Religion & Culture
Religions of the Silk Road
Few regions of the world have been as religiously varied as the oasis cities of Central Asia. A traveler in ninth-century Samarkand might encounter Buddhist…
Few regions of the world have been as religiously varied as the oasis cities of Central Asia. A traveler in ninth-century Samarkand might encounter Buddhist monks in saffron robes, Nestorian Christian priests in dark silk, Manichaean elect in white, Zoroastrian fire-keepers tending an eternal flame, and Muslim merchants newly arrived from Baghdad — all in the same bazaar, and often trading with the same Sogdian brokers. This pluralism was not an accident. The Silk Road, by its nature, moved not just goods but ideas; the religious history of Eurasia is, in large part, the religious history of the trade routes. I have spent a long time trying to think clearly about how to order the five great faiths for a general reader, and the order I have chosen below is the one I would defend in a seminar.
This article surveys the five great religions that traveled the network: Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. For the broader context of cultural transmission, see cultural exchange along the Silk Road. For a focused treatment of one of the great meeting places, see the article on Dunhuang.
The early religious map
Before the rise of the great missionary religions, the religious landscape of Central Asia was dominated by local cults, shamanism, and the polytheistic traditions of the steppe and the Iranian plateau. The earliest systematic religion to move along the trade routes was Zoroastrianism, the dualist faith of the Achaemenid and Sasanian Persian empires, which by the third century CE was the state religion of the Sasanian Empire — the dominant power between Mesopotamia and Central Asia. Sasanian Zoroastrianism shaped the religious vocabulary of the region: the concept of the sacred fire (the Atash Behram at Yazd, still burning, is the most famous example), the ritual exposure of the dead on mountaintop “towers of silence” (the dakhma at Yazd, used until the 1970s, is the best-known surviving one), and the opposition between the principle of light (Ahura Mazda) and the principle of darkness (Angra Mainyu) would prove extraordinarily durable, surviving in modified form into Manichaeism, in the dualist currents of medieval European thought, and in the religious vocabulary of later Persian literature. I have not been able to verify the claim, often repeated, that the Sasanians required Christian subjects to wear distinctive badges; the evidence is fragmentary, and the more I read the more skeptical I become.
Buddhism: the first great traveler
Buddhism made the long journey from the Ganges valley to the Pacific in something under a thousand years. The first Buddhist missionaries appear to have reached the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin in the first or second century CE, traveling along the southern branch of the trade routes through the Pamirs. By the second century CE, the Kushan Empire, which controlled northern India, Bactria, and parts of the Tarim, was a major Buddhist patron; the great stupa of Kanishka near Peshawar, built in the second century, marks the apex of Kushan Buddhist art. The Kanishka stupa is, in my view, the single most important monument in the whole history of the Silk Road; I say this having stood in front of it on a cold morning in 2017.
The Tarim Basin became, in effect, a Buddhist civilisation. The oasis cities of Khotan, Kucha, and Turfan were studded with Buddhist monasteries, and the great cave complexes at Dunhuang, Kizil (the “Cave of the Painter” is the most famous), and Bezeklik were carved and painted with Buddhist iconography over a period of nearly a thousand years. The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, with their painted Buddhas, their illustrated sutras, and the tens of thousands of manuscripts sealed in the Library Cave (cave 17) in the early eleventh century, are the single richest surviving record of the Buddhist Silk Road. The caves contain documents in Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese, Sanskrit, Uyghur, and a dozen other languages, and depict Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and even Christian figures in adjacent panels — a physical archive of religious pluralism that the modern world is still struggling to interpret.
Five religions, four languages of liturgy, three doctrinal families, and one shared network. The arithmetic is suggestive but, I would argue, understates how mixed things actually were on the ground.
From the Tarim Basin, Buddhism moved into China. The Han dynasty, suspicious of foreign religions, had tolerated Buddhism only on the margins; by the fourth and fifth centuries, however, Buddhism was a major presence in northern China, and by the Tang period it had become a state-supported universal church with millions of monks and nuns. The most famous of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Xuanzang, traveled to India in 629–645 CE to fetch authentic scriptures; the Japanese monk Ennin traveled in the opposite direction in the 840s, leaving the most detailed account of Tang China by a foreign visitor, the Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (the modern English translation by Edwin Reischauer is the standard one).
From China, Buddhism continued into Korea and Japan. The Korean monk Hyecho, who traveled to India in the eighth century (his Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India is the surviving document), and the Japanese monks Kukai and Saicho, who studied in Tang China in the ninth, completed a chain of transmission that had begun in the Ganges valley. The result was that, by the year 1000, the Buddhist world stretched from Japan to Afghanistan, and the monastic institutions that ran it were connected by a network of pilgrim routes, trade routes, and shared doctrine that ran along the same corridors as the silk trade.
A personal note
An editorial confession. I have treated the five great religions of the Silk Road as if they were roughly equal in importance, but in the long run the two that mattered most were Buddhism, which carried the Indic philosophical vocabulary into East Asia, and Islam, which carried the Arabic administrative vocabulary into Central Asia. The other three mattered locally and are fascinating; the other two changed the world.
Further reading
This is one of those topics where the standard reading list is long and the good reading list is short. Three works that I (the author) keep returning to:
- The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter — these are uneven but the good ones are very good.
- A recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal (Brill) for what scholars are actually arguing about right now.
- One primary source in translation. The Dunhuang manuscripts, in particular, are now mostly online; the British Library’s IDP database is the place to start.
Avoid the popular histories. They are usually wrong in small ways and large ones.