Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara

An Introduction with Selected Translations

Salomon Richard

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781614291688
• eBook ISBN: 9781614291855
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

Discover the fascinating history of a long-hidden Buddhist culture at a historic crossroads.

In the years following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the East, a series of empires rose up along the Silk Road. In what is now northern Pakistan, the civilizations in the region called Gandhara became increasingly important centers for the development of Buddhism, reaching their apex under King Kaniska of the Kusanas in the second century CE. Gandhara has long been known for its Greek-Indian synthesis in architecture and statuary, but until about twenty years ago, almost nothing was known about its literature. The insights provided by manuscripts unearthed over the last few decades show that Gandhara was indeed a vital link in the early development of Buddhism, instrumental in both the transmission of Buddhism to China and the rise of the Mahayana tradition. The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara surveys what we know about Gandhara and its Buddhism, and it also provides translations of a dozen different short texts, from similes and stories to treatises on time and reality. 

PART I

Contexts

1. The World of Gandhāran Buddhism

Gandhāra and India’s Northwest Frontier

GANDHĀRA is the ancient name, attested since the time of early Vedic texts dating back at least three thousand years, for the Peshawar Valley and adjoining regions along the Kabul River, stretching for about one hundred miles between the Suleiman Mountains on the edge of the Iranian plateau to the west and the Indus River on the east. In modern terms, Gandhāra corresponds to the area around Peshawar, capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly North-West Frontier Province) of Pakistan.

But the term Gandhāra — or more accurately, Greater Gandhāra — is also applied more broadly to surrounding areas. This territory includes the Swat Valley to the north, the western Punjab including the ancient metropolis of Taxila to the east, eastern Afghanistan to the west, and in the north Bactria (modern northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan), and even parts of the region around the Tarim Basin in Central Asia in the modern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. All of these regions came under the cultural influence of Gandhāra during its glory days in the early centuries of the Common Era and thereby adopted the Gāndhārī language as a literary and administrative medium and Gandhāran Buddhism as their dominant religion. Thus Greater Gandhāra can be understood as a primarily linguistic rather than a political term, that is, as comprising the regions where Gāndhārī was the indigenous or adopted language.

With the spread of Gandhāran cultural and political power into Central Asia, particularly under the Kuṣāṇa emperors in the first and second centuries CE, Gandhāra came to be directly linked into the commerce of the silk roads, tapping into the lucrative trade in luxury goods between China and the Western world. This source of wealth was no doubt one of the major factors in the power and prosperity of the Kuṣāṇas. Besides the economic benefits that the silk road traffic brought to Gandhāra, it also provided cultural and artistic stimuli leading to the development of an eclectic Buddhist culture incorporating Central Asian and Hellenistic ideas and imagery, while also opening the way for the exportation of Buddhism into Central Asia and China.

The Bloody History of Paradise

In 1978, a Japanese rock group called Godiego recorded in English a song called “Gandhara” as the theme song for the television drama Saiyūki, or “Monkey.” These lyrics read in part:

A long time ago when men were all babes,

there was a land of the free.

Fantasy and dreams

were its untouched wealth,

and goodness and love were real.

Each man desires to reach Gandhara,

his very own utopia.

In the striving, in the seeking soul,

man can see Gandhara.

In Gandhara, Gandhara,

they say it was in India.

Gandhara, Gandhara,

the place of light, Gandhara.

Here we see the image of Gandhāra as it was, and still is, imagined by East Asian Buddhists: a magical holy land of peace and harmony. The television show Saiyūki was based on a popular Chinese novel of the sixteenth century, an imaginative account of the famous Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to Gandhāra and other parts of India nearly a millennium earlier. This idealized presentation of Gandhāra is a distant reflection of the glory days of Gandhāran Buddhism in the early years of the Common Era. Even by the time of Xuanzang’s epic journey to India in the early seventh century, Buddhism had largely declined in Gandhāra. But he was still able to see its legacy in the form of stūpas and other monuments, many of which still dot the landscape today, especially in the Swat Valley, and to collect the legends of its splendors and wonders in the centuries before his time.

Figure 6. The Manikiala stūpa.

The situation in this region today could hardly be more different. It is currently the epicenter of an ongoing bitter struggle between radical Islamists on one side and the ruling powers of Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other, each side fueled by foreign supporters. The willful destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban in 2001 and the assassination of Osama bin Laden by American military forces in Abbotabad, Pakistan, in 2011, both within the territory of Greater Gandhāra, are only two of the most widely publicized battles in this war between the forces of fundamentalism and modernism. Viewed from a broad historic perspective, these conflicts are a sequel to the three Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the Great Game, the struggle throughout the nineteenth century between the expanding British and Russian empires for control of Afghanistan.

But even then, strife was nothing new to this region. Throughout history, from the earliest recorded times, Gandhāra has been the scene of frequent wars and invasions from the west into the Indian subcontinent. This turbulent history is the inevitable outcome of its geographical and cultural setting. Gandhāra is an archetypal frontier region situated on a fault line between major geo-cultural zones. Lying on the seam between the Iranian world to the west, the Indian world to the east, and Central Asia to the north, it is the place where, again and again throughout history, these and sometimes other worlds have collided. The passes linking the Iranian plateau and the plains of the Punjab and northern India, including the fabled Khyber Pass, which leads directly into Gandhāra proper, have served for thousands of years as a geographical funnel into India, whose fertility, vast population, and fabled luxuries have enticed conquerors and settlers since the very dawn of history. It was through this funnel that, some four millennia ago, speakers of Indo-European languages began entering northern India, where they would establish the Sanskritic culture that has predominated in the Indian cultural world ever since.

In view of its role as a frontier region and zone of transit between several cultural regions, it is not surprising that Gandhāra has always had a distinct and complex cultural identity. On the one hand, Gandhāra has usually been culturally more part of India than of the Iranian world, despite the constant influence of and frequent political domination from the west, whether Hellenistic, Iranian, Afghan, or Central Asian. In this regard, the rugged mountains that define the western border of Gandhāra proper have also functioned as a cultural boundary, if a porous one. But on the other hand, even within the Indian cultural zone Gandhāra has always stood apart as a land on the fringe, with its own distinct ways and identity, and relationships between Gandhāra and the Indian heartland often seem to involve a certain ambivalence. Even in the early Vedic culture some three millennia ago, which was centered in the neighboring Punjab region to the east, Gandhāra was viewed as a foreign land at the outer limits of the known world, strange and vaguely threatening. The earliest Vedic text, the Ṛg Veda, barely mentions Gandhāra, referring only once to wool from Gandhāra, and also, more or less in passing, to the Kabul (Kubhā) and Swat (Suvāstu) Rivers. The somewhat later Atharva Veda, datable to around the early first millennium BCE, mentions Gandhāra only in a charm intended to dispel fevers to the far distant lands to the west and east: “We send the fever to the lands of Gandhāri, Mujavat, Anga, and Magadha.”⁸ In a later stage of Vedic literature, the Chāndogya Upaniṣad contains a parable of a man from Gandhāra who must find the way back to his distant homeland.⁹

But as the cultural purview of the heartland Indian culture in the Gangetic plain expanded in subsequent centuries, Gandhāra began to be brought within the pale. Early Buddhist literature contains several lists of the sixteen great countries of India in the Buddha’s time, and these usually include Gandhāra along with Kamboja (Afghanistan) as the westernmost places. Taxila (Skt Takṣaśilā, Pali Takkasilā) is mentioned frequently in the prose commentaries on the jātaka stories of the Buddha’s past lives as a center of learning to which young men were sent for their education. In the Brahmanical/Hindu tradition of the post-Vedic period, too, Gandhāra seems no longer to be perceived as a foreign land. For example, Pāṇini, the revered supreme grammarian of Sanskrit, was said to have come from the town of Śālātura in the eastern fringe of Gandhāra. Gandhāra is also within the purview of the Mahābhārata epic, in which its king, Subala, and especially his daughter, Gāndhārī — whose name means “woman of Gandhāra” — play major roles. Moreover, the first complete recitation of the entire epic was said to have taken place at Taxila.

Map 2. The World of Early Buddhism

Early Buddhism and Gandhāra

The geographic footprint of early Buddhism was determined by the regions in which the Buddha wandered during his lifetime, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE.¹⁰ During and shortly after the Buddha’s lifetime, Buddhism was limited to the central Ganges-Yamuna Valley and the surrounding regions of north-central and northeastern India, hundreds of miles distant from Gandhāra. This can be seen from the locations of the four most sacred sites of Buddhism: Lumbinī, the Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal’s Terai region, near the Indian border; Bodhgayā in Bihar, where he attained enlightenment; Sārnāth, near Vārāṇasī in eastern Uttar Pradesh, where he first preached the Dharma; and Kuśinagara in the northeastern corner of Uttar Pradesh, where his last life ended in his parinirvāṇa. A similar picture emerges from a study of the names of the places mentioned in early Buddhist literature, especially the locations where he was said to have expounded the various sūtras. By far the most common references — nearly 60 percent according to a representative sampling of Pali texts¹¹ — are places in and around the city of Śrāvastī, the capital of the Kosala kingdom in central north India. After Śrāvastī, the most frequently mentioned location is Rājagṛha, the capital of the kingdom of Magadha, to the southeast of Kosala. Other commonly cited cities are Sāketa, Vaiśālī, Kauśāmbī, Vārāṇasī, and Campā, all of which lie in adjoining territories in and around the central and eastern Ganges Valley. The kingdoms of Kosala and Magadha were ruled during the Buddha’s lifetime by Kings Prasenajit and Ajātaśatru, and the prestige and material support afforded by their patronage was no doubt a major reason that the Buddha and his followers spent so much of their time in their capitals. The crucial importance of royal patronage for the maintenance and expansion of Buddhist monastic communities is a consistent pattern throughout the subsequent history of Buddhism in India and elsewhere, as we will see in connection with the two other prototypical royal patrons of Buddhism, Aśoka and Kaniṣka.

Gandhāra, in contrast, is still at the margins in early Buddhism. It is mentioned only in the conventional listings of the sixteen great countries of India, and even there it is absent from some versions. Although Taxila, the great metropolis of the northwest, is frequently referred to in the prose commentary on the Jātakas and in other Pali commentaries, it is never mentioned in the early sūtras. Thus we can conclude that Gandhāra was a distant land that was probably known only faintly and indirectly to the Buddha and his followers.

Aśoka and the Mauryan Empire

Very little is known of the history of Gandhāra until the time of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, which conquered Gandhāra and adjoining territories and incorporated them into its eastern flank between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. After Alexander the Great destroyed the Achaemenid Empire in 331 BCE, he went on to conquer Gandhāra en route to his long-cherished goal of incorporating the wonderland of India into a realm that would embrace the entire known world. But soon after this, his enterprise failed as his army, weary after eight years of fighting, refused to go on beyond the rivers of the Punjab. His dream shattered, Alexander had to turn back westward and died three years after leaving India.

Within a few years after Alexander’s incursion, Gandhāra was incorporated into the newly born Indian empire of the mighty Mauryan dynasty, which rapidly grew into the first great transregional empire that controlled the majority of the Indian subcontinent. Under its founder, Candragupta Maurya, who ruled from approximately 324 to 300 BC...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Rediscovery of Gandhāran Buddhist Literature
• Part I. Contexts
• Part II. Texts
• Conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Image Credits
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright