The Silk Road
The Silk Road was one of the earliest intercontinental trade routes that spanned routes from the Mediterranean throughout South and Northeast Asia. These trade routes were not only the arteries of national fortunes, they were rivers of culture, flowing together, for the speed of commerce is directly dependent on the speed of communication. Along these routes Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sufi, Zoroastrians shamans and devotees of the Greek Pantheon all intermingled sharing and inspiring new traditions of awakeness.
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The natural features of the Himalaya jutting above South Asia made it impossible for large caravans to move south into Tibet and China. And then there is the Takliman Desert which separates China from Europe; the extreme temperatures force travelers to pass through a meager set of oases as stepping stones through the periphery of what the people there called the "Land of Death." All these dangers meant that any trade routes heading north would have to first travel either East toward the coast or West toward Afghanistan.
The eastern side of the trade route developed earlier; travel through Persia and Syria was easier than the Takliman, and the Persian empire had its own routes established through the region already. As Alexander the Great conquered the Iranian Empire in 320 BCE, Greek language and culture was brought into the mix with the Persian culture and by the third Century BCE, Indian, Persian and Greek cutures comingled along the trade route. The Kushan people, descendents of the Yuezhi of the Norther Takliman Desert were Buddhists who were influenced by the Greek culture of the region. They were the artists of the first anthropomorphic images of the Buddha, figures that have distinctive European features, and often moustaches. Before these statues began to appear, images of the Buddha had always been signified by the image of the wheel or the tree of life, or even a set of footprints. This is a pivotal development in Buddhist thought, because there was a very specific reasoning for previous Buddhists to adhere to symbolic artistic conventions.
Artists chose archetypal images of the wheel and the tree of life or stupas because of their axial principles: all these images are considered to have a relationship to an axis and a center point. "Buddha" was considered to be a principle of awareness. So to sculpt Gautama the man was considered by the early Nikaya Buddhists and the Laypeople who sponsored the carvings as swaying away from Buddhism's pivotal reaction to the notion of a permanent Atman or essential identity of God. Buddhists claimed to be riding the indeterminate space beyond the previous limits of Brahman logic: Nagarjuna was credited to be one of the early proponents who said, "I have no opinions...I am innocent." (Chogyal Namkhai Norbu's translation) This means that Buddhists like Nagarjuna claimed that the ultimate reality, pure and total presence, was beyond the fourfold logic of yes, no, both or neither. This was the wisdom of the Prajnaparamita Sutra that Gautama Buddha taught at Vulture's Peak. It was the reason why Buddhists hesitated to make statues like the Hindu ones all around them. But the Gandharan sculptors had their own experience of the Buddhist tradition, for their traditions were that of the Middle East and not the Southern Indian Continent. One might imagine that they express in their statuary their own expression of embodied Buddhism: the practices of the Bodhisattvas and the transformation of all activity into the path beyond coming and going. To be walking that road along with many other travelers to be aware of the breath that pushes on toward the latest horizon; the Kushan, as those who lived on the edge of the Land of Death, these were bold people who knew the limits of their bodies. As practitioners of the path, they found challenges of embodied practice as they were run out of their homeland by the Xiongnu tribe, who became the Huns that later set their sights on Europe.
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to be continued...