Empire: World History - 130. India meets Rome: Making the Image of the Buddha

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

In the 1st century AD, the nomadic Kushans settled in what is now Afghanistan and established settlements and trade. From here, they moved down over the Hindu Kush and took large sections of Northern India. Within their new kingdom, Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the ruling class. Before Kushan rule, the Buddha had never been represented as a human, only as a tree or an empty throne. Yet through the empire’s trade connections with Rome, Buddhist symbols took on a more classically western form, and so the Buddha began to be depicted in Apollo-like statues. By the 3rd century AD, the Kushan Empire was dwindling, but Buddhism would not be stopped. It began to spread even further along the Golden Road, right to the borders of China. Listen as Anita and William explore the Kushan Empire and its role in the spread of Buddhism. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Pre-order William's book below: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Golden-Road-Ancient-India-Transformed/dp/140886441X India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/140886441X/ Australia: Available 17th September 2024 US: Available Spring 2025 Waterstones edition: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-golden-road/william-dalrymple/9781526681256 Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnh. And me, William Durimple. So this is right in your postcode, the kind of research you've been doing, which is kind of obsessed and consuming. you over the last, how many, well, five years since I've known you've been doing it, but longer, I guess, you've been ferreting things away.

Yeah, five years. I'd be very excited about the dynasty who are going to be the centre of today's episode, the Cajans, for a very long time. I remember the very first time I went to this extraordinary museum south of Delhi, Mata, where a lot of their best sculptures are on display. And then, as now, no one really talks about the Cajans in India, because they're an incoming dynasty, they're not regarded as sons of the soil, so they don't appear in nationalist historiography as prominently as they could do. No one outside of India has really

heard of them or talk about them, but they're responsible for some of the greatest works of Indian art and some of the absolutely foundational works of Buddhist art. And I love Kashan sculpture and have done for a very long time. So I was astonished, you know, when we were talking about doing this series, because you said Mathura, Muthra is like this hot bed of Kushan art. And Mathura, in my head, is only associated with Krishna, because it's meant to be the birthplace of Lord Krishna. And so I wonder if that's the Hinduism, just pushing out the Buddhism, you know, nothing to see here. This is what this city is known for. Well, no, it's one of the most sort of fertile sites, both in terms of archaeology, mythology, and religion. And Matura is,

you're quite right, where the Krishna myth is set, where the Yadava clan is supposed to, have come from, which is Krishna's people. It's also the place where many art historians would say the first image of the Buddha is sculpted. It's where some of the first images of kings who clearly are known to have worshipped Hindu deities were sculpted and ruled from. And it's at this sort of period that the stories of the Mahabharata are crystallizing into their final form, or the roots of the stories of that great war and that great epic, go back many hundreds, if not the thousands of years, but it's this point, and the geography of the Mahabharata is really quite similar to the geography of the Kushan Empire. And you also get Puranic Hinduism, the kind of full

devotional Hinduism in its familiar form, really crystallizing into clear form and clear sculpture. You get the first images of Shiva, the first images of Vishnu around the time of the Kushan. So it's a really, really important and much underrated moment in Indian history. Right. I mean, having said all that, though, the Kushans, it is true to say, that not much is known about them, isn't it? We don't know much detail, but we know broad brush strokes left by archaeology. Is that a fair assessment? Yes, that is. As with a lot of pre-Islamic Indian history, we have quite a lot of mythology, we have sculpture, we've got quite a lot of floor plans of buildings and sites that are clearly associated with these people, but we don't

have the written text to really fill out the biographical details of these people. And only one, One of the Kushan rulers really has any resonance for modern Indians. That's Kaniska. Let's come to him later. The Kushans, they are a group of pastoral Indo-European nomads, who we believe moved between the desert oasis of eastern Central Asia. They went by a different name originally, didn't they? I mean, what were they called the Kushans before?

So they're originally known in Chinese sources as the U.S.e. and they are probably the same people. Can you remember a few years ago? There was all that excitement in the press about those people being dug up in the Tarim basin near Kashgar who were wearing tartan. Yeah, you're getting very excited about it. Certainly had these sort of Czech textiles.

Yeah. These mummies dug out of, in very good condition, dug out of the deserts of the Taklamakan. And they're probably those people because they speak an Iranian sort of language. And we know that how. there's no written text, how do we know that? Because there are small quantities of inscriptions. Okay. And we have one or two of their sacred sites, Matura being one, another one in a place

called Surk Kotal in what's now Afghanistan. And these guys are really important because these guys are driven into what's now Afghanistan and India by the Huns, by the Zhongnu, as the Chinese call them. And they're the first empire to straddle Kashgar in the west of China, modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, all those mountain areas, and then conquer North India. The great and important irony of their rule is that these guys who are coming in from what is now China, conquering all the passes of Afghanistan and Pakistan and plunging down into the Ganges' plains, ironically, open up all those northern areas to Indian influence. And what you see is that although they come south, suddenly you have Buddhist monks and Indian myths and Hindu gods

and Indian Saddu, and a whole variety of travelling Indians moving northwards in what is now one empire, like a sort of early free trade zone or something, where people can just travel wherever they want. Once the Kashans come down, all these areas open up. So it sounds like a spiritual superhighway you're kind of describing or a dual carriage way where things go in and at. But I just want to pin down the dates, which may not be clear. I mean, you know so much about this, but others may not. We're talking about this migration or this pushing in by the Huns. 160 BC, is that the kind of dates that we're talking about.

talking about. That's the sort of date. And they are the people who overwhelm, if you like, the last Greek cities left by Alexander the Greatest Descendants at places like Ica Noom, which is in northern Afghanistan, on the banks of the Oxus. There, bizarrely, in the middle of what's now Afghanistan, you have these Greek cities with amphia theatres, with libraries, with Greek-looking temples, with enormous feat of clearly classical Western gods, of which only now a colossal sand survives the passage of time. But these were basically Greek outposts, and these guys, the Kushans come in, overwhelm that, and then in the first century AD, carry on pushing down into India and begin to get into Indian religions and Indian culture. What do they believe when they

arrived? Do we have any idea what the Kushans came with? So we're not sure what they came with when they left China, but certainly by the time they first turn up in Afghanistan, they are absorbing Iranian deities. So Nana, the goddess of love. Osho, who's the wind god, who's often depicted as a sort of form of Shiva, an early form of Shiva. And then by the time they push down to Matura, which is this big Indian holy town associated, as you say, with Krishna, some of their kings are Hindu, and some of their kings become Buddhist. And the most famous of the Buddhist ones is this guy, Kaniska. I keep keeping your way from Kaniska, because he's such a good story, but we need to earn the right to talk about him. And we should say where Mathara, it actually is,

in India. It's in what we would now call the state of UP. It's built alongside the river Yamuna. So, you know, it's a place of garts and water, fertile plains. William mentioned at the beginning that the Yardavs, it's the home of the Yardavs who are cowherds. So they're nomadic herding people. So that just gives you an idea of where we're talking about. So you say, you know, they come with this mixture of belief, but they are sponges, they absorb? Now, are there tiny pockets of Buddhism already in Afghanistan, which gives them that belief, which then will take over the whole Kushan Empire eventually? Correct. The first century, by the time that they're in charge, there's more than pockets of belief. There's clearly a lot of Buddhist activity in Afghanistan,

but it's when they get to mutter again that Buddhism seems to come centre stage. And we know that not only are the Buddhist temples active in Matra and very early Hindu temples in Matra, but early Jane temples. And one of the theories is that the image of the Buddha that we're so familiar with today, this cross-legged meditating Buddha, may first have been developed as a Jain image in Matura. Then again, there's another layer of belief of these nature spirits, these animist nature spirits, which you mentioned in the last episode, Nagas, who are kind of snake gods with great hoods, who often are later absorbed into Buddhism, and they shelter the Buddha from the sun and the rain. And these very voluptuous yakshis, who are tree spirits, which I sent you some images of.

You did. Can I just say? So before breakfast, William, it was a lot. They are very voluptuous, as you pointed out in your reply. I said they would not be out of place in a hip-hop video today, and they would be described as what the kids call thick. You know, there is junk in the trunk and plenty to spare. They are good-looking, curvy ladies, the actors in case you were wondering. And they come at exactly the same times.

You get these images of the Kushan Kings, who are shown as hunky chunks themselves. They're shown wearing enormous sort of overcoats, thick, padded, felt boots. Kanishka has an enormous club that he places in front of himself with his slightly sort of spayed legs. And they're very manly men, the Kushans. They're big chaps. Again, I mean, you've sent me the visual imagery.

And from what you've just said, again, it sounds like a hip-hop video because you've got sort of lavishly dressed men holding big sort of weaponry or clubs just completely replace a walking stick with a big diamond bobble on top and very scantily clad women. Anyway, put that to one side just for a moment. They, obviously, to come from a fleeing group of people to become the most powerful group in India, they must be getting money from somewhere. So is that trade or is it conquest or what's giving them the money to pay for these things? We've talked already in the last episode about this burgeoning trade between ancient India and the Roman Empire through the Red Sea.

And these extraordinary Red Sea ports, which archaeologists are working on now, There's one particular one called Beronique, where a team from Chicago has been coming up with extraordinary remains. And literally last year, they found the first ever image of a Buddha head on the Red Sea port of Beronique. Beautiful image of the Buddha with what the archaeologist described as tortellini curls. And these solar rays emanating out, as if it's some sort of the Buddha is some sort of sun god. And the same trade that brought the Buddha to the Red Sea brought lots of Roman gold, not only to the south of India, they're trading in spices, but to the north of India where they're trading in gemstones and in things like lapis lazuli, the very valuable bluish purple stone. And the kashans were clearly

very rich by this stage. The Romans wanted a lot of the sort of minerals like onyx and garnets and all these precious and semi-precious stones that the kushans were bringing down the indus from the mines and the Himalayas and Pamirs. And so in the 1920s, when French archaeologists were digging at Bagram, which later became famous as the site of this air base, where the American air power was based during the American takeover of Afghanistan after 2001. On that same site, they dug down and they found what seems to have been a Kushan royal storeroom, or according to some archaeologists, a merchant store room. But whatever it was, it was full of amazing luxury goods from not just the West, but specifically Roman Egypt. So there were these gorgeous porphyry vessels

built from the most precious of all Roman stones, porphyry, this purple stone associated with emperorship reserved for the sarcophagi of emperors. There were ivory plaques that looked very like the voluptuous yakshis you find in Indian sites like Sanchi. There were figurines, carved furniture, cut glass goblets. And what's so fascinating about these are. And what's so fascinating about cut glass obelets, is that they have images of very specifically Alexandria. There are images of the Farras Lighthouse. The best images we have at the Farras Lighthouse was found in this storeroom in Afghanistan, many thousands of miles to the east, as well as images of fishing, hunting and the date harvest on the Nile. So the link you have is very specifically with Roman Egypt. And again, you know, we think we don't know,

is this the old links that the Ptolemy's established from the time of Alexandria between the Greek cities which were in Afghanistan, did they survive into Roman times, these Romano-Egyptian traders following old trade routes that have been there since the time of Alexander, or is there something new? And it's just sort of fantastically improbable series of goods to find in the middle of the wilds of Afghanistan. So you're getting Roman money coming in here, you're possibly also getting Roman sculptors, because it's at this period, and this is the most exciting thing that suddenly The ideas of the Buddha are now about 400, maybe even 500 years old. And when he has been depicted at all, he's been depicted through a symbol, as if it's somehow improper to depict the person of the Buddha when he spent so long escaping his human form. It was such an effort to him to be enlightened and gain Nirvana. Buddhist sculptors initially show only an umbrella or a turban or an empty throne.

But with all this Roman influence and with images of Roman emperors on coins and Roman goods being imported, we've got an enormous treasure trove of stuff that turned up of all places under Bagram Airport, remember where the US bombers were based throughout all the different US periods in Afghanistan. Under there, they found this enormous treasure trove. And these images inspire a very romanized first image of the Buddha who looks like Apollo. He does. I mean, you sent me the one that's currently, I think it's the Gandharan one, but it's a bit later than the period that we're talking about. But developed very much by these Kushan kings, Gandhara is a Kushan land.

Right, okay. So the one that I'm talking about is the one that you sent me that's in Seoul currently at the moment. But he exactly looks like the kind of statue that one would see at a Roman temple. He's got those curls. He's got Western features. He's got the nose, the sculpted nose that we've come. to recognise from those classical statues. Not very Indian, actually, but quite European. So what's interesting is that you've got lots of different influences here. Scholars write a lot about this, and it's still very much a matter for discussion. Does the Buddha image come out of the animus cult, these yakshi lords that you find being worshipped again at Matra, this one place where

all these ideas seem to converge? Does it come from the image of Apollo? Does it come from Jane images? And you'll find art historians champing all three of those series. But what is clear is that the influence of classical art is very strong. And on Kushan coins you sometimes find not just Roman deities, but often specifically Egyptian Roman deities. So Harpocrates, Isis, these images which are worshipped in Roman Egypt, and these are the people who the Kushans are in touch with. They're not sailing directly to Rome or to Osteer. They're sailing to Alexandria and the Nile. So is all the gold that they are using? Is that because of commerce that is coming in to the Kushans? Or, I mean, do they get to mine gold from India? So, I mean,

We talked about diamonds being plentiful in India, but what, no gold? So diamonds are plentiful, but there's very little gold, correct. As much as a third of the Roman imperial budget came from trade with India, which includes the Khashans in the north and the different trading dynasties that were ruling in Gujarat and in what is now Kerala. You have complaints from Roman writers such as the naval commander Pliny and Strabo, who's a geographer based in Alexandria, saying that all the gold of the Roman Empire is debouching out towards India.

India. Debooshing. Is that the right word? I don't know, but I love it. I don't care. It's a good word. I've not come across that before. So with the growth of wealth, I try to understand this because as you said, Buddhism, the Buddha, Siddhartha, you know, the prince who gave up everything to be free, was not about material things. And you've got people mining their own gold or getting their own gold from Rome and completely blinging it up and, you know, sort of adorning their statues with iconography that didn't happen before. And then we should come to your man, Kanishka, now, because he's so interesting. How do they reconcile? a religion that they clearly like because it starts spreading like wildfire among the Qashans

and yet this desire for accumulation of wealth, power and status. We think of Buddhism as a very immaterial religion that involves the rejection of wealth. But one of the ironies is that Buddhism has always been embraced by the merchant classes and initially is often an urban religion in the middle of towns and is supported by the traders. and very early on, the Buddhist monks come to an arrangement with the traders, who they incidentally sometimes even lend money to, and some of the first banks that you get in South Asia are in fact Buddhist monasteries who are lending to the traders who are passing by. And the arrangement is basically that you give your money to the Buddhist monastery and rather

like getting indulgences in the Catholic Church in the pre-Reformation era, you get your bad karma taken away. Karma cleaning. Carma dry clean. It is. Oh my God. I mean, can you imagine the sort of the founder of the faith what he would have thought of that? It would have just been despicable to him, one would assume. Well, in even the very earliest Buddhist scriptures, some of the first converts to Buddhism are merchants. It was a very merchant-friendly religion. And it's thanks to the merchants that you find these early Buddhist monasteries. First of all, in the West Coast, in the Western Ghats above Bombay, then spreading up through the Pamirs into what's now Afghanistan. and they're on the trade routes and the people who are giving them gifts and lending to them are the traders. And even in some of the early Buddhist writings like the Lotus Sutra, you get a list of gifts that the monasteries will find acceptable.

It's like a John Lewis wedding list. We want this. We don't want that. Now, Kanishka, okay, so tell me, because I feel like I know him intimately because you sent me so many pictures of his naked torso, but I don't really know. I just thought, he's your kind of guy, nice big club. You know, right? There's a sort of many manly torsos which are lacking the head. Do you know why they're headless so many? It's because the neck is the thinnest part of a statue

and so it's the easiest thing to break, which is why arms and heads, like the Venus de Milo and stuff, they fall off because they're the weakest part of the stone. Did you know that? I have never thought that through. Yeah, that's why so many headless... God, it's because they're corpses statues.

So anyway, you littered my WhatsApp with headless torso. Kanishka, though. Good-looking torso. What more is there to him? Kanishka comes to the throne around 127 AD. So he's an almost exact contemporary of the Emperor Hadrian. And the same, I think 122 AD is the year that Hadrian begins building Hadrian's wall in Northumbria. So that is just five years before Kanisika comes to the throne.

And the Roman Empire is deeply involved in trade with the Khashans. And by this stage, the Khashans who were at different times flirting with, with animism, different times starting with Iranian gods, Jainism and Hinduism. By the time of Kanishka, they are apparently overwhelmingly going over. Certainly the aristocracy in what's now Pakistan and Afghanistan are going over to Buddhism amass. But who is he? Whose child is he? Is he an aristocrat? Is he a royal? Is it a bloodline thing? Who is Kanishka who turns into the leader of the Kushan? It is. It's a bloodline. And there's a long line of earlier kings, all of his images we have, at least we have their torsos, not always their heads. And there are two great

dynastic complexes that contain images of these great royal kings. One is at this place, Surtkotal, in central Afghanistan, and the other is Matra, where everything, all the early religious currents seem to converge. And you find amazing sculptures of Kanishka in Afghanistan, which sadly got destroyed by the Taliban when they raided and blotted out the Kabul Museum on their first a seizure of power of Afghanistan 20 years ago. But the ones in Matra survive and they're an hour's drive from my house here. I often go down there and it's one of my favorite museums. Would people have referred to him as emperor? All of the torsos don't get a sense of wealth and status because they really are just finely hewn male forms. But would he have been a young man when

he took over and would people have called him emperor? He was very clear in his now headless statue in Matar. It's inscribed the great king, king of kings. son of God. Oh, King of Kings and Son of God. Wow. Okay. No question about it. That's an Iranian set of titles and how you'd have referred to an Achaemenid or a Sasanian. Yeah, Darius said much the same about himself, I think. And as we say, he's a massive, he's shown as a massively powerful warrior, belted and booted with one hand on the pommel of his sword and the other propping up this enormous mace. And as I say, what I love best is his heavily padded felt boots and the fringe of this lovely stiff caftan, which is trimmed in pearls. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a gorgeous one.

You should definitely tweet it when this programme goes out. But I'm also struck by, and we had a vigorous discussion about why the women were so naked and the men were so booted, suited and booted. You're insisting that actually know that when you sort of told me about this material that they wear, that looks like they're naked, which is convenient. What do the women wear? They've got, as in many early Indian court cultures, they're in semi-transparent light weaves, this early form of muslin that the moguls called Buff Tawa, woven air, that yes, I mean, can be mistaken for nudity because it's so incredibly seethru. But the important thing about Kanishka is that he is the first ruler who produces a coin which is dedicated to the Buddha. And the legend

on this coin shows one of the very, very first images of the Buddha, one of the first dated images of the Buddha, too, because it comes from very early in his reign. And it has this sort of multilingual inscription, but the Greek one reads Bodo, just the Buddha. So this is the first king since Ashoka, who is openly proclaiming, I am a Buddhist, I'm a Buddhist follower. Like Ashoka, he may have had other devotions to. We know, for example, that Ashoka gave a cave to a group that no longer exists called the Jivikas. And we know from other inscriptions that Kanishka dedicates inscriptions to the Persian love goddess Nana, and he's shown making sacrifices at Zoroastro in fire altars. So I think we always got to

to remember that we think of people subscribing to one religion. In the Roman period, in the classical Indian period, people very happily hedged their bets and followed many religions. But what's important is that he is a keen supporter of the Buddhist monasteries, probably the most important Buddhist since Ashoka, who was 200 years earlier. And according to Buddhist tradition, he opens the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir, which is an incredibly important moment for for Buddhism, because all sorts of things get defined and laid down at this council. It's like one of the early church councils at Nicaea or Kelsidon that give the early definitions of Christianity. The same happens under Kanishka for early Buddhism. Does Kanishka also create sort of a government or a ruling

class that are monks as well? Because, you know, for a religion to spread like this, the clerics of said religion need to have power, authority. I mean, they've got money clearly because they're, you know, car washing karma. But what about sort of responsibility, power, authority? Do we anything about that? No, there's no evidence at all that they've got political power, but there is a lot of evidence that they're very rich. And I've been to a very exciting new site that dates from the reign of Kanishka in Afghanistan. Before the Taliban fell, I went to this new site called Mezainat, which was about three hours' drive out of Kabul. And Mezainat is this extraordinary early Buddhist monastery with about five separate temples and stupa complexes. And what's fascinating is that, at the

at the center of it is a copper mine that the monks clearly are controlling and literally coining. And so you have an early form of Buddhist monastery, which is also a big production center for copper. And incidentally, that site is now being threatened by Chinese miners who have bought the site because it's the biggest copper deposit in the world now and are threatening to blow up the entire site and just take the copper out. It's a fascinating site. Below the monastery was a series of caves where the 9-11 hijackers trained for the 9-11 operation. And when the Americans got there in 2001, they found some of the most important evidence linking Al-Qaeda to the 9-11 operation in those caves.

It's not the Tora Bores, is it a different set of mountains? Because we remember those bunker busters dropped on the Tora Bores. It was not there at all. Tora-Boros was where al-Qaeda fled to as they were leaving Afghanistan on their way to sanctuary in Pakistan, as we now know. The Mezainat caves was where they trained for the 9-11 operations. And you can go down there. And there was even a sort of rocket-propelled grade that hadn't quite gone off in one,

lodged in the wall of one cave. But these caves had also artwork and things in them? The caves themselves didn't have artwork in them, but above the caves on the hillsides were the succession of beautiful, very classical, early monasteries with Corinthian columns, stupas that look more like sort of Roman temples than anything. It's a smaller world, isn't it, than we imagine? It is a smaller world. I think that

just... So look, with these huge empires which are expanding quickly, this entire podcast is based on this. You know, there's sometimes a point where over-extension happens and then there starts to be a decline. Do we see that, clearly not in Kanishka's time when he's spreading it about

successfully? But when does the contraction begin? Because inevitably there will be a Kishan contraction. You're right, of course, that like in the empire, the Kushans rise and they begin to come to power about 100 BC when they enter Afghanistan. And they're kind of dying out by the third century AD. So they have quite a good crack of 300 years and they get as far east as al-Haband in India. They get to the Ganges. But the civilization that they create, this hybrid Indo-Roman world where the Buddha is shown wearing a toga based on images of Apollo and

not 100 miles from what the Emperor Augustus is shown wearing in his imperial statues, that survives for another couple of hundred years. You carry on finding these incredible early classical Buddhist monasteries in a sort of Indo-Roman form carrying on right up into the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. Well, look, it's a good point to take a break. We've talked about Kanishka, but after the break, I want you to tell us about somebody who is utterly fascinating to me, Kumara Jiva, a person who, one could credit with taking Buddhism and taking it way beyond the confines of India. Join us after the break.

Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Kanishka, the spread of Buddhism and the kind of almost codification of Buddhism as the primary religion that's spreading through the veins of commerce, we could say, all over the world. But what I'm really interested in, what I'm absolutely obsessed with, is how Buddhism gets to China, because so far we've been talking about the Gandharan planes, we've been talking about Afghanistan,

but we haven't talked about where it lands most heavily, and that is in China. So maybe we could do that in this half. So after the decline of the Kushans, what happens to Buddhism, the religion of the Kushans? There's several ways that Buddhism goes to China. And one route which we haven't really talked about is by sea. And there's clearly a lot of sea traffic through the Singapore Straits and arriving on the Chinese coast. But one of the most important thrust, and the thrust we're focusing in just, now is through Afghanistan into Western China. And by about the third centuries AD, the same

sort of Buddhist monasteries that are famously at Bamyan, where the Taliban blew up, the amazing. Oh, the Bamian Buddhas, those amazing Buddhas. And for those who you know, I had too young to remember this, I remember watching this being blown up in live time on television. And, I mean, these statues were how, I mean, they were mammoth carved into the side of a cliff face to, extraordinary, almost sort of, you know, like you said, that Hellenic torso that we've become familiar with, but enormous statues of the Buddha. I'm just going to go to the Bodleian and find out how tall they were. I went to see the remains with my kids about 10 years ago, and it was what turned my son Sam into a historian. He started gathering bits of the bomb, which was still lying around

that had blown up the Bamyan Buddha and putting it up on his Facebook and showing his friends at school. And that turned him into historian. It was the extraordinary sight of these beautiful, because it's riddled with monastic caves and the caves of hermits all the way up this valley and fragments of painting that the Taliban didn't manage to blow up. I mean, it's sort of 81 miles northwest of Kabul. It's very high land where the Bahmians were. And these statues, the smaller one, was 38 meters, so 125 feet high. And the larger one was 55 meters, 180 feet high. So, you know, they were treasures. I think UNESCO put them on the world heritage list because they were so very precious.

And it was in 2001 that the statues were destroyed after Mueller, Oma, decided that they weren't in keeping with Taliban beliefs. They were iconography. They were of a heretical religion and blew them up. And the world watched and powerless to do anything about it. And this was just shortly before 9-11, wasn't it? It was almost a precursor to 9-11. So there we are. So that is the poor Bamian Buddhist.

So, yeah, we were talking about, so they're spreading through Afghanistan into China. And what is the reception? What seems to be happening is that the monks are following the trade routes. And that wherever the merchants go, the monks follow. And wherever the merchants donate, you find monasteries springing up. First of all, they're in northern India. Then they're in what's now Pakistan and Afghanistan. And then they spread up beyond the Pamirs towards Kashgar into the edges of the Taklamakan desert,

which is then quite fertile. There's this whole fertile belt on the edge of the desert. And you get these amazing cave monasteries lining both sides of the deserts with the same sort of very classical Gandharan sculptures. But the further east you go, the more Chinese-looking the features become. And the Buddha, who starts off as this very Apollo-like figure, begins to look more and more like a sort of Chinese emperor by the time that you're reaching Dunhuan and the Gobi Desert.

And the most amazing of all these extraordinary cave paintings are the 236 cave temples of Kissel and Kutcher on the northern edge of the desert. And by the early 4th century, there are about 10,000 monks living in these cave complexes, but you've got to start wondering what they're on. The murals are unlike anything else in Buddhist art. Oh, describe. Describe? They're absolutely fabulous. They have these images of monks floating in the air with flames shooting out from either side of them, suspended in levitation. I think they were clearly on some sort of hallucinogenic. And these monks are holding their staffs and bowls and they can be seen flying through the air with rays and flames shooting out from their shoulders, hips and feats. Then there's

heavenly musicians and other strange creatures floating around them, including bizarre blue elephants. absolutely wonderful sort of Disney elephants or Dumbo. And then flights of white geese circling crescent moons. And then down below, there are hell images of hungry ghosts and contorted beings undergoing the tortures of hell. Representations of monks meditating on grinning white skeletons or contemplating skulls, locked in meditation and the kind of illusions of mortality. It's absolutely fabulous.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This sounds like, I mean, you know, not that I have much expertise in this field. But this does sound like a shroom-led kind of vision of religion. I mean, it's not unknown for holy men to take something that we would describe as illegal today for their visions and inspiration. Do we know? I mean, we're joking. They look like they're on something. But were they on something? What was part of the ritual of this? These are the strangest and most wacky murals I've ever seen.

Probably something. And if they're levitating and if they're getting visions of blue elephants floating around, they're clearly onto something. Out of all of this, you know, sort of maelstrom of hallucinogenic and network of monasteries, comes this extraordinary man who I want to talk about with you next, Kamarajiva, who is described by one historian as the St. Augustine of late antique China. Tell us who he was when he lived and why ought we to know about him. Kamarjiva is incredibly important because he's basically the first guy who makes good translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese. he brings the Buddhist scriptures to China in a coherent and organized fashion.

And he is ethnically half Indian. His dad is an Indian courtier working in one of these extraordinary high Himalayan courts. And his mother is a young Kutja princess. William, can you just tell us exactly where Kutja is? So this is now in modern Xinjiang. It's where the Uyghurs are living today. and it's, I suppose, not far from the modern capital of Zingang Urumqi. And she's extraordinary, because we have, in his biographies,

accounts of one of these incredibly strong Buddhist women who fill Buddhist history. And she is it brilliant, independent and forceful, known for her sharp wits, essentially could commit to memory whole Buddhist sutras. And what happens is that she sees one day when she's going for a walk, she stumbles across a graveyard, and she sees the bones of the dead. And she has this moment of epiphany when she realizes the transients of mortal life. And she asks her husband whether she can go off and become a Buddhist nun and, moreover, take their son, Kumarajiva, with her to become a monk. And of course, he says initially, no, of course you can't. but she fasts and goes on a hunger strike until he agrees.

There's lots of miracles associated with her. She's meant to have learnt Sanskrit sort of miraculously overnight. And the red mole. I mean, she's also meant to have this red mole on her body that somehow is the sign of being a superhuman mother. You know, she's the mother of all mothers. She's remarkable. And she teaches Kumara Jiva very, very early on, not just the ordinary Buddhist scriptures, but this new form of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, which is then rising up.

and we should talk about that. This is really a shaggy dog story. You're right. Literally. So tell us about Mahayana Buddhism and why it's different and where it comes from. Early Buddhism is dazzling in its simplicity. It's just the idea of avoiding suffering, finding a way of living that means you cannot feel desire so you cannot suffer.

But inevitably, it soon attracts a whole carapace of philosophy and mythology. And the most elaborate version of that and the most sort of philosophically complex version of that is Mahayana Buddhism. Well, scholars argue about this endlessly where it began, but the balance of opinion seems to believe that it began in Gandhara, where we were talking about in the last half of the episode, somewhere around Peshawar and the old Greek university town of Taxila. and Mahayana Buddhism revolves around the idea that the Buddha had many previous births and that there are earlier Buddhas as well as the current Buddha and indeed there are future Buddhas who will come and will be our saviour in the future. And this solves the problem that's there in early Buddhism in that if the Buddha's enlightened and had Nirvana and disappeared from this world, in a sense there's no point praying to him

because he's not there. He's gone. He's already moved on to a different world. But in Mahayana Buddhism, you have these bodhisattvas, and they are people who have paused on the threshold of enlightenment and remained on this side with us humans so that they can help us towards enlightenment. And the guy who first develops this into a philosophical system is a monk called Asanga. And the story goes that he climbs one of these Himalayan peaks after he leaves the University of Taxila. and he goes up for 20 years, like the Buddha, undergoing terrible austerities and loneliness, trying to reach enlightenment.

But he fails. And it's only when he comes down the mountain and encounters a man-struck dog covered in sores and looking disgusting. And he pats the dog and is kind to it and he gives the dog some food. And the dog turns into the bodhisattva and says, I was with you always. I am your faithful dog who barely noticed for all these years you were meditating. But thanks to your kindness, I've now revealed myself. So it's more outward-looking. So you've suddenly got a different iteration of Buddhism, which is now not just about the self,

but about the self not being terrible to its pet and everybody else, you know, just sort of being a kinder form. No, it's about humanism. Humanism and humanitarianism. And it comes with a huge and very complex philosophical baggage, which appeals to intellectuals at the period. So Kumarajiva, who's the son of our mole-tapped princess from Cuchar, who is brought up by this brilliant woman and is early taught every language of the Himalayan and can speak Sanskrit and read Prachrit and is fluent in everything. He goes on to become one of the great exponents of Mahayana Buddhism.

But first of all, though, he suffers a whole series of terrible tragedies. The small kingdom of Cutscher where he is practicing his Buddhism. Where his mum's from, yeah. Where's mum's from and where all his cousins are, is conquered. First of all, by a warlord called Lu Guang. And Kumar Jiva finds himself part of the loot, and he's transported to the general's capital in Gansu. How old is he? Are he just a boy or a teenager?

And at this point, I think he's in his 20s. But this is when he masters Chinese. He knows all the languages of the Western Himalayas, but he doesn't know Chinese. And as a, well, I think they treat him with great honor, but so he's not a slave in the conventional sense of someone working and doing manual labor. But the warlord Lu Guang uses him as his sort of court intellectual. And he becomes so impressed with Kamar Jiva's brilliance that he's determined that Kamarajiva should have children. And of course, Kamarjiva is a monk. But he's a monk.

But he's a monk. So he gets him drunk and tempts him into sleeping with a beautiful cortisanne. And this is the first in a number of such instance that results in Kumara Jiva fathering twins eventually, breaking all monastic codes. And then 17 years later in 401, Kumarjiva is captured for a second time. And this time, he is transported to the Chinese capital Chang'an. And again, by this stage, he's acknowledged to be one of the great intellectuals. of the entire region. And the Chinese emperor takes him into his court and venerates him as a powerful teacher and asks him, will he head a translation bureau as someone that has both perfect Sanskrit

and now perfect Chinese? Will he be the man who produces a subtle and erudite series of texts to fill the gap in the Chinese capital? And Kumar Jiva agrees, allegedly remarking that reading the sutras and poor translation is like eating rice that somebody else has done. Jude. Oh, okay. And so initially, he's feeling very out of his depth. He thinks that the Chinese capital at this period is an intellectual wasteland compared, interestingly, to the very academic and intellectual world that he was used to in the Western desert in Kuchat. And he initially complains now in this land of Quinn, he says, I'm like a bird with clipped wings.

but he is allowed to bring in his friends and fellow monks from the West to join his translation beer. He has a budget given to him. And within a couple of years, he has several thousand talented translator monks and theological specialists from across China and Central Asia, including a Kashmiri friend of him called Dharma Mitra, other guys from Kutja, former Mahayana students from Kashgar, and the greatest Mahayana master of the day, a guy called Huyan, has a leapti correspondence with Kumarajiva that goes on itself to become a classic Mahayana text. And Kumar Jiva is in the Chinese capital of Chang'an for 13 years until his death in 413. And he and his fellow translators labour away.

And the result is a series of 300 translated works notable for their quality as much as their quantity. and the remarkable fluency and readability, free from technical vocabulary, which often higher and Buddhist theology can get lost in. To this day, many Chinese prefer Kumar Jeeva's translations to all the ones that have followed. And he's like in the sense, I suppose, they're like the King James Bible. He's the basic text that has survived not for 500 years, but for 1,500 years. So you see now, for the first time, a really sufficient. sophisticated version of Buddhism taking root not just in China, but in the Chinese court. Great place to leave it. Join us in the next episode of Empire when the scene is now set for

Buddhism taking China by storm. And we'll talk about that. And as always, members of the Empire Club, who are friends of the show. We love you, our friends. You can hear that episode right now, right here, right now. And if you want to join and be a friend, You can sign up on Apple Podcasts or go to Empirapoduk.com and sign up over there. And of course, let me tell you again, pre-order Like the Wind, his fabulous book, The Golden Road. It's on a link in the show notes, be there or be square. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arlen. And me, William Duremple.