Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes

Anna Akasoy, Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138247048
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351926058
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century onwards the spread of the Mongol Empire from the Western borders of Europe through Central Asia to China facilitated further exchanges. The significance of these interactions has been long ignored in scholarship. This volume represents a major contribution to the subject, bringing together new studies by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars. They explore for the first time the multi-layered contacts between the Islamic world, Central Asia and the Himalayas from the eighth century until the present day in a variety of fields, including geography, cartography, art history, medicine, history of science and education, literature, hagiography, archaeology, and anthropology.

Chapter 1

Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions – An Introduction

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

In the mid-eighth century three major empires abutted each other: the Abbasid Empire, founded in 750, which established its new capital at Baghdad in 762 and embraced the culture of Persia; the Tibetan Empire, which reached its height in the early ninth century; and Tang China (618-907) in the east, with its capital of Chang-an (Xi’an), spilling out into the Tarim Basin (East Turkistan, now Xinjiang). Cutting across these political regions were two powerful religious movements: Buddhism, which from its origins in northern India, challenged and eventually displaced local religions in China and Tibet, and Islam, which spread from the West over the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia, reaching China and the Tibetan borderlands. These political and religious movements of the eighth century were to shape the development of Central Asian civilizations for many centuries to come, and can still be discerned in the societies of the region today. It is to the ways in which the Islamic empire, in particular, impinged on Tibet (and vice versa), and to the role of Muslims in Tibetan society that this book is devoted.

By ‘Tibet’ is meant more than the geographical area of the Tibetan Plateau, or any current political construct such as the ‘Tibetan Autonomous Region’ (TAR). Regions that participated in Tibetan culture, such as Ladakh and Baltistan, are also included. Above all, Tibet is viewed as it was conceived throughout its changing history by its Islamic neighbours. And similarly, the lands of Islam are considered as viewed in Tibetan literature. Thus this book begins with an essay by Anna Akasoy on Tibet in Islamic geography and cartography: what names did the Arabic authorities have for Tibet, and what land did they mean when they referred to ‘Tubbat’ (which is taken to be the Arabic equivalent to Tibet)? How did they obtain their information? And did their knowledge of the area change over time? The primary aim of the article is to trace the tradition of the concept of Tibet in Arabic literature, rather than to exploit that literature for reliable information about Tibet in historical times. Thus the Arabic tales refer to conversions to Islam in Tibet; they claim that those who visit the country are so overwhelmed with such joy that they cannot refrain from laughing and that the country abounds with gold and musk.

In Tibetan there are a number of terms that refer to the Islamic empire and its people, of which the most important are stag gzig, par sig, khrom/phrom and kha che. Stag gzig in its various spellings (stag gzigs, ta zig, ta zhig, ta chig) as well as par sig (par sil, pa ra si ka) refer in many cases, but not always, to Muslims or to Arabs in general. The earliest mentions of these names are to be found in the Tibetan Dunhuang material.¹ In Pelliot Tib. 1283, dated to the second half of the eighth century or the first half of the ninth,² we find a reference to the par sil tribe³ along with a mention of the ta zhig.⁴ A reference to the land of ta zig is documented in a Tibetan medical text from Dunhuang which describes methods of moxibustion, and mentions the land of ta zig as a source for paper.⁵ The early renderings of the name par sig support a direct linguistic link, as suggested by Uray, between Tibetan and Early Middle Persian or possibly Sogdian.⁶

1.1 Tibetan Empire, 8th century (estimation)

The name ta zig is related to ‘Tajik’, now the name of Tibet’s closest Persian-speaking neighbours. Another Tibetan term that refers to lands in the West derives from ‘Rome’ (or ‘Rum’, Byzantium): Khrom (or: Phrom). As Dan Martin explains in his contribution here, it is hard to know where the exact delineation between Tazig and Khrom stands from the Tibetan point of view, and probably all we can state with any degree of certainty is that in Tibetan they refer to areas in close proximity to each other.

A significant contact with Muslims was through neighbouring Kashmir. So many Muslims had arrived in Tibet through plying their trade via Kashmir that Muslim settlers in Tibet were called by a name deriving from the name ‘Kashmir’: kha che. Whether this term already meant ‘Muslim’ in general, rather than ‘Kashmiri’ in a mention of kha che silk in a Dunhuang manuscript from the ninth century is not clear.⁷

Kashmir had already been an important cultural junction in the seventh and eighth centuries when Buddhist scriptures and scientific works were transmitted from there both to Tibet and to the emerging Islamic culture. This is the subject of the article by Kevin van Bladel. Barmak, the father of the Barmakid family, was an educated Buddhist official from Tokharistan (Bactria), an area where Buddhism and its related Sanskrit sciences flourished at the time the Arabs arrived. The family then became very important in the Abbasid court in Baghdad and the Barmak’s grandson, Yaḥyā, became the tutor and then the powerful minister of the caliph, Hārūn al-Rashīd (reg. 786-809). Van Bladel demonstrates how, as a result of Yaḥyā’s Buddhist roots and his family ties with Tokharistan and Kashmir, Yaḥyā facilitated a substantial translation enterprise from Sanskrit to Arabic in the Caliph’s court. A major outcome of this enterprise was the monumental translation of the Indian medical classics into Arabic: the Suśruta, the Aṣṭaṅgahṛdaya saṃhitā of Vāgbhaṭa and the Siddhasāra of Ravigupta. These same texts were also translated into Tibetan a short while later and thereafter became core texts in the Tibetan medical tradition. Although the full impact of the Indian tradition on Arabic medicine is yet to be studied, van Bladel provides sufficient evidence to show its importance, particularly in the area of pharmacopoeia. The cultural links facilitated by the Barmak family are inherently rooted in the special conditions developed in Central Asia in the century after the Arabs arrived and when Buddhism was still widely practised.

Another outcome of the coexistence of Buddhists and Muslims in Central Asia is discussed by Christopher Beckwith, who suggests that the adoption of the scholastic method in the Islamic world was a result of the conversion of the Central Asian Buddhist vihāras (monastic colleges) into Islamic madrasas. According to Beckwith, the conversion incorporated not only the structure, but also the people – and with them their method of learning too. The earliest known examples of the scholastic method appear to be, Beckwith suggests, in commentarial texts of the Sarvāstivādin school of Buddhism, which flourished in Central Asia. The first Muslim writer known to have used the scholastic method is Ibn Sīnā, who was born and educated in Central Asia. The sudden appearance of the scholastic method in Western Europe followed the translation of one of the most important of Ibn Sīnā’s works from Arabic into Latin, and coincided with the transmission of the madrasa to Europe as the college.

Whereas texts can often demonstrate precise details of transmission between cultures, as in the cases presented by van Bladel and Beckwith, visual evidence of transmission is not always so clear-cut. Souren Melikian-Chirvani, however, draws attention to some tantalizing hints at this evidence in regard to links between Tibet and Iran. The evidence suggests that at a very early age – at least as early as the mid sixth century BCE – the artefacts of horsemanship, of hunting and warfare of a type known from western Iran, became familiar to the populations of present-day Tibet. Other, later evidence, suggests a clearer link: Melikian-Chirvani discusses three types of silver wine banquet vessels made in the Iranian world which reached Tibet around the seventh–eighth century CE. He also explores the provenance of Persian silk amongst Tibetans: pictorial and material evidence indicate that Persian brocaded silks were used as royal garments in Tibet as early as the seventh century. This includes a fragment of Sasanian silk with a Pahlavi inscription establishing its royal ownership which was recovered from a Tibetan tomb. He also notes the enduring memory of these textiles in the traces they left in western Tibetan mural paintings in Ladakh (Alchi) and Spiti (Tabo). Could it be that the reference found in the Dunhuang manuscript to kha che silk refers to what Melikian-Chirvani is describing from visual evidence? This question is yet to be investigated.

A study conducted by Christopher Beckwith in the late 1970s⁸ brought to light the significance of the influence of medical knowledge originating in areas lying to the west of Tibet on Tibetan medicine. Beckwith mentioned references to medical influence deriving from Tazig and Khrom. These links, as mentioned in one of the earliest histories of Tibetan medicine, are further discussed in this volume by Dan Martin.

The sources discussed by Beckwith, as well as other sources which have come to light in the three decades since he published his article, mention a certain Ga le nos, as one of the four sages who introduced medicine into Tibet. This ‘Galenos’ obviously does not refer to Galen himself, but rather to the transmission of elements of Galenic medicine, which could have arrived in Tibet via Arabic, Persian or Syriac intermediaries.

Interestingly enough, in the earliest extant Tibetan medical history discussed by Martin, this ‘Galenos’ is not mentioned. In this medical history by Che rje, composed in the thirteenth century, there is a reference to another figure who is associated with medicine originating from the West: Tsan pa shi la ha, or as Martin suggests reading his name: Tsan Bashilaha. He suggests ‘Tsan’ refers to his origin from the shores of the Black Sea, and reading ‘Bashilaha’ as ‘Basileos’. More research will be needed to ascertain more about this figure, and the knowledge he may have brought with him. Martin also embarks on a revealing account of the medical content of the book ascribed to this Tsan Bashilaha: the Bi ci’i pu ti kha ser, which has recently been published. A method for detecting invisible skull fractures discussed in this text resembles methods described in Greek and Arabic medicine.

How one might explain the later appearance of the name ‘Galenos’ in Tibetan medical histories remains an open question for the time being. In any case, by the seventeenth century details concerning this ‘Galenos’ are abundant in the Tibetan historical narratives. One of the most detailed accounts of the contacts between Tibetan and Western (Persian) medical sciences is in the medical history by De’u dmar bstan ’dzin phun tshogs (b. 1672).⁹ De’u dmar tells us not only about Ga le nos and Biji Tsan pa shi la ha, the representatives of what seems to be an Arabo-Persian tradition, but also about an entire ‘Biji’ lineage, spanning from Persia to Tibet, or rather from the Persian court and into the Tibetan court. One of the predecessors of the Biji lineage was a certain Ga le thos, who, according to De’u dmar, served as the personal physician to the king of the stag gzig.¹⁰ According to De’u dmar, Biji Ga le thos’s son was the Ga le nos who was invited to Tibet during the reign of Srong btsan sgam po (617–49). We are told that he cured Srong btsan sgam po’s illness and hence was requested to become chief doctor. The younger brother of Ga le nos had two sons – the older was Biji Tsan pa shi la ha, who was invited to Tibet by the Tibetan prince Ljang tsha lha dbon, son of Mes ag tshom (d. 755). Furthermore, De’u dmar tells us, Tshan pa shi la ha: ‘… arrived in the Tibetan kingdom after having been dispatched by the king of Khrom together with 300 [other] masters and students [of medicine] and hence the medical teachings spread’.¹¹

What is particularly interesting about De’u dmar’s account is that it portrays the links with stag gzig doctors as spanning through a continuous period of time. Not only the famous ‘Galenos’, but an entire lineage is associated with stag gzigs and khrom. The significant input from the stag gzig doctors described by De’u dmar leaves us with the question: what was the nature of the medical knowledge that arrived from the Arab-Persian world into the Tibetan medical system? This is a vast question. But some indications can be gained from the analysis of the urine section from the early Tibetan medical text, the Zla ba’i rgyal po,¹² in which doctrines and practices from Western medicine appear among the more evident influences deriving from the Indian and the Chinese spheres. The Zla ba’i rgyal po is an early example of a synthesis of medical ideas deriving from different cultures. How and when did the Western input come to Tibet is still a question to be resolved, but the material acquired so far suggests that further research into theses questions will be highly worthwhile.

Following the initial relations between Tibet and its Muslim neighbours during the time of the Tibetan Empire, contacts continued predominantly via trade. There is evidence that a trade route fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• List of Plates
• Preface
• 1 Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions – An Introduction
• 2 Tibet in Islamic Geography and Cartography: A Survey of Arabic and Persian Sources
• 3 The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids
• 4 Iran to Tibet
• 5 Greek and Islamic Medicines’ Historical Contact with Tibet: A Reassessment in View of Recently Available but Relatively Early Sources on Tibetan Medical Eclecticism
• 6 Tibetan Musk and Medieval Arab Perfumery
• 7 The Sarvastivadin Buddhist Scholastic Method in Medieval Islam and Tibet
• 8 Notes on the Religions in the Mongol Empire
• 9 Tibetans, Mongols and the Fusion of Eurasian Cultures
• 10 Three Rock-Cut Cave Sites in Iran and their Ilkhanid Buddhist Aspects Reconsidered
• 11 The Muslim Queens of the Himalayas: Princess Exchanges in Baltistan and Ladakh
• 12 The Discovery of the Muslims of Tibet by the First Portuguese Missionaries
• 13 So Close to Samarkand, Lhasa: Sufi Hagiographies, Founder Myths and Sacred Space in Himalayan Islam
• 14 Between Legend and History: About the ‘Conversion’ to Islam of Two Prominent Lamaists in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries
• 15 Ritual Theory across the Buddhist-Muslim Divide in Late Imperial China
• 16 Trader, Middleman or Spy? The Dilemmas of a Kashmiri Muslim in Early Nineteenth-Century Tibet
• 17 Do All the Muslims of Tibet Belong to the Hui Nationality?
• 18 Greater Ladakh and the Mobilization of Tradition in the Contemporary Baltistan Movement
• Index of Proper Names