buddhism again through Central Asia, Buddhism has arrived in the capital of China, Chang'an, but very much as a foreign faith. There are a few merchants, there are a few particularly Sogdians who come from what's now, sort of Samakhan and Uzbekistan, who are hanging around the trading and merchant quarters

of the city who subscribe to this faith. But it's definitely not a local religion, and it's regarded as something foreign and exotic. And what happens is not dissimilar to the disasters that lead to the rise of Christianity, just like it was the Hans and the barbarian invasions and the collapse of Rome that give Christianity its moment, that upsets the entire classical apple cart and seems to provide answers for a troubled time. The same sort of thing happens to Buddhism in China. that it is the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE, followed by famines, plagues, locus and floods, and all that whole bandwagon of a collapsing civilization, that shatters the old self-confidence of the Confucian elite,

people following the ideas of Confucius, chipping away at the Chinese conviction of cultural superiority that leads them to reject Buddhism as something that, you know, Indians, people from the far west. for them. It's not for us. It's not for us. And the collapse of that entire hand civilization provokes the questions which Buddhism seems to be the answer to. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because you've seen a similar thing going on in Western culture, you know, with the sack of Rome, for example, and suddenly people start looking and saying, what kind of Christianity is this? And asking questions of Christianity, where before it was just the divine word handed down and accepted? I mean, would you say that's a similar kind of thing? It's very similar. And it's in

contrast to, for example, the way that Buddhism spreads to Southeast Asia, which is taken by merchants along trade routes at a time of prosperity. And it takes this crisis in China with the claps of the Han and the burning of Chang'an and the destruction of that whole world that gives Buddhism its moment. And from that time, Buddhism begins to get a foothold among Chinese intellectuals and there is a sort of 400-year history of the slow increase in influence of Buddhism until it becomes the court religion briefly under the tongue in the 6th century. Is it carried on the back of monks, you know, when this sort of new wave of Buddhism comes after the collapse of the Han Empire, is it monks from India who are importing it again,

all sort of surviving little pockets of, you know, the original older Buddhism that came over in the early days? So it's coming from all sorts of directions. It's coming by sea with merchants who are landing at the great Chinese seaports. It's arriving along the trade routes from the west, brought not just by Indians themselves, but by other converted people such as the Sogdians. We've mentioned briefly. The Sogdians are the great traders who link China with the West and are very much involved in the trade of silk in the early days of the silk trade. And the Sogdians become Buddhist fairly early on. and they provide many of the early translators of Chinese texts. And what you find is a slow transformation in also the way that India is looked at in China. China has always been an amazingly self-confident civilization that has never felt the need to reach out to other places and other civilizations for guidance. Well, I mean, I'd go further than that.

They'd look down on other civilizations as barbarians. That is often the case. The thinking was that they were much more enlightened. But as Buddhism rises and becomes a more honored and more respected faith and more Chinese intellectuals subscribe to it, you find that Buddhism brings with it, if you like, hidden in its belly a whole variety of Indian ideas about astronomy, mathematics, medicine, furniture, how you eat, how you sit, what you wear. and all these ideas come alongside Buddhism as part of the baggage of the Buddhist monks and traders who are bringing the religion to China. I mean, those are the lofty ideals, but also I was laughing because you've written this in your wonderful book, which is coming out in September.

You can pre-order it now, by the way. The Golden Road. The Indian monks who are sort of flooding in to China and who are now being well thought of are also quite a hefty dose of snake oil salesmen coming in through here. And what, they say they can make it rain, they can exercise you, they can treat you for, you know, VD and coughs and coals and everything else, all sorts of bonkers promises that they're making. Which, again, is not so dissimilar if you actually think about it from how Christianity arrives, for example, in Anglo-Saxon England. If you think of those sort of wonderworking monks like Oswald or Wilfrid or Aden,

people entertain them and invite them to their courts because they're seen to have power. Sain Colomber, who goes to the Picks, he has an encounter with the Loch Ness Monster on the way, according to his biography. Of course he does. And it's being able to control wondrous beasts like the Loch Ness Monster that gives Colomber his power in the eyes of the Picks. In the same way, these monks who come from India are regarded as wonderworking miracle workers. and there's in a sense a double attraction of Buddhism. For the common people, it's this. It's the miracles, what you call the snake oil.

But obviously, Buddhism has enormous intellectual deaths, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, and that's what attracts the intellectuals at court. Yeah, I mean, I love the fact that Chinese libraries are beginning to fill up with these, you could say, esoteric manuscripts from India. One title, I loved, drugs advocated by the various Rishis of the Western regions. Something for everybody in the library. You never know when you might need that. Yeah.

So you also find, which is a big feature of the way China takes Buddhism, is that China transforms Buddhism as much as it is transformed by Buddhism. And very early on, you've got Chinese architects, for example, changing the stupor, which it initially starts off, as we said in, I think in the last episode, just as a simple burial mound, that suddenly transformed into the pagoda, as seen in Qar gardens. If you're a Brit, that shape of the pagoda is how the Chinese transform the simple stupa. And the same happens to the religion. There's a whole variety of Chinese forms and ideas which subtly transformed Buddhism into a Chinese

religion. And you find, for example, pilgrimage sites beginning to develop like Mount Wutai, which is the home of Manjou Shri, it said, one of the most powerful body's at first. So in order to conquer China, China conquers Buddhism. And it becomes, over the course of the next two or three hundred years, very much a Chinese religion, even if it originates in India. And it's bringing a lot of Indian ideas and Indian culture towards China. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to sing again.

But I'm really struck by the fact that, you know, they do credit India with being the seat of this learning as well. The appropriation or transformation, whatever you want to call it, is never divorced from India. So even the Chinese who are transforming it into their own image are completely aware of its roots and fascinated by the roots. As you say, you know, sort of the superiority complex crumbles somewhat and it's now more of a greater land united by thinking, you know, rather than divided by borders. Let's talk about China as a country as we know it today is like a unified country. But it wasn't then. It takes one man to make China. Who was that man? Well, China, for much of its history, is a unified country and has brief periods of disunification and being split up. Well, almost the exact opposite is true of India. For most of its history, India is a fractured land with many different kingdoms. And it has these brief moments of unity under the Morias or the Gopters or the Mughals. And the great sort of unification that's often remembered and appears in many Chinese movies is this guy, General Yian.

Yang Jan, who seizes the throne of North China in 580 CE after 300 years of split North, South China, with two different worlds. And he comes very violently to the throne. He massacres 59 members of the founder of his predecessor and proclaims the beginning of the Sui dynasty. But despite being this ruthless northern aristocrat, famous for his energy, tenacity and military, skills. He is very much a Buddhist. He's born in a Buddhist temple, was brought up by a Buddhist nun, and his first act on coming to power is to order the building of Buddhist monasteries at the foot of each of the five sacred mountains of China. I mean, that incongruity between Buddhism, which we have come to know today, I mean, you know, the peace, love, the empire of peace. I was always shaken by what

was going on in Myanmar with the Buddhists waging war and brutality against the their ethnic minorities there. You know, I never, never understood that, but there is an old, old history of wielding a sword and still claiming to be a Buddhist. Well, I don't you can see that even in Ashoka's period when, you know, he famously writes about his massacre of the Kalingas in eastern India.

And yet it's that moment of realization of what he's done that leads to his conversion. But he felt sorry about it. I'm not sure many of the others. I'm not sure whether your general really bothered too much about massacring 59 members of the same family. Well, my general was a very. very militaristic character. And he spends the first half of his career building up an unprecedented

army of half a million men, as well as constructing granaries, canals and roads that will enable them to move at speed. And best of all, and this is what he was most proud of, he created this extraordinary navy. This is an inland navy meant to be sailing on the rivers, on the Aung Sea, rather than on the sea. But these riverboats that he builds are some of the most formidable vessels in Chinese history, although we're talking in European terms, the Anglo-Saxon or the Merivindian period. And he builds five-decker yellow dragon warships. Oh, I just like the sound of that. A yellow dragon warship. Which towers to a height of more than 100 feet. And each deck is bristling with port-holes full of crossbow men and equipped with these

enormous 60-foot booms on ropes that can be swung to batter any rival ships. And in 589, these Yellow Dragon warships and his ground forces are unleashed in a sort of massive eight-prong amphibious assault on the south of China. And it's a brilliant success. In a few weeks, he's completely captured the whole of Southern China, captured the rival emperor alive, reunited the entire country for the first time since the fall of the Han Dynasty 300 years earlier. And there's very little love lost between North and South at this period. The Southerners who look on themselves as the preservers of the old Chinese order look down on the northerners as semi-barbarous. And regard their poetry, this is a quote like the braying of donkeys or the barking of dogs.

And the northerners regard the southerners in turn as pathetically effective. feet and fussy. And what the emperor does is the first Sui emperor, Yang Zhang, pushes Buddhism as the balm, which is going to reunite the country. Does he push it as a balm or does he push it on the end of a crossbow? I mean, how does he say, look, convert or else? Or does he say, here is the empire of love that I bring to you or I'll shoot you in the head? I mean, how does it work? I think there's a bit of both probably. The two are presented, certainly presented as a as a peaceful healing package. And this works. I mean, he goes out of his way to promote Buddhism. One Indian Buddhist monk claims that the general is actually an incarnate bodhisattva.

And before long, the general is claiming that the Buddha personally entrusts him with the task of reuniting and ruling China. And he looks back to Ashoka. He talks about the chakravartan king, the armed might of chakravarting king, he says, we will spread the ideals of the enlightened one, with 100 victories and 100 battles will promote the practice of the 10 Buddhist vehicles. So you're right, there is a contradiction. Very strongly inherent in this. Love thy neighbor or I'll kill you.

Well, it worked for him, exactly. Yeah, but you know, again, though, I mean, just by calling himself the Chakravathin king, you know, using a Hindu, you know, Indian term for himself, to me, this is mind-blowing because I've grown up in a world where India and China hate each other, they suspect each other. There was one moment of thawing when Nero

becomes the first prime minister and announces Hindu-chini bye-bye. We are brothers. We are brothers. The Hindus and the Chinese, India and China are brothers. And then promptly there's an invasion and a war. And he's discredited for that. And it's been bad ever since.

And I remember on my first trips to China from Delhi, there used to be only two flights a week. Yeah. From Delhi to Beijing and nothing else. No question of a flight to Shanghai or anything like that. Oh, forget it. There are periodically these skirmishes that go on on the border as, you know, someone's trying to push two inches one way and someone's trying to push two inches the other. That's right.

Going up to just last year. I think in Ladakh, the agreement was on the ceasefire line that neither side could bear firearms in order to preserve the peace. So the Chinese went in with clubs with barbed wire wrapped around it. And this was a great fight. They also claim, I think, Arunachal Pradesh as part of Tibet. So there's all sorts of issues here. But at this period, and this is the. important point. The Chinese regard India as the only place, which is their equal.

And they look to Ashoka as a model. And the general, as soon as he comes to power, in imitation of Shoka, begins to distribute Buddhist relics from the capital across the realm. By the end, the emperor when, as he becomes, after the reunification, is said to have authorised the ordination of 230,000 monks and nuns, constructs, constructs, 3,792 monasteries, copies 132,000 sutra rolls, and paints 106,000 holy images. So he's definitely going enthusiastically into the promotion of Buddhism. But it remains one religion among many. And there's Taoism and Confucianism, which are rival philosophical systems. What's the difference? Can you tell the dummy's guide to the difference between Taoism and

Confucianism? So both Confucianism and Taoism straddle the kind of borderline between philosophy and religion. Confucianism is very firmly based on the writings of Confucius, who is a historical character and his belief system is focused very strongly on personal ethics and morality. while Taoism is all about living in harmony, really. There's a road, a way, a Taoism or Taoism, the way of Tao is a way of living at one with nature. And these three philosophical systems now coexist at the Chinese court. So you get Buddhism joining Confucianism and the Tao as a way of understanding your place in the world as a way of understanding how you should live. And often the emperors promote all three, and the three coexist as different ways of guiding people through life.

We have come to this point where, so China is sort of saturated with Buddhism now. But I think this is the point, exactly that, that you've reached a point where, although it isn't the religion of court, because there's also Confucianism and Taoism, Buddhism is now an all-pervasive feature of life at all levels of Chinese society. There are Buddhist shrines and monasteries scattered across the landscape. The lovely gilded finials of temples and pagodas are punctuating the city's skylines. And you really can't travel very far at all without meeting grey-robed monks on their way to new Buddhist stupas. And you can hear the tolling of temple bells and the chanting of sutras everywhere. Okay. So join us after the break where we do the return of the boomerang

because, you know, it's come from India. It has travelled around China. It has made a huge impact on Chinese cultural and spiritual life, but now it's headed back to India. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the success of Buddhism in China and how it manages to influence every strata of spiritual, political life, even though it's not the court religion. There comes a point. I mean, I described it as a boomerang, but you don't like that terminology because it's not taking Chinese Buddhism back. It's a pilgrimage of Chinese Buddhists to the motherland, you like, isn't it, William? So there's that famous image, isn't it? It's called the pizza effect, where sometimes in history

you have something going back in a different form. So just as pizza goes to New York and comes back with pineapple on top and horrifies theapolitans who don't know what's happened to their gorgeous pure pizza. In this case, you have the Chinese who have got a particular form of Buddhism that's begun to be sinusized. And a whole generation grows up in. around 600 AD that begins to worry that the Buddhism that's being practiced in China is simply not pure, that it's corrupted, that it's become indigenous, that it's got Confucian and Taoist elements now attached to it, that even the scriptures are somehow corrupted and errors have crepted partly because no one in China can read Sanskrit at this period. And the translations have been

done by people like Kumara Jiva, who we talked about in the last episode, are simply not good enough. So we come to our key character, who's one of my favorite, favorite characters in this story. And this is Shwan Zhang. And Shwan Zhang is this tall, strong, brilliant young man, born around 600 CE. He is from an elite dynasty of Confucian scholars. In fact, his grand. grandfather had been head of the Imperial College at Beijing, so is the head honcho of the entire imperial scholarly establishment. And he grows up in a family which has endowed villages, whole revenues of towns are pouring into their coffers. But he rejects all that. And he's attracted to Buddhism. And in his youth, he becomes this young questioning monk. But he's only 13 when

the brief period of the Sui dynasty, which we heard reunited China in the last half, that after just two rains begins to collapse. And age 13 in 618, Shwan Zhang and his elder brother have to flee for their lives through the fields along the Yellow River after their monastery in Loyang, the eastern capital, is threatened. And they're living in a world full of unrest. There's this famous bandit outside Lo Yang called Zee the bandit and the two monks have to creep round their bands and find their way to more peaceful parts of China. But even as the whole political establishment is cracking up and civil war is breaking out and the tongue are rising up against the old dynasty, the Sui, Zhu Zhang decides that he has to travel to India, that he has so many questions to ask

about the source of Buddhist tradition, particularly he's very interested in the Yoga Kara tradition of Asanga. Do you remember in the last episode we were talking about the guy who goes up the hill and he only gets enlightened when he pets his pet dog? He's his little scabby dog. He's a little scabby dog. I was always with you and I was the Buddha, yeah. So those texts written by Asanga, the Yoga Kara text, are the text that Shwan Zhang is looking for. and he decides to make this epic journey across the deserts, Tachnamakan and the gobi, which is exactly where all the bandits are sheltering from the imperial authorities.

It's the most dangerous place you can possibly go at the most dangerous time imaginable. And the reason he wants to go is that he's heard about the monastery, university of Nalanda. And you, presumably as someone of the Indian diaspora, grew up with Nalundra, as part of your imaginative world or not? No. It didn't reach Essex. Well, everyone here is very proud of it in Delhi. People here, sort of, you know,

if you say any kind of remarks about Oxbridge or NASA or the Ivy League, oh, but we founded the university system with Nolanda. Oh, I'm sure my dad might have talked about it, but by this time I probably wasn't listening to him very much. So tell me about Nalanda. Where is Nolanda? And why was it so, I mean, you've described. in, like Alexandria, so I've got a good idea that it's a fabulous place. Yeah. So, Nalanda is a wonderful,

wonderful story in itself. And it is a thing that very few people in the West know about. We're brought up typically with knowing about the great library of Alexandria as the center of all these fantastic texts. And it is the destruction of Alexandria that we mourn as if it's the loss of all the learning of antiquity. But very few of us grow up in the West knowing about Nalanda, which is its eastern equivalent. And in the middle of Bihar, not so far from Bodhaya, where the Buddha was enlightened, not far at all from Rajgeir, where some of the first Buddhist monasteries were founded, there grows this extraordinary Buddhist monastery that is also a university that is the great centre of learning across the entire Buddhist world. And it has these whole towering

powering libraries, the remains of which still survive, though sadly without the manuscripts intact, which preserve all the learning of Indian antiquity. And not just, I mean, principally, obviously it is a Buddhist library containing Buddhist texts, but it also has text on astronomy, on mathematics, on astrology, on logic, and on all the branches of learning. And it's this place that Zhuanzang is determined to go to. He says, I cannot live as a Buddhist monk unless I get to this monastery and get to these manuscripts and read the truth. So this, I mean, this journey of Shran Zhang through the badlands looking for scrolls of enlightenment, it reminds me of a certain monkey magic. With reason.

It's based on that, yeah. Because you've got a little monk called Tripitaka who is also looking for scrolls of enlightenment and making perilous journeys. I mean, fighting with demons and things like that. that, but you're saying that that is largely inspired by this? Yeah, it is very, very closely based. A thousand years later, a fictional version of Shwan Zang's journey. And we should also say that as well as wanting to go to Nalanda, there's this particular yoga-kara master called the venerable Shilabandra, who is 106 years old and still teaching

yoga-kara. And Shwan Zang has heard that he's alive and he's taking on. pupils aged 106. So right, okay, so you know my obsession with the fictional account of a journey towards scriptural enlightenment. What was the real life journey actually like? Do we know? We do. And in fact, we know more about this journey than anything in pre-modern China, because not only do we have Suan Zhang's own account, which survives in full, written immediately on his return. we also have the fullest biography to survive from pre-modern China, which is a separate document written by one of Shwan Zang's followers, Hulin. And these two documents are the most incredibly

full and detailed description of what Shwan Zang does. So the whole of early Chinese and Indian history is full of doubt and questions and ambiguity. And then out of this haze, comes these two monumental texts where suddenly everything is in sharp focus. We know every detail and we know exactly when Shanzang sets off. He sets off in the late autumn of 629 AD. He leaves Chang'an in the early morning and this is his account. He says, as the road was obstructed and long, the transmission of Buddhism to China was still incomplete. Secretly praying for spiritual protection, I determined to go out from the land of my birth and throw myself into the realm of 10,000 deaths.

When passing in the footsteps of the Buddha, I paid my respects to the numinous presence he left behind. If there were people who propagated the Dharma, I sought out their authentic teaching. When I passed through a place, I has moved to see what I had never seen before. When I encountered a word, I rejoiced at hearing what I had never heard before.

In this way, I exhausted my life's resources to copy texts that were missing at home. So do join us for our final episode in this mini-series on Buddhism as we see. Shran Shang undertake this literally bonkers journey all the way back to the heartlands of Buddhism and the studies at the Great School of Nalanda and as always, members of the Empire Club, who are friends of the show, we love you, our friends. You can hear that episode right now, right here, right now. And if you want to join and be a friend, you can sign up on Apple Podcasts or go to EmpirePodUK.com and sign up over there. And of course, do this. It's a good idea.

You can pre-order William's fabulous new book, The Golden Road. The link will be in the show notes. Till the next time, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. Goodbye from me, William Drupul.