Tibetan pilgrims continued visiting Swat for at least five hundred years after Padmasambhava’s death, and Buddhist tourists from Japan are not an uncommon sight today. But from the fifth to the seventh centuries CE, it was Chinese monks who were the leading chroniclers of Swat’s great Buddhist flourishing–and of its steady deterioration.
These epic pilgrimages began because Chinese Buddhists, originally converted by monks from India, soon yearned for first-hand experience of their faith’s sacred geography. The journey from China to India was long and dangerous: north through the Icy Mountains, across the Taklamakan desert, and down the perilous northern gorges of the Indus; or via the hazardous southern sea route. But caravans had been taking silk slowly across the world for centuries, and where silk went, Buddhism could follow.
Xuanzang is probably the best known of the pilgrim chroniclers who set out from China and travelled 10,000 miles to witness Swat’s living Buddhism–and being one of the last, he was also the most disillusioned. In 629 CE, with ‘a character of unequalled virtue’, he ‘took his staff, dusted his clothes, and set off for distant regions’. With a bamboo-frame rucksack on his back, Xuanzang crossed the ‘Great Unknown’, visited the Kings of the Silk Road, and paid homage to the Bamiyan Buddhas (fifty-three metres high, and coated with gold). At Bamiyan he turned east, passing by the Buddhist towns near modern-day Kabul and Jalalabad, and trekking through the Khyber pass to Peshawar. Finally, he forded the ‘dark and gloomy’ Indus.
Unfortunately, what Xuanzang saw as he criss-crossed the Indus between India and Uttarapatha, made him despair. In Gandhara the monasteries were ‘filled with wild shrubs and solitary to the last degree’. In Swat the monasteries were ‘waste and desolate’. Along the banks of the river in Sindh the monks were ‘indolent and given to indulgence and debauchery’. Elsewhere, they ate meat–despite being able to hear the squeals of the pigs being killed for them. They were forever squabbling, and ‘their contending utterances,’ Xuanzang found, ‘rise like the angry waves of the sea.’ The serious monks lived ‘alone in desert places’.
But Xuanzang travelled far and wide, and during his long journey met many monks who received him hospitably. At last, with their help, he ‘penetrated to the very source of the stream’ (of religion). What this evocative riverine metaphor meant in practice, was that sixteen years after he set out, Xuanzang returned to China followed by twenty-two horses all laden with booty: 400 ‘grains of relics’, statues of the Buddha in gold, silver and sandalwood, and 520 sutras (holy texts).
It was only when crossing the Indus on his way back to China that Xuanzang met with calamity–his boat overturned and he lost all his botanical collections and sutras. ‘It has been so from days of old till now,’ the local king explained to the bedraggled monk; ‘whoever attempts to cross the river with seeds of flowers is subject to similar misfortunes.’ Such was the power of the Indus in antiquity. Xuanzang patiently had the sutras recopied, and went on without the seeds.
Back in China, Xuanzang’s trip was a huge success. He was called ‘the jewel of the empire’ and became a pet hero of the Tang dynasty. Both the detailed account of his visit which he wrote up for the Tang emperor on his return, and his contemporaneous authorized biography, became–for the Chinese at the time, and scholars subsequently–a gold mine of information about Indian Buddhism.
But for a religious man, it had been a journey of bitterness. India was no longer a Buddhist heartland. Xuanzang had read the pilgrim account written by Fa Hsien, the best known of the Chinese monks to have preceded him to that fabled realm, and he could see that the number of Buddhist lay people had declined, the religious places and buildings were crumbling, the support extended by local Indian kings had waned, and even the moral purity of the monks themselves was under question.
Just two centuries earlier, when Fa Hsien made the same pilgrimage in 420 CE, ‘everything was flourishing’ in Indian Buddhism. Fa Hsien, who hailed from eastern China, reached India just as Swat was experiencing a Buddhist resurgence. He, too, followed a difficult route into India, along the notoriously dangerous upper course of the Indus. There were venomous dragons which spat ‘gravel’, the valleys ‘were difficult to walk in’ and the gorges so high, it made one’s ‘head swim’. But once in the easy green valley of Swat, Fa Hsien was able to relax. He had set out from China with one mission: to collect ‘the Books of Discipline’ (such was the ‘mutilated and imperfect state of the collection’ in China). Luckily for him, Buddhism was then at its pinnacle of strength in north-west India.
The Buddha almost certainly never visited Swat, but the Silk Road drew him to it posthumously. Three hundred years after his death, Buddhism invented for itself a whole new field of worship in Uttarapatha. Along the upper course of the Indus, near Skardu, Fa Hsien was shown such unlikely relics as the Buddha’s spittoon and his tooth. Near the source of the Swat river, above Kalam, he saw the Buddha’s footprint in a rock. Further south on the banks of the ‘Su-po-sa-tu’ (the Swat river was called the Suvastu in Sanskrit), he worshipped at the place where the Buddha had dried his clothes, and again at the scene of his conversion of a wicked dragon. That was about as far as ancient tour guides could stretch the Buddha’s historical existence.
Nothing, however, could stop them embellishing his past lives. The Buddha was omniscient–he could remember the past, going back billions of infinite aeons–and his previous incarnations obligingly furnished endless new pilgrimage sites in Swat. There were the places where he had gorged out his eyes, decapitated himself, or offered up his body to feed birds, animals or humans, such was his doctrine of selfless renunciation (‘no-self’). At each site, a stupa (reliquary) was erected, bearing witness to these exemplary acts. Around the stupas grew monasteries; around the monasteries, communities of monks; and Gandhara and Swat grew too, ever more in importance.
Buddhism liked hills–ideally monks should live at one remove from lay people, yet near enough to beg their midday meal from villages–and archaeologists have found some form of Buddhist settlement on almost every Swati high place. The monks chose wisely: in the paralysing heat of April it is the archaeological sites, alone in all Swat, which are cool and breezy.
Butkara, the main monastery in the region, was unearthed in Mingora, Swat’s small hillside capital, in 1956. When the archaeologists began work on it, the site was a mound of mud–a last trace of the flood which buried the monastery and town in the seventh century CE. But beneath the silt, the archaeologists found seven distinct periods of Buddhist history, each one superimposed upon the other.
Butkara is a short walk from the centre of Mingora, and when I arrive there one quiet afternoon, strolling down through the wheat fields and under an avenue of trees, there are only two other people sitting beside the stupa. They jump up as I approach, surprised to see visitors. One is the old watchman, who makes me a cup of tea, and the other is Sanaullah, a history student from Peshawar University, who spends his free time in the shadow of these exotic old stones, dreaming of black schist, blue lapis lazuli and gold relic caskets.
It is Sanaullah who makes me appreciate how the stupa expanded like a gilded balloon during the millennium of its use, ‘as each new Buddhist king introduced his own art’. He draws a diagram in the dust, of seven concentric circles. The seventh and top layer, he says, corresponds to the time of the flood. The sixth layer represents the state of the monastery as Xuanzang saw it–by which time the buildings were in a state of near collapse, and the original stone floors had been overlaid with beaten earth.
To understand the previous five periods, Sanaullah and I enter the cool stone stupa courtyard. The stupa itself would have been a large, domed structure–not dissimilar in outline, as Sanaullah points out, to a mosque. Carved into the very top of the stupa’s dome were umbrellas–the Buddhist symbol of royalty. All around the main stupa were many smaller votive stupas filled with the bones of monks and patrons, all jostling to be sacred by association. Most of the statues have been removed to Swat’
s museum because of thieves, but there is enough still carved into the stone here–lotus flowers from India, Corinthian pillars from Greece, Persepolitan columns from Persia, Roman cupids–to illustrate the miscellany of motifs used in Swati Buddhism. Butkara thus incarnated in stone, gold and paint one thousand years of Swat’s continuous Buddhist history, its changing rulers, schools and fortunes.
Each king, Sanaullah explains, added new sculptures and stonework to the dome itself. The fifth layer, decorated with scenes from the life of the Buddha, was embellished by a succession of Indo-Greek and Saka kings and it was this that Song Yun, another Chinese pilgrim, saw when he visited Butkara in 518, and wrote of the six thousand dazzling gold statues there (the gold wash that archae ologists detected on many of the stone images corroborates this). The fourth layer, with its dramatic stucco statues of the Buddha, was commissioned by King Kanishka in the fourth century. Below this was a stupa faced with green and white soapstone, made during the reign of Azes II, king of the Scythian or Saka nomads from Central Asia, in the first century. The second layer, of schist and pink plaster, was the work of the first-century BCE King Menander, an Indo-Greek. And the first and deepest layer of all–the original stupa, built simply and coarsely from pebbles and plaster enclosing the sacred relic casket–was erected in the third century BCE by the Indian emperor Ashoka. Here archaeologists also found a fourth-century potsherd painted with Greek characters–probably brought to Swat by the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
Sanuallah points out the sixteen niches around the walls which once contained stone and stucco statues of the Buddha; the chipped stone floor that was inlaid with lapis lazuli (‘the Japanese tourists steal it,’ he says); and the stone carvings of humans and animals still visible in the walls of the stupa or, in the case of the lions which once surmounted pillars at the stupa’s gates, newly cemented to the ground. ‘These lions symbolize both Emperor Ashoka and the Buddha,’ says Sanaullah.
Swat, as Fa Hsien saw it, was the legacy of King Kanishka: an energetic patron of Buddhism from the Kushan dynasty. The Kushans arrived in Uddiyana two hundred years before Fa Hsien, probably from north-western China. King Kanishka made Peshawar his capital, organized the Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir (during which Buddhist doctrines were codified), and despatched missionaries and texts to China. Kanishka had eclectic tastes: his coins were embossed with Greek, Iranian and Indian deities, and–for the first time in history–with an image of the Buddha.
During Kushan rule, the production of Buddha images became a cottage industry in north-western India. Carved into bare rock, blocks of stone and, later, soft stucco, these icons became so important that, in China, immigrant Buddhism became known as the ‘religion of the images’.
It was over the role of images, of course, that Islam distinguished itself most flamboyantly from Buddhism. Sultan Mahmud had prized his reputation as a but-shikan–image-destroyer–the word ‘but’ (idol) referring to Buddhist statues that the Muslims encountered in Bamiyan and Ghazni, and to Hindu images they saw in India later. Ironically, as Sanaullah points out, ‘just as modern Muslims forbid the worship of images of our leader’, so did early Buddhists.
Image worship was a new and contentious development for second-century Buddhists and, for some, it went against the previous seven centuries of their faith’s history. The emergence of image worship just before, or during, Kanishka’s reign was a result of the huge changes in Buddhism that took place four hundred years after its founder’s death. Early Buddhism, with its focus on meditation as the route to enlightenment, was centred around the monastic life. But lay people wanted to be enlightened too. ‘Mahayana’, a movement away from Buddhism as its founder envisaged it, stressed instead the intercessionary role played by the pantheon of bodhisattvas (future Buddhas, awaiting final reincarnation), and the importance of texts, images and artefacts. Images of the Buddha were the natural corollary. But many Indian monks viewed these handsome stone statues as vulgar and debased, and the Buddhist community was split irreparably.
In north-western India, at a significant distance from the main Buddhist community in eastern India, the Buddha came to be seen not just as a wise human, but as immortal and godlike, under the patronage of three consecutive dynasties–the Kushans, and before them the Parthians and Sakas (all western immigrants to Uttarapatha). Buddhist art up to this point had represented the Buddha by his absence–by the horse he rode, the royal umbrella he once carried, or the footprints he left. But in first-and second-century Uttarapatha, an entirely new school of art arose, depicting him in his complete human form. Some masons carved the Buddha standing, one arm raised in protection; others showed him sitting with his eyes closed in meditation; still others, as an emaciated skeleton (from the time before his enlightenment). Sometimes, reflecting Indian ideas, his ears were elongated and the crown of his head raised to show the usina or sacred bump; at other times he wore a thickly draped toga with a halo glowing around his head (this was the sun disc, adopted from Persia). Smaller, intimate friezes described his early life in east India–his birth, schooling and departure from his kingdom–and significant moments from his past lives. Along the edges of all these religious scenes hovered vibrant glimpses of secular life: voluptuous, gauzily clad dancing-girls; rich devotees in mountain caps, carrying relic boxes; peepul trees, palm fronds and elephants.
Along with the Buddha and the bodhisattvas, as objects of worship, were added the local gods of India. Mahayana accepted all the erstwhile Vedic deities, who were now shown bowing in subservience to the Buddha; the god of wealth was included (to please the mercantile middle classes); and for the peasants there was a rich abundance of ancient animal spirits, water gods and nagas–serpent deities or dragons, guardians of lakes, springs and rivers.
Just as the appearance of the Buddha image divided the Buddhist community during the first century CE, so eighteen hundred years later, when European historians began examining Buddhist history, the issue of the image again caused controversy in India. Many of the early Buddha statues were unearthed by British colonial officers, who, as one historian writes, felt ‘a sense of relief’ on beholding in those classical lines ‘something that was familiar to them’. Unlike the ‘strange and exuberant’ multi-armed goddesses that filled the temples of India, Gandharan Buddhas–with their togas and wreaths, severe noses and straight-backed poses–appeared to have been lifted from Athens or Rome. To the horror of Indian scholars, some Europeans viewed them not as Indian at all, but as copies of something Greek or Roman. Hellenistic art had entered India in the trail left by Alexander the Great; Buddhism arrived from the east at exactly the same moment; the Buddha statues, Europeans argued, were surely influenced by Greek prototypes. Once again, the scholarship of ancient India divided along familiar lines. Was it invented in India, or imported from outside?
Standing in Mingora’s museum face to face with toga-clad Buddhas, in front of stone friezes framed by vine leaves, or before coins punched with images of laurel-crested kings and club-wielding Hercules, the Western influences on the stonemasons and craftspeople of Uddiyana is manifest. So too is the influence of work from China, India and Persia. Today, the best-preserved illustration of the richness and depth of influences on which Buddhist artists drew, can be seen in the treasures unearthed at Begram, the site of King Kanishka’s summer capital near Kabul. There, archaeologists found glasses painted with the battle of Achilles and Hector; blue blown-glass fish; Chinese lacquerwork; Indian ivories showing scenes from the Buddha’s life; Graeco-Roman bronzes of Alexander the Great, Hercules and Athena; a bronze plate of fish with fins and tails that wave in the wind; a plaster sculpture of Aphrodite; ivory wasp-waisted river goddesses standing on the makara, an aquatic beast; and my favourite of all, sculpted into clay during the first century CE, the buxom Kinnari, a mythical bird-woman who is still painted on the back of Pakistani trucks today.
The quibble over whether Gandharan art is the child of Greece or India has merely obscured a much more magnificen
t phenomenon–the mutual interest that these two cultures found in each other. In Swat and Gandhara, Greek and Indian art forms, languages and social structures commingled like rivers for a brief and mutually sympathetic moment.
King Menander, who built the penultimate layer of the Butkara stupa in the first century BCE, was an Indo-Greek. He was also a Buddhist. The archaeologist John Marshall portrayed Menander’s Buddhism as wholly pragmatic:
in Menander’s case it was obviously a matter of policy to espouse the Buddhist cause and thus secure the support of what was obviously at that time probably the strongest religious body in the Punjab and the North-West.
But Menander’s passion for Buddhism appears to have gone beyond mere rhetoric. He absorbed Uddiyana within his kingdom, and built upon Ashoka’s stupas, including that at Butkara. He expanded the ancient town of Taxila, on the left bank of the Indus, which had long housed a Hindu university. According to the Kushan-era Buddhist text, Milindapanha (Milinda’s Questions), which purports to be a philosophical dialogue between King Menander and his Buddhist teacher, Nagasena, the King was a deeply committed Buddhist. The Buddhist tradition, at least, enthusiastically embraced the notion of its foreign Greek convert.
Empires of the Indus Page 21