Buddhism on the Silk Road — The Silk Road Atlas

Buddhism was the first of the great universal religions to travel the Silk Road, and the religion that most deeply stamped the network with its character. Over roughly a thousand years, beginning in the late centuries BCE and continuing into the Tang period, the teachings of the historical Buddha moved from the Ganges valley through the oasis cities of Central Asia and into China, Korea, and Japan. The transmission was carried by monks, merchants, and princes, and it left behind some of the most spectacular monuments of the Silk Road — the cave temples of Dunhuang, the painted monasteries of the Tarim Basin, and, ultimately, the great Buddhist civilizations of East Asia. The story belongs to the larger history of religions of the Silk Road, and ranks as one of the most consequential religious transmissions of the ancient and medieval world. I have always thought that the conventional framing of this story underplays how slow the transmission was — the Buddha’s death is conventionally dated to around 480 BCE, and a recognisably Chinese Buddhism does not really exist until the fourth or fifth century CE.

The Kushan synthesis

The first great flowering of Buddhism in Central Asia was the work of the Kushan Empire, which controlled northern India, Bactria, and parts of the Tarim Basin from the first to the third centuries CE. The Kushan emperors, especially Kanishka I, were major Buddhist patrons. The great stupa of Kanishka near Peshawar, built in the second century and described in some detail by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang four centuries later, marked the apex of Gandharan Buddhist art, in which the Buddha was first represented in human form, modeled on the Greco-Roman sculptural traditions of the Hellenistic East — a curlpatted, toga-wearing Buddha, which is the kind of detail that has always struck me as the single most interesting fact about religious art in Asia.

The Kushan synthesis of Indian, Iranian, and Hellenistic elements became the visual language of the Buddhist Silk Road. The standing Buddha of Gandhara, draped in a toga-like robe and standing in contrapposto, became the model for Buddhist sculpture across Central Asia and, eventually, China. The painted and sculpted Buddhas of the Tarim oases, the cave temples of Dunhuang, and the great Buddhas of Bamiyan — before the Taliban destroyed them in March 2001, and to my lasting regret — all descend, in one way or another, from this Kushan visual vocabulary. The Silk Road’s Buddhist art is, by and large, the heir of the Kushan moment. Popular accounts tend to oversell the Indian sources and undersell the Hellenistic ones, which is a mistake.

The oasis monasteries

The Tarim Basin became, between the second and the tenth centuries, a thoroughly Buddhist civilization. The oasis kingdoms of Khotan, Kucha, Turfan, and Dunhuang were studded with Buddhist monasteries, and the great cave complexes at Dunhuang, Kizil, and Bezeklik were carved and painted over a period of nearly a thousand years. The monks of these monasteries were not merely contemplatives: they were also scholars, translators, and entrepreneurs, owning land, operating caravans, and lending money at interest — the Buddhist canonical objections to usury were widely observed in the breach. They served as the principal infrastructure of Buddhist transmission along the Silk Road.

Buddhism is, of the five religions, the one that traveled earliest and farthest.

The most important scholarly activity of the oasis monasteries was translation. Buddhist texts, originally composed in India in Pali and Sanskrit, had to be translated into the local languages of Central Asia — Khotanese, Sogdian, Uyghur, Tibetan, Chinese — and from there retranslated as the faith moved further east. The translation workshops of Khotan and Kucha produced authoritative Chinese translations of many foundational Buddhist texts, and the work of these workshops was continued at the great translation bureaus of Tang China, the most famous of which was directed by the monk Xuanzang on his return from India.

The Silk Road’s role in this transmission is most vividly documented at Dunhuang, where the Mogao Caves and the Library Cave preserve tens of thousands of manuscripts in more than a dozen languages. The Dunhuang manuscripts include Buddhist sutras in Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese, Sanskrit, Uyghur, and other languages, and the Library Cave, sealed in the early eleventh century and rediscovered in 1900 by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu, is in effect a frozen archive of the Buddhist Silk Road’s cultural exchange.

The Kizil caves, in the northern Tarim, are the oldest major Buddhist cave complex in Central Asia, and they predate the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang by perhaps a century. They are harder to visit than Dunhuang — the road from Kucha is long, the fuel stops are thin, and the site itself is administered separately from Dunhuang and has fewer facilities — but a serious visitor to the Buddhist Silk Road should see them, and I would put Kizil ahead of Dunhuang on aesthetic grounds, though not on documentary ones.

A personal note

I have used “Buddhism” throughout as if it were a single religion, but the Buddhism that traveled the Silk Road was a much more diverse phenomenon than the modern Theravada / Mahayana / Vajrayana categories suggest. The Buddhism of Khotan, of Turfan, of Dunhuang, of Tang China, and of early Japan were distinct local Buddhisms, with different texts, practices, and ritual forms. The unity is a modern scholarly construction imposed on a more varied past.

The Kushan synthesis

The oasis monasteries

A personal note

Further reading

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