Buddhism in Central Asia

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Besides silk, paper and other goods, the Silk Road carried another commodity which was equally significant in world history. Along with trade and migration, the world’s oldest international highway was the vehicle which spread Buddhism through Central Asia. It was launched from northwestern India to modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan), China, Korea and Japan. Buddhism not only affected the lives and cultures on those regions but also left us with a world of wonders in art and literature.

From the time of the Buddha in 566 and 486 BC in the central part of northern India, slowly, his message spread to the surrounding areas, where monastic communities of monks and nuns soon arose. Buddhism initially spread from northern India to Gandhara and Kashmir in the middle of the third century making its way two centuries later into both West and East Turkistan (Turkestan) when it expanded from Gandhara to Bactria and from Kashmir to Khotan during the first century BC.

It also had passed, by that time, from Kashmir to Gilgit and from northern India to present-day Sindh and Baluchistan in southern Pakistan, through eastern Iran and on to Parthia. According to traditional Buddhist histories, two merchants from Bactria were among the direct disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha. However, there is no evidence of their having established Buddhism in their homeland at that early stage. During the second century, Buddhism reached the northern rim of the Tarim Basin as well, passing from Bactria to the Tokharian people of Kucha and Turfan. The Tokharians originally had come from Europe and, according to some modern scholars, had adopted Buddhism while in Bactria during the course of their long eastward migration. Eastern Bactria is also known as Tukharistan. There was an Iranian cultural presence in many of these regions of West and East Turkistan, particularly in Bactria, Sogdia, Khotan, and Kucha. Consequently, Central Asian Buddhism came to incorporate Zoroastrian features to varying degrees. Zoroastrianism was the ancient religion of Iran.

Starting in the middle of the second century CE, Buddhism came to Han China first from Parthia. Its spread was subsequently expanded by monks from the other Buddhist lands of Central Asia, as well as northern India and Kashmir. Central Asian and north Indian monks helped the Han Chinese translate Sanskrit and Gandhari Prakrit texts into Chinese, although the Central Asians themselves at first preferred these original Indian versions for their personal use. With constant exposure to international caravans visiting them along the Silk Route, most were comfortable with foreign languages. In the course of their translation work for the Han Chinese, however, the Central Asians never transmitted Zoroastrian elements. Han Chinese Buddhism, instead, took on many Taoist and Confucian traits.

From the beginning of the fifth century, the Ruanruan people ruled a vast empire centering in Mongolia and stretching from Kucha to the borders of Korea. They adopted a blend of the Iranian-influenced Khotanese and Tokharian forms of Buddhism and introduced it to Mongolia. The Old Turks, living in Gansu within the Ruanruan domain, overthrew the latter in 551. The Old Turk Empire they established split into an eastern and western division within two years.

The Eastern Turks ruled Mongolia and continued the Ruanruan form of Khotanese/Tokharian Buddhism found there, combining it with northern Han Chinese elements. They translated many Buddhist texts into the Old Turk language from a variety of Buddhist tongues with the help of monks from northern India, Gandhara, and Han China, but particularly from the Sogdian community in Turfan. As the principal merchants of the Silk Route, the Sogdians produced monks who were natural polyglots. The main character of Old Turk Buddhism was its appeal to common people, incorporating within Buddha’s entourage many popular, locally worshiped deities, including both traditional shamanic, Tengrian, and Zoroastrian ones. Tengrism was the traditional pre-Buddhist belief system of the peoples of the Mongolian steppes.

The Western Turks at first ruled Dzungaria and northern West Turkistan. In 560, they captured the western portion of the Silk Route from the White Huns (Hephthalites) and migrated progressively to Kashgar, Sogdia, and Bactria, establishing a certain presence in Afghani Gandhara as well. In the course of their expansion, many of their people adopted the Buddhist faith, specifically the forms found in the regions they conquered.

For centuries before the migration of the Western Turks, Buddhism had been flourishing in central and southern West Turkistan under the successive rule of the Greco-Bactrians, Shakas, Kushans, Persian Sasanids, and the White Huns. The Han Chinese pilgrim to India, Faxian (Fa-hsien), traveling in this area between 399 and 415, had reported it filled with active monasteries. However, when the Western Turks arrived in this region a century and a half later, they found Buddhism in a weakened state, particularly in Sogdia. It had apparently declined during the period of White Hun rule.

The White Huns were, for the most part, staunch supporters of Buddhism. In 460, for example, their ruler had sent a shred from Buddha’s robe as a reliquary offering from Kashgar to one of the northern Chinese courts. However, in 515, the White Hun king, Mihirakula, had instigated a persecution of Buddhism, purportedly under the influence of jealous Manichaean and Nestorian Christian factions in his court. The worst damage was in Gandhara, Kashmir, and the western part of northern India, but also extended to Bactria and Sogdia on a more limited scale.

In approximately 630, when the next notable Han Chinese pilgrim to India, Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), visited Samarqand, the Western Turk capital in Sogdia, he found that although there were many lay Buddhist followers, the local Zoroastrians were hostile toward them. The two main Buddhist monasteries were empty and closed. In 622, however, several years before Xuanzang’s visit to Samarqand, its Western Turk ruler, Tongshihu Qaghan, had formally adopted Buddhism under the guidance of Prabhakaramitra, a visiting northern Indian monk. Xuanzang encouraged the king to reopen the deserted monasteries near the city and to construct even more.

The king and his successors followed the Chinese monk’s advice and built several new monasteries in Sogdia--not only in Samarqand, but in the Ferghana valley and present-day western Tajikistan as well. They also spread a blend of the Sogdian and Kashgari forms of Buddhism to northern West Turkistan. There, they built new monasteries in the Talas River Valley in present-day southern Kazakhstan, the Chu River Valley in northwestern Kyrghyzstan, and in Semirechiye in southeastern Kazakhstan near present-day Almaty.

In contrast to Sogdia, Xuanzang reported the flourishing of many Buddhist monasteries in Kashgar and Bactria, the other major areas controlled by the Western Turks. Kashgar had hundreds of monasteries and ten thousand monks, while in Bactria the numbers were more modest. The greatest monastery of the entire region was Nava Vihara (Nawbahar, Nowbahar) in Balkh, the main city of Bactria. It served as the principal center of higher Buddhist learning for all of Central Asia, with satellite monasteries in Bactria and Parthia, also called navaviharas.

Run like a university, Nava Vihara admitted only monks who had already composed scholarly texts. It was famous for its stunningly beautiful Buddha statues, draped with luxurious silk robes and lavishly adorned with magnificent jewel ornaments, in accordance with local Zoroastrian custom. It had particularly close links with Khotan, to which it sent many teachers. According to Xuanzang, Khotan at the time had a hundred monasteries with five thousand monks.

[edit] The Decline of the Western Turks

By the middle of the seventh century, the Western Turk control of these areas in West and East Turkistan began to wane. First, the Turks lost Bactria to the Turki Shahis, another Turkic Buddhist people who were ruling Gandhara. Xuanzang had found the situation of Buddhism in Gandhara worse than that in Bactria, despite the Western Turks’ having established a monastery in Kapisha, not far to the north of Kabul, in 591. The main monastery on the Kabul side of the Khyber Pass, Nagara Vihara, just south of modern-day Jalalabad, housed the skull relic of the Buddha and was one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world. Its monks, however, had become materialistic and were charging pilgrims a gold coin each to view the relic. There were no centers of study in the entire region.

On the Oddiyana side, the monks preserved merely the monastic rules of discipline and had hardly any understanding of the Buddhist teachings. In the Swat Valley, for example, Xuanzang found many of the monasteries in ruins and, in those still standing, the monks merely performing rituals to gain protection and powers from supernatural beings. There was no longer any tradition of study or meditation.

An earlier Han Chinese traveler, Songyun (Sung-yün), had visited Swat in 520, five years after Mihirakula’s persecution. He had reported that the monasteries were still flourishing at that time. The White Hun ruler apparently did not implement his anti-Buddhist policy very strongly in the more remote regions of his realm. The subsequent decline of the monasteries in Swat was due to several severe earthquakes and floods that occurred during the century between the two Chinese pilgrims’ visits. With the mountainous valley impoverished and trade through Gilgit to East Turkistan cut off, the monasteries had lost almost all their economic support and contact with other Buddhist cultures. Local superstitious beliefs and shamanic practices had blended with what was left of Buddhist understanding.

In 650, the Western Turk Empire shrank further with the loss of Kashgar to the Han Chinese, who had been expanding their empire since the founding of the Tang Dynasty in 618. Before gaining control of Kashgar, the Tang forces had taken Mongolia from the Eastern Turks and then the city-states along the northern rim of the Tarim Basin. In face of the growing Han threat and the inability of the weak Western Turks to defend them, Kashgar and independent Khotan on the southern rim peacefully submitted.

Buddhism was found, then, in almost all parts of Central Asia when the Muslim Arabs arrived in the middle of the seventh century. It was the strongest in Bactria, Kashmir, and the Tarim Basin, was popular but at a low level of understanding in Gandhara and Mongolia, had just been introduced into Tibet, and was enjoying a recent revival in Sogdia. It was not, however, the exclusive faith of the area. There were also Zoroastrians, Hindus, Nestorian Christians, Jews, Manichaeans, and followers of shamanism, Tengrism, and other indigenous, nonorganized systems of belief. Bordering Central Asia, Buddhism was strong in Han China, Nepal, and northern India, where its adherents lived peacefully with Taoists, Confucianists, Hindus, and Jains.

On the eve of the Muslim Arab arrival in Central Asia, the Turki Shahis ruled Gandhara and Bactria, while the Western Turks controlled Sogdia and parts of northern West Turkistan. The Tibetans held Gilgit and Kashgar, while Tang China controlled the rest of the Tarim Basin as well as Mongolia. The Eastern Turks of Mongolia were temporarily held in abeyance during a short interim period of Han Chinese rule.

[edit] East Turkistan (Xinjiang)

Most of the monasteries of the Kalmyk Mongols living in East Turkistan (Xinjiang) were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Several have now been rebuilt, but there is an even more severe shortage of teachers than in Tibet. New young monks have become very discouraged by the lack of study facilities and many have left.

Buddhism reached the height of its power in the 8th and 9th centuries in Afghanistan before it fell to the Arabs. Buddhism certainly had a strong effect on some other lives in the steppes. Grousset has pointed out that once a nomadic tribe adopted the Buddhist faith, they no longer possessed tough barbaric and soldierly qualities. Eventually they lost their nomadic identity and were absorbed by the civilized neighbors. This can demonstrated by the Tobgatch Turks or the Toba, whose empire extended to Mongolia and northern China. From 386-534, they controlled northern China under the Northern Wei dynasty. These eastern Turks had contact with Chinese Buddhism early on. Some of the Turkic emperors were foremost patrons of Buddhism. In 471 Toba king Hung was so devoted to Buddhism that he had his son become a monk. This son, Toba king Hung II (471-499), was equally devoted to Buddhism and under his influence he introduced a more humane legislation. By the time he moved his capital from Pingcheng in Jehol to the south, Loyang in 494, he and his Turkic people have been completely sinicized. At his instigation, work began on the famous Buddhist Longmen caves, south of Loyang. According to Chinese sources, Turkish Buddhist temples were erected for the Turkish ruler, Mu-han (553-572) in Ch’angan and other places during Northern Chou dynasty (556-581). Mu-han’s successor and younger brother Tapar Qayan (To-po, 572-581) was also devotee to Buddhism and erected a Buddhist temple. In 680 Eastern Turks, the kingdom of Kok-Turks (682-745) disassociated themselves from Chinese Buddhism and returned to their nomadic native life style and religion.

The next time Buddhist activities were seen in this area were by the Uighur Turks who became masters of the steppes around 745. Around 840 the Uighur Turks were driven out from Mongolia and many settled in the area of the northern Tarim oases, mainly Turfan from 850 to 1250. They practiced Manichaeism but quickly abandoned it in favor of the local Buddhist faith. In the early 20th century, much Turkish Buddhist literature was discovered in Turfan, Hami and Dunhuang. At the end of 10th century, a Chinese envoy, Wang Yen-te, found in Kaochang (near Turfan) a flourishing Buddhist culture with some fifty Buddhist convents and a library of Chinese Buddhists texts. Turfan remained the main center of Turkish Buddhism until the end of the 15th century when its ruler converted to Islam.

While the Mongols were controlling the Silk Road, Kublai Khan clearly showed his preference for Buddhism even though most of the Mongol kingdoms converted to Islam.

[edit] Decline of Buddhism

The decline of Buddhism along the Silk Road was due to the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in the East and the invasion of Arabs in the West. The conversion to Islam started in the 8th century in Central Asia. Since Islam condemned iconography, most of the Buddhist statues and wall-paintings were damaged or destroyed. Buddhist temples and stupas were abandoned and buried beneath the sand. By the 15th century, the entire Central Asia basin had been converted to Islam.

Central Asia had been influenced by Buddhism probably almost since the time of the Buddha. According to a legend preserved in Pali, the language of the Theravada canon, two merchant brothers from Bactria, named Tapassu and Bhallika, visited the Buddha and became his disciples. They then returned to Bactria and built temples to the Buddha.

Central Asia long played the role of a meeting place between China, India and Persia. During the 2nd century BC, the expansion of the Former Han to the west brought them into contact with the Hellenistic civilizations of Asia, especially the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms. Thereafter, the expansion of Buddhism to the north led to the formation of Buddhist communities and even Buddhist kingdoms in the oases of Central Asia. Some Silk Road cities consisted almost entirely of Buddhist stupas and monasteries, and it seems that one of their main objectives was to welcome and service travelers between east and west.

Various Nikaya schools persisted in Central Asia and China until around the 7th century. Mahayana started to become dominant during the period, but since the faith had not developed a Nikaya approach, Sarvastivadin and Dharmaguptakas remained the Vinayas of choice in Central Asian monasteries.

Buddhism in Central Asia started to decline with the expansion of Islam in the area from the 7th century. The Muslims did not show to the Buddhists the tolerance that they had for other religions “of the Book”, such as Christianity or Judaism. Instead they considered Buddhists to be practitioners of idolatry, and tended to persecute them harshly.

Trade and Islam beat a path through the Silk Roads of the 11 countries of Central Asia, much of which could not be changed by 70 years of Soviet rule. Most of the languages here have been Turkish-based since the early days of the Ottoman Empire. Most other languages in this region are based on Farsi, the tongue of Persia, Central Asia’s other traditional world power. All but two of the countries in this region are over 90% least-reached peoples, with Pakistan by far the largest: 150 million people within 468 people groups still least-reached in this country alone! Almost 850 people groups remain with less than 2% evangelical believers and less than 5% adherents to any form of Christianity.