The Silk Road served not only as a great portal of trade but also as a conduit of knowledge and beliefs. The Silk Road played an important role in the arrival of Buddhism, and to a lesser extent Manicheanism and Nestorianism, into China. Buddhism began as a religious doctrine in the sixth century BCE in India and became their official religion in the third century BCE. Monks and missionaries travelled along the Silk Road from India to Central Asia and on to China, carrying Buddhist teachings, writings and paintings.
Buddhist travelers
Converts and pilgrims from China followed the Silk Road west in search of enlightenment. One was Faxian (337–442) who travelled by foot along the southern route through the Tarim Basin and over the Himalayas to India, later returning home by sea. He arrived back in China with a fabulous collection of Buddhist scriptures and statues, leaving us a travelogue of his journeys with the all-encompassing title: A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Xian of his Travels in India and Ceylon in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline.
The most famous Buddhist pilgrim was Xuanzang (600–664), who became one of the great Chinese translators of Buddhist writings. He journeyed for 14 years along the northern Silk Route to Bactria and over the Hindu Kush Mountain range along today’s Afghan–Pakistan border to the ancient Indian kingdom of Gandhara and ultimately to Ceylon. He became a renowned scholar winning debates against local authorities and returned to China by the northern Silk Route. He left an excellent (more pithily) entitled account of his journeys, Records of the Western Travels, which gives a thorough account of Buddhist thought in the seventh century.
Cave complexes of Silk Road
As Buddhism spread along the Silk Road, monasteries and elaborately designed cave complexes were built near the oasis towns. The extent and artistic content of these shrines were simply breathtaking. These holy sites became a repository of hundreds of holy manuscripts and dramatic art in murals and statuary dating from the fifth to the tenth century. Large and small statues of Buddha in gold and bronze adorned the caves. Colorful cave frescoes portrayed great images of Buddha and wealthy cave benefactors in worship, to aid in their passage to nirvana. These massive complexes served as beacons of enlightenment, scattered across some of the most desolate, inhospitable terrain on earth.
Foreign devils steal Buddhist artifacts
The full majesty of the Buddhist cave complexes did not come to Western attention until the early 1900s through the efforts of European explorers/adventurers. These men came to be despised by the Chinese as ‘foreign devils’, for removing artefacts from the caves and shipping them to museums in the Western world. The most infamous was Sir Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-British archaeologist and geographer who was based at a couple of Indian universities. During four expeditions between 1900 and 1930, he collected from grave sites and holy places countless documents and artefacts, from Neolithic stone tools to eighth-century-CE manuscripts.
Stein made his first major discovery at Niya, an ancient oasis on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin, where he found over 100 wooden tablets and letters written in Indian script, representing official orders and communications. These discoveries set off an international race of archaeologists from seven nations, all out to rob the ancient Buddhist treasures of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts. This untethered competition didn’t end until the mid-1920s when the Chinese finally forbade further exploration. The excavated artefacts of Stein and others wound up in more than 30 museums across Europe, America, Russia and East Asia.
The second most infamous of the ‘foreign devils’ was Stein’s arch-rival, Albert von Le Coq, a German who had made his fortune as a brewer and a wine merchant before he began to study archaeology at the age of 40. In 1904, he uncovered the ‘Lost Murals of Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves’ mostly buried under shifting sands near Turfan on the northern branch of the Silk Road. When he and his team began digging, they were astonished to find an extensive cave complex filled with manuscripts, statues and exquisite murals dating from the 5th to fourteenth century. These Le Coq removed from the caves, crated and shipped to Europe to the Berlin Ethnological Museum. Tragically, this transfer led to the ultimate destruction of many of them, as they were lost in air raids during World War II.
Adapted from: Hancock, J.F. (2021) Spices, Scents and Silk: Catalysts of Trade. CABI
Illustration: Praṇidhi scene No. 5, Temple No. 9, dated to the 9th century, Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, near Turpan, Xinjiang, China. This and many other paintings were removed by Albert von Le Coq from the Bezeklik caves. They were destroyed in the Allied bombing of Berlin during the Second World War.
Bibliography
Foltz, R. (2010) Religions of the Silk Road. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Onishi, M. and Kitamoto, A. (2008) Overview of the Silk Road: time, space and themes. Silk Road in Rare Books. National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
Sen, T. (2006) The travel records of Chinese pilgrims Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing. Education about Asia 11, 24–33.
Wang, H. (ed.) (2012) Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections. British Museum
Research Publication No. 184. British Museum, London.
Wenjie, D. (1993) Dunhuang art: the treasure of the Silk Road. In: Agnew, N. (ed.) Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites. Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, California, pp. 1–3.
Whitford, S. (2013) A place of safekeeping? The Vicissitudes of the Bezeklik mural In: Agnew, N. (ed.) Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites. Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, California, pp. 95–106.
Wood, F. (2002) The Silk Road. University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
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