Buddhism

Assembled from 37 blocks · 3 evidence · 41 related

1. Story
2. The first of the major religions to travel the overland routes at scale, moving from northern India through Gandhara and the Kushan realm into the Tarim oases and then into China. The mechanism was commercial before it was missionary: merchants endowed monasteries, monasteries offered lodging and credit along the routes, and translators followed the traffic. An Shigao was translating in Luoyang by 148 CE; Kumarajiva, from Kucha on the northern route, was brought to Chang'an in 401 and headed the translation bureau that shaped Chinese Buddhist vocabulary. The cave complexes at Mogao, Kizil and Bamiyan mark the corridor physically. A belief system, not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Buddhism
5. Silk Road religious corridor
6. Connections
7. Sogdian merchant networks
8. Silk Road religious corridor
9. Xuanzang
10. Mogao Caves
11. First cave cut at Mogao (traditional date)
12. Xuanzang travels to India and back
13. The Dunhuang Diamond Sutra is printed
14. Gandhara
15. Ashoka (Ashoka Maurya)
16. Ashoka's bilingual Greek-Aramaic inscription at Kandahar
17. Council at Pataliputra and the despatch of Buddhist missions (traditional account)
18. Buddhism attested in Han China
19. Anthropomorphic Buddha images appear in Gandhara and Mathura
20. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
21. Xuanzang's overland journey to India and return
22. Construction of Borobudur under Shailendra patronage
23. Buddhism
24. Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)
25. Xuanzang
26. Dunhuang
27. Indian Ocean maritime trade network
28. Ashoka's bilingual Greek-Aramaic inscription at Kandahar
29. Buddhism attested in Han China
30. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
31. Xuanzang's overland journey to India and return
32. Alopen received at the Tang court
33. The Xi'an stele is erected
34. Evidence
35. Eyewitness description of the Tarim oasis kingdoms, the Pamir crossing, Central Asia and seventh-century India, compiled the year after Xuanzang's return. It records the state of Buddhist communities city by city and has been used by archaeologists to identify and locate sites.
36. 492 decorated cave temples with roughly 45,000 square metres of murals and over 2,000 painted sculptures, cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, together with the manuscript hoard of Cave 17.
37. A woodblock-printed scroll dated by its own colophon to 868 CE, the earliest dated complete printed book known. Its presence at Dunhuang shows printing in working use on the corridor four centuries before it appeared in Europe.