The Kushans adopted the Greek alphabet for their own language and began minting gold, silver, and copper coins on the Greek model, which showed a Kushan ruler on one side and a god or mythological figure on the other, including the Greek hero Hercules, the deified Buddha, the Hindu god Shiva, and the Egyptian god Sarapis. Coins also depicted the Iranian god Ahuramazda, which suggests that some Kushan rulers had adopted the teachings of Zoroaster, a prophet and thinker whose ideas had gained wide acceptance centuries earlier in the Persian Empire, which along with Indo-Greek kingdoms was now the western part of Kushan. Zoroastrianism taught (and teaches) that Ahuramazda was the source of all good, and that individuals had the responsibility to choose between good and evil in their thoughts, words, and actions. At the end of time Ahuramazda would preside over a last judgment to determine each person’s eternal fate. Veneration was owed to Ahuramazda alone, and not to other deities.
2.7 Relief sculpture showing the Buddha surrounded by devotees, from Mathura, one of the capitals of the Kushan Empire, in about the second century CE. Anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha appeared first in Kushan, where Hellenistic Greek styles, including flowing robes and defined musculature, combined with Buddhist devotional forms.
Buddhism grew in this setting of cultural mixture, and over centuries divergent traditions developed. The Buddha’s teachings began to be written down by his followers in the second or first century BCE in sacred texts called sutras. Monastic communities recited and studied the sutras, and came to stress different ones among them and to write new texts. Many of these texts focused on bodhisattvas, compassionate beings who were far along on the path to enlightenment and nirvana but who stayed in the world to help other sentient beings on their own paths. Bodhisattvas were understood to be both in time and timeless, and their lives and powers absorbed aspects of local deities and religious traditions. The bodhisattva Guanyin, for example, was originally depicted as a young man, but became increasingly associated with the goddess of mercy and kindness worshipped in local religions, and came to be shown primarily as a beautiful young woman in a flowing robe. Bodhisattvas became objects of veneration, as did the Buddha himself, who was more and more viewed as a transcendental and eternal being, and the chief among a group of celestial buddhas. Among the celestial buddhas was Amitabha (“the buddha of infinite light”), who had been a bodhisattva over countless lives, and had created a paradise beyond the bounds of the world called the Pure Land, open to all who call on him in death. The earliest known inscriptions and sutras referring to Amitabha come from the Kushan Empire in the second century CE, at which point the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great (r. 127–151) was actively promoting the spread of Buddhism, the Kushan Buddhist monk Lokaksema was translating sutras into Chinese, and merchants and pilgrims were traveling along the Silk Roads through Central Asia and other well-established trade routes.
The veneration of bodhisattvas and celestial buddhas, and the notion that every sentient being is on the path to buddhahood in a celestial realm, became the center of one of the primary traditions within Buddhism, Mahayana, which means “Great Vehicle,” a term reflecting the idea among its followers that it is broadly inclusive. This branch of Buddhism—which because it was open to new texts had many different schools and traditions within it—spread from northern India and Kushan into other parts of South Asia, Central Asia, China, the Himalayas, and ultimately Korea, Japan, and much of Southeast Asia. Texts were translated, beautifully decorated temples and stupas were built, and tens of thousands of people became monks and nuns in monasteries, which sometimes grew wealthy on the gifts from pious believers. In China, the decision to enter a monastery and forgo family life conflicted with traditional Confucian aims, but in the unstable political environment after the fall of the Han dynasty, even rulers and officials, along with countless ordinary people, were attracted to Buddhist teachings of ethics, charity, and spiritual meaning. Buddhism also fit well with another Chinese philosophical tradition, Daoism, which taught that the best life was one that does not seek to change anything, but passively yields to the dao, the “way of nature” that underlies everything. Translators of Buddhist texts used Daoist terminology, and Daoist rituals of fasting and meditation were adapted to include Buddhist concepts, as were traditional rituals of divination and ancestor veneration. Confucian hierarchies also shaped translations of Buddhist texts and made them seem less foreign: “husband supports wife” became “husband controls wife” and “wife comforts husband” became “wife reveres husband.”
Some monasteries and religious thinkers emphasized different sutras, rules, and practices, and a different tradition became more common in southern India and Sri Lanka, termed Theravada, the “Teaching of the Elders,” which put particular emphasis on the oldest texts. In Theravada understandings, only one buddha could appear in a cosmic age, so the ultimate ideal is to become not a buddha but rather an arhat, an individual who achieves full enlightenment in nirvana and is thus completely freed from material existence and will never be reborn in any world. Monasticism was viewed as the superior way of reaching this state because it allowed for a life of meditation, morality, and study, although lay people gained merit by reciting scriptures and supporting monks. (This respect for monks continues among contemporary Theravada Buddhists; they disagree about whether women can become fully ordained nuns, and historically there have been far more monks than nuns.) From southern India and Sri Lanka, monks took Theravada Buddhism to Southeast Asia, where it gradually supplanted other forms of Buddhism and remains the dominant form of Buddhism today.
In all of its variants, Buddhism came to encourage travel: people often went on pilgrimages to the holy places associated with the life of the Buddha, to monasteries and temples that contained relics or particularly impressive images, or to shrines associated with bodhisattvas. Some of these travelers wrote about the peoples they met along their journeys, and their works are an early form of world history.
Like Buddhism, Christianity also took root and expanded in a cosmopolitan world with a great mixing of cultures, languages, and traditions, and when it was fairly easy to move around and exchange ideas and practices on roads and sea routes. It appeared in the early Roman Empire, in which people followed and combined a variety of spiritual traditions, including religions devoted to the traditional Roman gods of the hearth, home, and countryside, syncretistic religions that blended Roman and indigenous deities, and mystery religions that offered the promise of life after death. Christianity developed initially in the Roman province of Judaea, where the civil wars and turmoil that ended the Roman Republic and created the Empire had led to a climate of violence. Movements in opposition to the Romans spread among Jews, and many Jews came to believe that a final struggle was near and that it would lead to the coming of a savior, or Messiah, who would destroy the Roman legions and inaugurate a period of happiness and plenty for Jews.
Into this climate of Roman religious blending and Jewish Messianic hope came Jesus of Nazareth (c. 3 bce–29 ce). According to Christian Scripture, he was born to deeply religious Jewish parents and raised in Galilee, stronghold of those opposed to Rome and a trading center where Greeks and Romans interacted with Jews. His ministry began when he was about thirty, and he taught by preaching and telling stories. Like the Buddha, Jesus left no writings. Accounts of his sayings and teachings first circulated orally among his followers and beginning in the late first century were written down to help build a community of faith. Discrepancies within early texts indicate his followers had a diversity of beliefs about Jesus’ nature and purpose, but they agreed that Jesus preached of a heavenly kingdom of eternal happiness in a life after death and of the importance of devotion to God and love of others. His teachings were based on Hebrew Scripture and reflected a conception of God and morality that came from Jewish tradition, but he deviated from this in insisting that he taught in his own name, not in the name of Yahweh. He said that he was the Messiah (Christus in Greek, the origin of the English word C
hrist), but also asserted that he had come to establish a spiritual kingdom, not an earthly one based on wealth and power. Worried about maintaining peace and order in Jerusalem, the Roman official Pontius Pilate arrested Jesus and condemned him to death, and his soldiers carried out the sentence. On the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, some of his followers said that he had risen from the dead, an event that became a central element of faith for Christians.
The memory of Jesus and his teachings survived and flourished. Believers in his resurrection and divinity met in small assemblies or congregations, often in one another’s homes, to discuss the meaning of Jesus’ message and to celebrate a ritual (later called the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper) commemorating his last meal with his disciples before his arrest. Because they expected Jesus to return to the world very soon, they regarded earthly life and institutions as unimportant. Marriage and normal family life should be abandoned, and followers of Jesus should depend on their new spiritual family of co-believers. Early Christians often called each other brother and sister, a metaphorical use of family terms that was new to the Roman Empire.
The catalyst in the spread of Jesus’ teachings was Paul of Tarsus, a well-educated Jew who was comfortable in both the Roman and the Jewish worlds. After a conversion experience, Paul became a vigorous promoter of Jesus’ ideas, traveling all over the Roman Empire and writing letters of advice that were copied and widely circulated, transforming Jesus’ ideas into more specific moral teachings; Paul’s letters later became part of Christian Scripture. The breadth of the Roman Empire enabled early Christians to spread their faith easily throughout the world known to them, as Jesus had told his followers to do. Paul urged that Gentiles, or non-Jews, be accepted on an equal basis, and the earliest Christian converts included men and women from all social classes who learned about Christian teachings through family contacts, friendships, and business networks. People were attracted to Christian teachings for a variety of reasons: they offered the promise of a blissful life after death for all who believed; stressed the ideal of striving for a goal; urged concern for the poor; and provided a sense of identity, community, and spiritual kinship welcome in the often highly mobile world of the Roman Empire.
At first most Roman officials largely ignored the followers of Jesus, but slowly some came to oppose Christian practices and beliefs. They considered Christians to be subversive dissidents because they stopped practicing traditional rituals, objected to the cult of the emperor that was becoming an important part of Roman political ideology, and seemed to be trying to destroy the Roman family with their claim that salvation was more important than family relationships. Persecutions of Christians, including torture and executions, were organized by governors of Roman provinces and sometimes by the emperor; although most were local and sporadic, some were intense, and accounts of heroic martyrs provided important models for later Christians.
By the second century CE Christianity was changing. The belief that Jesus was soon coming again gradually waned, and as the number of converts increased, permanent institutions were established instead of simple house churches. These included large buildings for worship and a hierarchy of officials—priests, bishops, archbishops—often modeled on those of the Roman Empire. Christianity also began to attract more highly educated men who developed complex theological interpretations of issues that were not clear in early texts. Often drawing on Greek philosophy and Roman legal traditions, they worked out understandings of such issues as how Jesus could be both divine and human and how God could be both a father and a son (and later a spirit as well, a Christian doctrine known as the Trinity). These interpretations became official doctrine through decisions made at church councils, large gatherings of bishops and other clergy, which also decided which books circulating among believers would be canonical, that is, officially part of Christian Scripture. Not everyone agreed with these decisions, however, and major splits over doctrinal issues led to the formation of variant branches. Bishops and theologians also modified Jesus’ teachings about wealth, power, and family, downplaying those that seemed socially disturbing and bringing them more in line with Roman values.
Christianity was thus becoming more formal and centralized, and it was also spreading. Christian missionaries, sometimes sent by bishops, and Christian merchants or other travelers ventured beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. They brought Christianity to the kingdom of Kush along the Nile south of Egypt and then further south to the empire of Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands, which was already home to a sizable Jewish community and the center of a trading network that reached from the Mediterranean to India. In the fourth century, King Ezana of Aksum (r. c. 320–360) made Christianity the official religion of his kingdom and his primary Christian adviser Frumentius became a bishop. Texts were translated into Ge’ez, the local language, churches were built (sometimes hewed out of a single block of rock), and monasteries were established, creating the Ethiopian Church that has continued to today with practices and doctrines somewhat different from other branches of Christianity, including dietary rules similar to those in Judaism and a slightly different group of books in its biblical canon.
Missionaries, merchants, and soldiers took Christian teachings eastward and northward as well, into the tolerant Parthian Empire centered in Persia and to the tribal Celtic and Germanic peoples of Europe. Bishop Ulfilas (c. 310–383), himself a member of the Germanic Ostrogoths, translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language, creating a new Gothic script in order to write it down. Over the next several centuries this text was recopied many times and carried with the Gothic tribes as they migrated throughout southern Europe. Rituals were more important than texts in the transmission of Christian teachings, however, and the veneration of saints became especially important. Saints were people who had lived (or died) in a way that was spiritually heroic or noteworthy; like bodhisattvas, they were understood to provide protection and assistance, and objects connected with them, such as their bones or clothing, became relics with special power that linked the material and spiritual world. Churches that housed saints’ relics became places of pilgrimage for those seeking help, comfort, or blessing. Missionaries and converts often fused existing local religious customs with Christian teachings. For example, landscape features such as lakes or mountains sacred to indigenous gods became associated with specific saints, as did various aspects of ordinary life, such as traveling, planting crops, and childbirth. Saints’ days came to punctuate the calendar, providing days of rest or celebration with rituals of veneration and worship.
The third century brought civil war, invasions, and economic chaos to the Roman Empire. Hoping that Christianity could be a unifying force in an empire plagued by problems, Emperor Constantine (r. 306–337) ordered toleration of all religions in the Edict of Milan, issued in 313. He supported the Christian Church throughout his reign, expecting in return the support of church officials in maintaining order, and late in his life he was baptized as a Christian. Constantine also freed the clergy from imperial taxation, called and appeared at councils that decided theological issues, and endowed the building of Christian churches, especially in the new capital he was building for the Roman Empire at Byzantium, an old Greek city on the Bosporus, a strait on the boundary between Europe and Asia. He named the city the “New Rome,” though it was soon called Constantinople. Constantine also declared Sunday a public holiday, choosing it over the Jewish holy day of Saturday because it fit with his own worship of the sun god, a practice shared by many Romans. The annual celebration of the birthday of Jesus was set at midwinter, when Romans were already celebrating the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice. Thus Roman as well as Germanic and other pre-Christian religious traditions were assimilated into Christianity. Christians altered their practices to follow the emperor’s decrees; worship became increasingly elaborate, and clergy began to wear ornate clothing and use expensive symbols of authority modeled on those of the emperor.
Some Christians objected to these clo
se connections between church and state, wondering if Christianity could be both powerful and holy. Men and women who thought this way sometimes left cities and went into the Egyptian desert to live as ascetics, or formed themselves into monastic communities somewhat cut off from the world, similar to the monasteries that emerged in Buddhism.
Helped in part by its favored position, Christianity slowly became the leading religion in the empire, and emperors after Constantine continued to promote it. In 380 the emperor Theodosius (r. 379–395) made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. He allowed the church to establish its own courts and to use its own body of law, called “canon law.” With this he laid the foundation for later growth in church power.
Christianity was not able to hold the whole Roman Empire together, but capable military leadership and powerful fortifications protecting the city of Constantinople and some border areas allowed the eastern half of the empire to withstand attacks and remain in existence for another thousand years, becoming what people later termed the Byzantine Empire. (Those who actually lived in the Byzantine Empire called themselves “Romans” and their state the “Roman Empire,” thus emphasizing cultural and political continuities.) The western half of the empire gradually disintegrated, as the emperors ruling from Constantinople could not provide enough military assistance to repel invaders, which included Germanic peoples such as the Goths and Vandals and nomadic central Asian steppe peoples, especially the Huns. In 476, a Germanic chieftain, Odoacer, deposed the Roman emperor in the west and did not take on the title of emperor, calling himself instead the king of Italy. This date marks the official end of the Roman Empire in the west, although much of the empire had come under the rule of various barbarian tribes well before that.
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