China’s forgotten white kingdoms
Nishy Wijewardane
Just a day before leaving Colombo for Central Asia, a book I ordered months earlier arrived through the post, much to my delight. It contained rare photographs of extraordinarily beautiful 3-5th C AD Buddhist cave murals from a remote corner of China’s vast Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The exhilarating photographs depicted exquisite renditions of the Jataka Tales in colours alien to murals in Sri Lanka. As the pages turned, my mind (which had contemplated this location for years) was already there and it was clear where the rest of me would go, if indeed it could.
The bleak, dusty settlement of Kucha, an oasis town, lies on the northern end of the Taklamakan desert amidst vast river beds, bone dry for centuries. It is, like many places I visited in this little known region, a pale shadow of its wondrous past. Gone are the two 30 metre high Buddha statutes that had flanked the town’s entrance in the 7th century and bore its fame. However, from about 2nd C AD, the independent Kingdom of Kucha had embraced Buddhism.This attraction strengthened due to the prodigious activities of its great Buddhist monk-scholar and translator, Kumarajiva (344-413 AD). Kumarajiva (“mature-youth” in Sanskrit), of an Indian Brahmin father, Kumara, who was married by a Kuchaen King to his daughter, Jiva, was to command an epoch-making influence on Chinese Buddhist thought. A prodigy, he was taught the theories of Mahayana Buddhism by no less than a prince, Suryasoma of Yarkand, in another kingdom I had visited south of Kashgar. This itself illustrates the remarkable presence of several Buddhist kingdoms, with rich interactions, that populated this Xinjiang landscape in the first millennia.
Young Kumarajiva’s wisdom and reputation as a translator soon emanated to all corners (causing his forced removal, ironically as a prize of war, to the Chinese imperial court in 383 AD); based in Kucha, his birthplace, it is said he eventually commanded a translation team of nearly 3000 ! He is renowned for his systematic translations of the Sanskrit Mahayana sutras that flowed down the Silk Road into Chinese, enabling millions to gain a meaningful, rather than mechanical, understanding of Buddhism.
Infused by such thoughts emanating from far off Gandhara (today Swat Valley, Pakistan, see Sunday Times June 5, 2005 “Grandeur of Gandhara”), over mountains and deserts, through the minds of traders, monks and others, as well as by varied influences from Persia, Kucha grew. It straddled the Northern Silk Road that had emerged from the Karakoram mountains at Kashgar (which I had followed) and ran 1500 kilometres towards Urumchi (Xinjiang’s current capital) and then southwards to the Mogao Caves. Thought and art thus flourished in this outpost thousands of kilometres from the sea; reflecting on their solitude, the monk-artisans of Kucha set out harnessing these into extraordinary imagery.
Along with this artistic expansion, the kingdom’s musical culture gained considerable currency. That well known monk-traveller Xuanzang (602?-664 AD) praised Kucha’s orchestral music as the “best in the world”. Not surprisingly, Kuchaen musicians were, like Kumarajiva, forcibly co-opted to the music loving Tang imperial Chinese court. It is remarkable that the music of the most famous lute player of the period, Po Ming-ta, a Kuchaen, is still played in Japan (“Trill of the Spring Warbler”) while Kucha’s music is believed to have formed the very roots of Chinese music today.
European migration into China
As if this were not extraordinary enough, what had especially intrigued me was the very origin of the Kuchaens. Though deep in China, they were in fact a part of a Caucasian human migration that originated in the Caucasus and Anatoliya, Europe and around 3000 BC led to the peopling of today’s Turkmenistan. Then, around 2000 BC, these Indo-European people migrated southwards and entered the central Tarim Basin, introducing a Bronze Age.
They were the forefathers of the Tocharians, the indigenous inhabitants of the famed Loulan region of middle China, but their linguistic roots lay in the European family of languages (itself said to be partially rooted in Asia). Around 1000 BC, evidence of the Tocharians’ direct trade with China proper has been found.
As the first centuries AD dawned at Kucha, specifically, the Tocharian society that emerged had developed a highly refined Indo-Persian mixed culture which then embraced Buddhism by 2nd C AD. The contributions of the Tocharians and their forefathers to the region appear significant despite the technological and cultural prowess that developed within China; besides domestication of pasture animals, they brought knowledge of the stirrup/bridle (revolutionizing war by making man stable on horseback), and the light chariot. Indeed, amongst the most rewarding of my time in Xinjiang was the chance to finally see its unique 4000 year old “European” (Caucasian) mummies.
http://lakdiva.org/suntimes/060219/plus/7.html
Andrew Redmond:
A Chinese Buddhist monk named I Ching (Yi Jing) visited India on pilgrimage in the 600s AD and went through the Tocharian realms along the Silk Road, detailing their rich civilization. These white people had a close kinship linguistically to the Celts, and even had plaids, living in what is now Xinjiang. They were wiped out soon after I Ching’s visit by Turkic groups who fathered today’s Uighurs. Like nearly all Turks, the Uighurs are now Muslims. That, and the fact that they are ethnically foreign, means that the Beijing communists keep firm grip on the region.
The white Tocharians, being on the Silk Road, helped to bring Buddhism to China. Some of them were also, at various points, Nestorian Christians and Manichaeans; previous to this their faith was a form of pre-Zoroastrian solar worship, which developed into faith systems which are still found among the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Parsis of India, and various “Angel Cults” of the Middle East. This current of religious thought went on to influence other religions, giving what were to become the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths their ideas of angels, messiahs and the apocalypse.
Early white influence on East Asian Buddhism was profound. Bodhidharma, who lived in the 6th century AD, was “a monk of the Western Region named Bodhidharma, a Persian Central Asian,” according to Chinese scholar Yang Xuanzhi, who met the Buddhist saint in 520. Yang Xuanzhi claimed that these white-occupied “Western Regions” were the source of the first Chinese contacts with the religion: “The establishment of the Baima Temple by Emperor Ming (58-75 CE) of the Han marked the introduction of Buddhism into China… The Emperor dreamt of the golden man sixteen Chinese feet tall, with the aureole of sun and moon radiating from his head and his neck. A “golden god”, he was known as Buddha. The emperor dispatched envoys to the Western Regions in search of the god, and, as a result, acquired Buddhist scriptures and images.”
Bodhidharma himself founded the Buddhist school of Chán, which is known in Japan (and worldwide) as Zen. Zen Buddhism played a leading role in the development of Eastern martial arts, as well as on Japanese aesthetics and the samurai code, which has many elements that have some resemblance to Western ideals of chivalry and honor.
The cave painting phenomenon spread out from Tocharian homelands to non-white areas of East Asia, associated with the Zen teachings of Bodhidharma. Korea (where Zen is called Seon) has many such cave murals. However, in the Korean paintings the scenes are reversed, making the revered saint Bodhidharma appear as a Korean, with his disciples shown as white. The cave paintings in Xinjiang show the participants as white.
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