Gandhara

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A grey schist relief, broken at one corner, shows a man in a Greek himation — the heavy draped cloak of a Mediterranean philosopher — standing in a slight contrapposto sway, weight on one leg, the folds of cloth falling in deep parallel runnels. His face is youthful, almost Apollonian; his hair is gathered into a wavy topknot. On his brow, between the eyebrows, sits a small raised disc, and the cloth that should be a Greek pallium is, on inspection, a monk’s robe. This is the Buddha — not symbolized by a footprint, an empty throne, a parasol, or a wheel, as the earliest Buddhist art had shown him for three centuries, but rendered as a body, with a face one could meet. The relief was carved in the river valleys around Peshawar and Taxila, in the country the Indians called Gandhāra and the Persians wrote as Gandāra. It is one of the most consequential objects in the religious history of Asia, because the form it fixed — robed, serene, dressed in a vocabulary borrowed from the Aegean — would travel east along the trade routes and become the standard image of the Buddha from Bamiyan to Nara.

A name older than its empires

The region’s name is very old. Gandhārī appears already in the Rigveda — late in the second millennium BCE — in the homely phrase gandhārīnām avikā, the ewe of the Gandharans, and again in the somewhat later Atharva Veda. Around 400 BCE the grammarian Pāṇini, who himself probably came from the region, lists Gāndhāra among the major provinces of the Indian world. Geographically it lay along both banks of the Indus, gathered around two great cities — Takshaśilā, the Taxila of the Greeks, and Pushkalāvatī (modern Charsadda, northeast of Peshawar) — and reached west across the whole valley of the Kabul river to where it meets the Indus. It is a hinge of geography: the last fertile basin before the mountain passes that open onto the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, and the first the traveler crosses coming the other way. Everything that defines Gandhara follows from that position. It was never a single people’s homeland so much as a corridor where peoples and gods met, and the layering of those meetings is the substance of its history.

The four-fold layering

The Iranian floor. The first imperial layer was Persian. Under the Achaemenids, Gandhāra was a satrapy of the empire — its name stands in the great royal lists of Darius I among the lands that paid tribute, alongside the neighboring countries of Bactria and Sogdiana (Sogdia). For roughly two centuries the administrative language of the region was Aramaic, the chancery tongue of the Achaemenid Empire, and its religious horizon was tilted west toward the Iranian world — toward the fire-cult and the cosmology of Mazda-worship that the Avestan hymns place in exactly these eastern Iranian lands. The Avesta itself names Bactria and the Central Asian east, not western Persia, as the homeland of Zoroaster’s preaching; Gandhara sat on the Indian edge of that vision’s reach. This Iranian floor never wholly disappeared. It would resurface in the Sasanian campaigns of the third century CE, in the Iranian deities stamped on later coinage, and in the Mazdean and Mithraic strands (mithraic-mysteries) that ran through the region’s syncretic religious life.

The Hellenistic horizon. In 327–326 BCE Alexander of Macedon crossed the passes and fought his way through Gandhara to the Indus and beyond, and though his eastern empire dissolved within a generation, the Greek presence did not. The Seleucid successors ceded these lands to the rising Mauryan power, but along the Kabul valley and in the cities of Bactria a Greek-speaking population took root, and out of it grew the Hellenistic kingdoms of the east — first Greco-Bactrian, then, pressing south into Gandhara, the Indo-Greek kings. The most celebrated of these, Menander, ruling in the second century BCE from a capital in the northwest, entered Indian memory under the name Milinda. The Milindapañha — “The Questions of King Milinda” — preserves a long Socratic dialogue between this Yona (Greek) king and the Buddhist monk Nāgasena, in which the king interrogates the doctrines of no-self, rebirth, and the conditioned arising of things, and is brought, question by question, toward the teaching. Whether the historical Menander truly took refuge in the Dharma is debated; that a Greek king of Gandhara became the protagonist of a canonical Buddhist text is itself the measure of how completely the two worlds had begun to interpenetrate.

The Mauryan-Buddhist seeding. Between the Greek floruit and its echo came the Mauryas. After Seleucus ceded the northwest to Chandragupta in the peace of 305 BCE, Gandhara passed under Indian imperial rule, and in the third century BCE the emperor Ashoka — having turned, by his own account, from conquest to the Dharma — broadcast Buddhist ethics across his realm in carved edicts. At Kandahar, in the old Achaemenid satrapy of Arachosia just to the west, his officials cut his earliest known inscription, around 260 BCE, in two languages: Greek and Aramaic. The choice is itself a portrait of the region — an Indian emperor addressing a population that read the chancery script of the vanished Persian empire and the language of Alexander’s settlers, all in the service of a teaching born on the Ganges. From this period the monasteries of Gandhara begin: the great foundation at Taxila, the stupas whose relic-deposits would later cradle the first Buddha images. The seed of Buddhism was planted in soil already cross-furrowed by three traditions.

The Kushan flowering. The flowering came with the Kushans, a dynasty of Central Asian origin — descended from the Yuezhi confederation that had pushed out of the steppe through Bactria — who by the first century CE had made Gandhara the heart of an empire reaching from the Oxus to the Gangetic plain. Their greatest king, Kanishka I (most often dated to a reign of roughly 127–150 CE), ruled from Purushapura, modern Peshawar, and became a patron of the Buddhist order on a scale the region had never seen. Under the Kushans the trade in silk, gold, and ideas that bound Han China to Rome passed straight through Gandhara, and the wealth of that traffic built monasteries and reliquary stupas across the Peshawar and Taxila valleys. It was in this Kushan crucible — Indian in faith, Iranian in dynasty, Hellenistic in artistic vocabulary, and global in commerce — that the Buddha received his human face.

The image born here

For about three centuries after the Buddha’s death, Buddhist art had been aniconic. Where the teacher himself should stand, the early reliefs of Bhārhut and Sāñchī placed a sign: a riderless horse for the great renunciation, a tree for the awakening, a wheel for the first sermon, a pair of footprints, an empty throne. The presence was indicated by absence. Then, around the turn of the first century CE, in two places at once — in Gandhara and, far to the southeast, at Mathura on the Yamunā — that restraint broke, and the Buddha was given a body.

The two solutions were distinct, and the modern consensus is that they arose independently and nearly simultaneously. Mathura sculpted in warm red sandstone, building its Buddha out of the robust, broad-shouldered yakṣa nature-spirits its workshops had carved for generations — an Indian image from Indian roots. Gandhara reached for the Mediterranean. Its sculptors, working in grey-blue schist, gave the Buddha the proportions of a Greek god and the drapery of a Roman senator: the heavy toga-like robe with its deep carved folds, the wavy hair drawn up over the cranial protuberance (uṣṇīṣa) so that it reads at once as a topknot and as the mark of an awakened being, the calm frontal gaze of late-antique portrait sculpture. The earliest datable examples sit in the relic-deposits of the Kushan stupas. The Bimaran casket, a small gold reliquary excavated in the 1830s in eastern Gandhara and now generally dated to the deposit of around 20–60 CE, shows the Buddha standing in contrapposto in a Greek himation, flanked by the Indian gods Brahmā and Indra — the whole syncretic equation in a single object the size of a fist. Confirmation that the image was current in Kanishka’s reign is stamped in metal: his gold coinage carries, on the reverse, a standing haloed Buddha labeled in Greek letters, BODDO.

That this happened in Gandhara was no accident, and it is the clearest case of syncretism in the religious history of Asia. The region had, ready to hand, a four-century-old Hellenistic figural tradition — workshops that knew how to render a draped standing human figure with dignity and weight — and a Buddhist patron class hungry for an object of devotion that the older aniconic conventions could not supply. The doctrinal turn that made the image welcome belonged to the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle, whose devotional reorientation toward the Buddha as a transcendent, venerable presence — and toward the ranks of bodhisattvas who postpone their own release for the sake of all beings — created exactly the religious need that a sculpted, worshipable Buddha-body answered. Gandhara was also a great Mahāyāna intellectual center: it was in this northwestern Buddhist world that the philosopher Nāgārjuna, active around the second century CE, developed the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness — the demonstration that no thing carries inherent, independent existence — which became the metaphysical spine of the Mahāyāna. (Madhyamaka and the Theravāda current of southern Buddhism each have their own distinct development; Gandhara’s gift to the broader tradition was the carried image and the early scriptural witness.)

The carrier

What Gandhara made, Gandhara exported. The trade arteries that ran north and west out of the Peshawar valley — over the Hindu Kush, through Bactria and Sogdia, across the Tarim oases to the Gansu corridor and the Han frontier — were the same roads the monks walked. They carried the schist Buddha as a template. The colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan, cut into a cliff in the central Afghan highlands; the cave shrines of the Tarim Basin; the early Buddhist sculpture of China, Korea, and Japan — all descend, through a long chain of copying and reinterpretation, from the Greco-Buddhist figure first stabilized in Gandhara. The robe, the topknot, the halo, the meditative composure: the grammar of the Buddha image, wherever it is met in Asia, was first written in this valley.

The same corridor carried more than statues. It was the principal channel by which Buddhism itself moved from India into Central Asia and the Far East, and it carried other faiths in the opposite directions of the same roads. The Iranian religions traveled it: the Mazdean cult of the Kushans’ own coinage, and later the Religion of Light preached by Mani (c. 216–276 CE), whose missionaries pressed up the trade routes into Sogdia and Bactria and whose surviving scriptures — recovered in the twentieth century from the Turfan oasis — are written in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, and Bactrian, the languages of the very corridor that fed Gandhara. In that meeting-zone Manichaeism took on Buddhist colors, presenting Mani in Chinese sources as the Buddha of Light. The roads through Gandhara were less a one-way mission than a long bidirectional conversation among Iranian, Indian, and Hellenistic religious vocabularies, conducted in stone, on coins, and on birch bark.

The written witness

For most of its history Gandhara was known chiefly through its art and through the reports of pilgrims. That changed in 1994, when the British Library acquired twenty-nine fragments of birch-bark scrolls, written in the Gāndhārī language — a Prakrit dialect — in the angular Kharoṣṭhī script, and preserved in an inscribed clay pot in which they had been buried in antiquity. They date to about the first century CE, which makes them the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts known, and indeed the oldest manuscripts of any kind from South Asia. The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project at the University of Washington, founded in 1996 under Richard Salomon, has since gathered the study of more than seventy such scrolls — sūtras, commentaries, avadāna narratives, and Abhidharma — held in the British Library, the Senior and Schøyen collections, and elsewhere. They reveal a Gandhāran Buddhist literature with its own canon-in-formation, a regional school transmitting the teaching in its own tongue and script before the great standardized Sanskrit and Pali canons closed. The image was not the region’s only export; so was a written tradition, and through it the texts that fed the Buddhist literatures of Central Asia and China.

The Kushan kings convened, in tradition, a great Buddhist council in Kashmir under Kanishka’s patronage, associated with the Sarvāstivāda school and the systematization of its Abhidharma — a gathering remembered in the later tradition as a fourth council, though its details are debated. What is certain is that Gandhāra under the Kushans functioned as a workshop of the whole tradition: of its image, its philosophy, its scripture, and its outward transmission.

The long descent

The flowering did not last. In the third century the Sasanian shahs campaigned into the northwest and reduced the Kushan kings to vassals, reasserting the Iranian floor. The decisive blow came later, from the steppe. In the middle of the fifth century the Hephthalite confederation — the Alchon group of the so-called White Huns — swept into Gandhāra. The great monastic complexes around Taxila, Dharmarājikā and Jaulian among them, were sacked; tradition counts more than a thousand monasteries destroyed in the reign of the Hun king Mihirakula, a worshipper of Śiva hostile to the Buddhist order. When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang crossed Gandhāra around 630 CE, on his long overland journey to the holy places of India, he found the monasteries deserted and the stupas in ruin, the land’s Buddhist life all but spent and its devotion turning toward the Hindu gods. The region that had given the Buddha his face had, within a few centuries of doing so, ceased to keep him.

Yet the schist Buddha of Gandhāra long outlived the workshops that cut it and the kingdom that paid for them. By the time the last monastery fell silent in the Peshawar valley, the figure first composed there — robed in a Mediterranean cloak, crowned with an Indian topknot, gazing with the stillness of an awakened mind — was already being carved into cliffs a thousand miles north and cast in bronze in foundries on the far side of the continent.

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