Buddhism in Central Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism in Central Asia once stretched from the desert oases of modern Xinjiang to the monasteries of Balkh, carried along the arteries of the Silk Road for more than a thousand years. At its height, the ancient Kingdom of Khotan alone counted some 400 Buddhist temples. Chinese monks traveled thousands of miles on foot to visit them. Persian poets borrowed imagery from Buddha statues to describe ideal beauty. And a hereditary line of Buddhist administrators would eventually rise to become the most powerful viziers in the Islamic world.

  How did a religion born in northern India come to define the spiritual landscape of a region that today is almost entirely Muslim? Which monastic orders blazed the first trails into Central Asia, and what did they build there? How did Greek philosophy become woven into the very image of the Buddha? And what happened to all of it when Islam arrived? The answers reach across continents, dynasties, and centuries, threading together in ways that still leave traces in unexpected places.

• 2. The Dharmaguptaka Vanguard

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  Of all the early Buddhist sects active in Central Asia, the Dharmaguptaka made more concentrated efforts than any other to spread Buddhism beyond India's borders. Scholars identify three major phases of missionary activity in Central Asian Buddhist history, associated in sequence with the Dharmaguptaka, the Sarvastivada, and the Mulasarvastivada. The Dharmaguptaka came first, and the scale of their reach was extraordinary.

  According to scholar A. K. Warder, the Dharmaguptaka executed what amounts to a vast circling movement along trade routes. Moving north-west from the coastal region known as Aparanta, they penetrated as far as Parthia and Iran, while simultaneously establishing themselves in Oddiyana, the Suvastu valley north of Gandhara. From those western footholds they then followed the Silk Road eastward across Central Asia and into China, where Warder credits them with effectively establishing Buddhism in the second and third centuries AD. The Mahisakas and Kasyapiyas followed in their wake along the same routes.

  In the 7th century CE, the Chinese monk Yijing grouped the Mahisasaka, Dharmaguptaka, and Kasyapiya together as sub-sects of the Sarvastivada, and noted that these three were not widespread in India proper, but were found in parts of Oddiyana, Khotan, and Kucha. Because so many East Asian countries first received Buddhism through Dharmaguptaka channels, those countries also adopted the Dharmaguptaka vinaya and ordination lineage. Warder wrote that in certain respects the Dharmaguptaka sect can be considered to have survived to the present day in those East Asian traditions.

• 3. The Greek Buddha

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  Before the Greeks encountered Indian Buddhism, the Buddha was never shown in human form. Buddhist art was entirely aniconic: the teacher was indicated only through symbols such as an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, footprints, or the Dharma wheel. This restraint is traceable to a passage in the Digha Nikaya in which the Buddha discouraged representations of himself after the extinction of his body.

  That changed in the Hellenistic successor kingdoms that followed Alexander the Great's conquests. The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, which spanned modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, lasted roughly from 250 BCE to 125 BCE. The Indo-Greek Kingdom, which overlapped its territory, ran from around 180 BCE to 10 CE. Within these kingdoms, Greek artists who had a strong tradition of sculptural representation did not feel bound by Indian aniconic convention. As one account puts it, because of "their cult of form, the Greeks were the first to attempt a sculptural representation of the Buddha."

  The stylistic fingerprints of Greece appear throughout the earliest Buddha images. The robes resemble the Greek himation, a light toga-like garment draped across both shoulders. The standing figures adopt the contrapposto stance familiar from classical Greek sculpture. The curly hair and top-knot seem derived from the style of the Belvedere Apollo, dated to 330 BCE. Some standing Buddhas were made using a specifically Greek technique: hands and sometimes feet carved in marble for heightened realism, the body formed from another material entirely. The art historian Foucher regarded Hellenistic free-standing Buddhas as "the most beautiful, and probably the most ancient of the Buddhas," placing them in the 1st century BCE.

  The Greeks had a long practice of creating syncretic divinities to serve as shared religious focal points. Ptolemy I introduced the god Sarapis in Egypt by fusing aspects of Greek and Egyptian deities. In India, the same impulse produced an image that combined the appearance of a Greek god-king, possibly the Sun-God Apollo or the deified Indo-Greek founder Demetrius, with the traditional attributes of the Buddha. The Kushan empire that followed would inherit this synthesis wholesale, adopting not only Greco-Buddhist art forms but the Greek alphabet itself in its Bactrian form.

• 4. Khotan, the Buddhist Bridge

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  Khotan was among the earliest Buddhist states anywhere in the world. Its capital lay to the west of the modern city of Hotan, and its inhabitants spoke the Iranian Saka language. For centuries it served as the channel through which Buddhist culture and learning traveled from India into China.

  The evidence points to the Dharmaguptaka as the authors of the first Buddhist missions to Khotan. An early text in the Khotan Dharmapada, along with loan words in the Khotanese language written in the Kharosthi script, indicates that Dharmaguptakas were among the first missionaries and that they used a Gandhari-language tradition. All later Khotanese manuscripts belong to the Mahayana and are written in the Brahmi script, showing that a religious shift occurred over time.

  In 260 AD, the Chinese monk Zhu Shixing traveled to Khotan specifically to find original Sanskrit sutras. He located the Sanskrit Prajnaparamita in 25,000 verses. When he tried to send it back to China, local Hinayanists attempted to block the transfer, regarding the text as heterodox. Zhu Shixing stayed in Khotan himself but sent the manuscript onward to Luoyang, where a Khotanese monk named Moksala translated it. In 296, another Khotanese monk, Gitamitra, arrived in Changan carrying a second copy of the same text.

  When the monk Faxian visited Khotan, he reported that the entire population was Buddhist. He counted fourteen major monasteries and stayed at the most prominent, the Gomati monastery, which housed 3000 Mahayana monks. When Xuanzang passed through in the 7th century, the king personally rode out to the border to receive him. Xuanzang recorded roughly 100 monasteries in Khotan at that time, housing around 5000 monastics, all studying the Mahayana.

  By the late 9th and early 10th century, Khotan's dynasty governed a city-state with approximately 400 temples, four times the number Xuanzang had counted around the year 630 CE. The royal family cemented ties with the Buddhist center at Dunhuang by intermarriage with Dunhuang elites, patronizing its temple complex, and financing portraits of the Khotanese royals on the walls of the Mogao grottoes.

• 5. Iranian Buddhism and Its Legacy

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  Parts of Central Asia that were Buddhist for centuries were, and in many cases remain, Iranian-speaking. The most prominent institution was the Nava Vihara, meaning New Monastery, in the city of Balkh. It functioned as the intellectual center of Central Asian Buddhism for centuries.

  When the Sassanian Persian dynasty fell to Muslim armies in 651, Balkh followed in 663. The Nava Vihara, however, continued operating for at least another century under Islamic rule. In 715, after an insurrection in Balkh was crushed by the Abbasid Caliphate, many Persian Buddhist monks fled eastward along the Silk Road, heading first to Khotan, which spoke a related Eastern Iranian language, and then onward into China. The Persian scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, who served the Ghaznavids, reported that around the start of the 10th century, the monasteries of Bactria, including Nava Vihara, were still standing and still decorated with Buddha frescoes.

  Two Iranian Buddhist monks left particularly deep marks on Chinese Buddhist history. An Shigao, active roughly between 148 and 180 CE, was the earliest known translator of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese. By tradition he was a prince of Parthia who renounced his claim to the throne to become a missionary monk in China, earning the nickname the "Parthian Marquess." The other is Bodhidharma, credited as the founder of Chan Buddhism, which became Zen, and by legend the originator of the physical training at the Shaolin monastery. The first Chinese reference to Bodhidharma, recorded by Yan Xuan-Zhi in 547 CE, describes him as a Buddhist monk of Iranian descent. In Chinese Chan texts he is called "The Blue-Eyed Barbarian" and throughout Buddhist art he is depicted as heavily bearded and wide-eyed.

  The administrators who ran Nava Vihara for generations were the Barmakids, an Iranian family whose hereditary role ended when the monastery was conquered and they converted to Islam. Under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad they rose to become extraordinarily powerful viziers. The last of the line, Jafar ibn Yahya, appears in many stories from the Arabian Nights, where he is associated with mysticism and traditions outside standard Islamic practice. The mystical and syncretic traditions that coalesced around Balkh persisted in other forms too: Balkh was the birthplace of the medieval Persian poet Rumi, founder of the Mevlevi Sufi Order.

  Buddhist imagery persisted in Persian poetry for centuries. Palaces were praised by saying they were "as beautiful as a Nowbahar," meaning Nava Vihara. The moon-disc halos depicted around Buddha images at Nava Vihara and Bamiyan gave rise to the poetic phrase "the moon-shaped face of a Buddha" as an expression of pure beauty. In 11th-century poems such as Varqe and Golshah by Ayyuqi, the word budh is used with a positive connotation for Buddha, not with its secondary meaning of idol, implying an ideal of asexual beauty.

• 6. The End of an Era

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  The Kushan dynasty was not the only political force to sponsor Buddhism in Central Asia. In the 16th century, the Mongol ruler Altan Khan invited Buddhist teachers to his realm and proclaimed Buddhism the official religion, a move scholars read as primarily political: a way to unify a population and consolidate power. In the process, some indigenous non-Buddhist practices were suppressed or persecuted, though those actions were understood as driven by political calculation rather than religious conviction alone.

  The transformation of Central Asia from a predominantly Buddhist region to a predominantly Muslim one was largely complete before the modern era. Today, the Buddhist presence in Uzbekistan stands at 0.11 percent of the population, practiced almost entirely by the Koryo-saram, a Korean ethnic minority. The only functioning Buddhist temple in Uzbekistan is Jaeunsa, meaning Compassion, a Korean Buddhist Jogye Order temple on the outskirts of Tashkent. In Kazakhstan, Buddhism is similarly a Korean-community phenomenon, with additional practitioners affiliated with the Dalai Lama, Lama Namkhai Norbu, and the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Kyrgyzstan has the single registered Buddhist community called Chamsen, founded in 1996, with membership drawn mainly from Koreans, Russians, and Kyrgyz, alongside practitioners of Nipponzan Myohoji and Karma Kagyu denominations.

  In 2001, the Afghan Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and relics in Bamyan province, the same region where Buddha images with moon-disc halos had once inspired Persian poets. Of the thousand-year civilization that produced those images, what remains in the region itself is measured in fractions of a percent, a handful of communities, and one temple named Compassion on the edge of a Central Asian city.