This episode looks at the trip that the Buddha’s teachings took from the Indian subcontinent through the Kushan empireand the land of Gandhara, and over to East Asia—to the Yellow River and Yangzi River regions as well as the Korean peninsula.

Buddhist Art and Architecture

Some of the oldest evidence we have for Buddhism are monuments. The Ruwanweli Maha Saya is believed to have been built in about 140 BCE in Sri Lanka, where the Pali Canon was put together and eventually disseminated. It claims to have the largest collection of the Buddha’s relics anywhere in the world, and rises up 103 meters high. It was built at the heart of the ancient capital of Sri Lanka.

This is a very classic stupa shape, and the shape most commonly found in South and Southeast Asia.

Early Buddhist art and artifacts can be hard to find. There are the Ashoka Pillars, which have references to Buddhist theology, and stupas, but most of the written documents have turned to dust, as they were written on leaves or paper, which typically don’t do well outside of very specific conditions.

Where we do find art, it may not always be obvious. Take this early depiction of the Buddha as a wheel, with a garland. The idea of existence as a wheel that kept turning and turning, and therefore kept bringing people back to an existence of suffering again and again, is at the center of a lot of Buddhist teaching, and so wheels are often used as symbols. Sometimes they will have eight spokes, representing the eightfold path, but here we see it is just a wheel.

Gandhara and the Kushan Empire

I’ve collected a series of images and encourage you to look through at the art style in Gandhara that was so influential on later Buddhist imagery. Much of this comes from the 2nd to 3rd centuries, which was the height of the Kushan Empire’s power.

Tarim Basin

One of the main routes of the overland silk road was through the Tarim Basin. To the south it are the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. To the north are the Tianshan mountains, and beyond that the region of Dzungaria, part of the Eurasian steppe. In the center of the Tarim Basin is the Taklamakan desert. Eons ago, it was a fertile inland sea, but over time it has dried up, so that the only remnants are in the eastern extremity—the swampy, stagnant former salt lake of Lop Nor. Despite this seemingly inhospitable land, settlements arose along the edges, where meltwater runoff from the mountains kept rivers flowing. Water could be found there to grow crops and even support thriving cities and kingdoms.

Thanks to the dry conditions of the Tarim Basin, many arts were preserved, including paintings and even documents, giving us keen insights into just what went on along the silk road in ancient times.

One of the larger polities around the time that Buddhism was spreading was the land of Kucha.

Kuchean history is not fully understood. We have mention of it in other documents, but it is known mostly through other sources and the archaeological traces left behind. We do have documents in a language that we believe was the language of Kucha, known as Kuchean or, likely erroneously, as Tocharian B, one of two—or possibly three—related Indo-European languages found in the Tarim Basin. It was once thought that Kucha was related to Kushan and the Yuezhi, though the language of Kushan appears to have been Bactrian, an Indo-Iranian language, instead.

Kucha (or Kuqa or Kuche) likely started further east and then people moved west along the edge of the Tianshan mountains, likely pushed along by the Xiongnu and others who were fighting for dominance in the Gansu region. As such it is part of the northern route through the Tarim basin. While the majority of Kucha has since been lost, there are many sites, such as the ancient city of Subashi and the Qizil caves, which remain. In the Qizil caves, you can see ancient Buddhist statues and paintings by believers. The caves were dug out of the side of a cliff face, and would have provided shelter and shade, which kept the caves, and the art in them, well protected.

This is where the monk Kumarajiva was from, making his way west towards Chang’an (modern Xian) and helping to spread Buddhism there.

There was another route along the south, where traces of loanwords show up that appear linked to the language of Kucha. Whether there were more speakers in that area or they came from other influences, there were definitely links across the region in terms of art and religion.

Dunhuang

At the edge of the Han sphere of influence was the city of Dunhuang, where the northern and southern routes around the Tarim basin came together, leading towards the Gansu corridor and into the Yellow River region. Otherwise you were traveling over treacherous mountain paths towards the Yangzi or the Sichuan basin. When the Han dynasty pushed back against the Xiongnu, they established an outpost here, including an extension of their original “Great Wall”.

“Yumenguan”, the Jade Gate Pass, is mentioned in many of the stories of people passing through the region. A garrison here was supposed to keep track of who was coming and going, and provide protection against incursions by outside foes, such as the Xiongnu. This was the edge of empire, but it was also where many of the merchants and people who traveled back and forth along these desert highways would meet and come together.

One of the famous sites of Dunhuang, today, are the Mogao caves. These are some of the most striking caves and examples of Buddhist artwork anywhere. While some of been damaged by erosion, many of the caves remain intact, and there are ongoing conservation efforts to try to minimize damage to and catalog the artwork that is inside.

The caves were first dug out in about the 4th century as a place to practice Buddhist meditation, but eventually it evolved into a system of over five hundred caves where people could worship. Elaborate carvings and paintings can be found throughout the cave system, which was actively being used and improved for roughly a thousand years. Today it is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Unfortunately, the popularity of the paintings has actually put them under threat. First there are those that were taken out and moved when early explorers like Aurel Stein came through, with expeditions sending samples off to London, Berlin, and elsewhere. But even today, as more people come to study or just to see the paintings, it has changed the humidity and pH levels in the caves, such that many are deteriorating at a much faster rate, and so access has been limited, but there are efforts to digitize many of them so that they can be safely viewed for generations to come.

China

When Buddhism came in the Han dynasty it was simply one of many religions. While we have examples and mentions of it, it was not as influential, and the Buddhist heartland remained in the West—in India, Kushan, etc. However, in the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, Buddhism gained immense patronage and saw much growth. From the third to 6th centuries there was even a reversal, as the Kushan Empire declined, and Central India saw a rise in Brahmanic traditions. Monasteries in the Yangzi and Yellow River region would become the geographic center of much of the Mahayana Buddhist practices, which themselves spread out to the rest of east and northeast Asia.

Converts during this period often went out in search of documents and manuscripts in an attempt to try to get at a more authentic version of the Buddha’s teachings. This was no doubt hampered by the fact that there were so many different writings by this time, particularly in the Mahayana tradition. The Buddhist canon is vast, and could fill up entire libraries. Debates over which sutras and which practices were more effective would continue throughout the historical period, and even today there are numerous schools that emphasize different things.

Through it all, there are some common threads as to the core nature of the historical Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, aka Shakyamuni, and his core principles. The Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path remain at the heart of Buddhist teaching. This would prove both helpful and troubling to various states as they looked at how to use Buddhist teachings and thoughts to support their own aims at political power and stability.

Temple design and practices were, in turn, influenced by the cultures of these areas just as much as Buddhism influenced them. Buddhist images, originally in the Gandharan style, began to take on their own characteristics. As with other regions, the face of the Buddha often reflected the people who were building the images, and we can see a change in the look of the Buddha as time progressed.

Furthermore, the temples changed. The stupa became more of a tower, and eventually transformed into wooden or stone pagodas. These then became standard for most East Asian Buddhist temples, and even became iconic images of various locations, such as the pagoda of Tōji, in Kyōto, which for centuries towered over the city, and was as iconic as the Eifel tower in Paris, or the Capitol Building in DC. Even today, these iconic buildings evoke the places where they reside.

The oldest tower style structure that we have today is the Songyue pagoda in modern China. It was built on Mt. Song in modern Henan province in 523 CE, the Northern Wei period, and is one of the few remaining from this era. Many others were made of wood, a tradition that would pass on to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, where we have an example in the oldest wooden buildings in the world at Hōryūji, built in the 7th century, about one hundred years after Buddhism first arrived in Japan.

References

• Lewis M. E. (2009). China between empires : the northern and southern dynasties (First Harvard University Press paperback). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

• Best, J. (2006). A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi. Cambridge (Massachusetts); London: Harvard University Asia Center. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1tg5q8p

• 沈福伟 (1996). Cultural flow between china and outside world throughout history (1st ed.). Foreign Languages Press.

• Skilton, Andrew (1994). A Concise History of Buddhism. Barnes & Nobles Books, by arrangement with Windhorse Publications. ISBN 0-7607-4829-2.

• Ebrey P. B. (1993). Chinese civilization : a sourcebook (Second edition revised and expanded). Free Press.