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 17in 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 18the 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 BCE, Gandhāra and adjoining regions, along with most of northern and central India, came for the first time under the rule of an Indian power based far to the east in Pāṭaliputra (modern Patna, Bihar), in northeastern India. Chandragupta Maurya’s grandson Aśoka (ca. 273–232 BCE) was to become the greatest royal patron of Buddhism, “the Constantine of Buddhism,” under whose sponsorship Buddhism spread in all directions, far beyond its early strongholds in north and eastern India, and began to develop into a pan-Indian and ultimately into a world religion. It is at this point that Gandhāra became part of the Buddhist world.

We know precious little about the historical development of Buddhism between the lifetime of the Buddha and the reign of Aśoka. There are no inscriptions or other primary historical sources to guide us. The only information comes from the Buddhist texts themselves. But Buddhist canonical texts are uniformly ahistorical, in the sense that they are never dated and mention historical circumstances, if at all, only in passing and only with reference to some point of Buddhist teaching or doctrine. Although a sūtra must, in order to be considered authentic and authoritative, be prefaced with a nidāna, that is, a statement of when and where it was preached, this preface never includes a date. The time is invariably stated only as “Thus have I heard: at one time . . . ” (Skt evaṃ me śrutam: ekasmin samaye . . . ), but that “time” 19is never located in a historical sequence. As a result, the chronology of early Buddhist literature, and thus the history of early Buddhism, can be deduced only by internal comparisons and other indirect methods, and at best only in relative terms. We have no way to attach specific dates to any of the texts and events of early Buddhism whereby we might trace its spread and development; indeed, we do not even know with any precision when the Buddha himself lived.

This situation changes drastically with the reign of Aśoka. Aśoka was the first Indian monarch who saw fit not only to issue public proclamations to his subjects in all parts of his vast realm but, more importantly, to have them carved onto natural rock surfaces or artificial stone pillars, with the result that many of them have survived to the present day. In this, he was probably inspired by the monumental trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings whose territories he had inherited. Several of Aśoka’s inscriptions are dated by the year of his reign. The absolute chronological value of those dates has been determined with reasonable certainty and precision on the basis of his reference to five contemporary Hellenistic kings of the Western world to whom Aśoka addressed his message of “conquest by dharma.” Since the dates of these Hellenistic kings — Antiochus (Antiyoka) of Syria, Ptolemy (Turamāya) of Egypt, Antigones (Antikini) of Macedonia, Magas (Maka) of Cyrene (North Africa), and Alexander (Alikasudara) of Greece — are well attested in classical historical tradition, they allow us to correlate Aśoka’s regnal years to a known chronology, and thereby to establish the dates of his rule to approximately 273–232 BCE.

With the appearance of the Aśokan inscriptions, we have the first indication, albeit indirect, of a Buddhist presence in the region of Gandhāra. The matter is complicated, however, by the ambiguous character of these inscriptions. They fall into four main classes, which in turn may be divided into two subsets: first, those with explicit Buddhist content, namely the minor rock edicts and the separate pillar edicts, and second, the non-Buddhist inscriptions, namely the major rock edicts and the major pillar edicts. In the latter set, Aśoka promulgates a 20neutral, all-encompassing dhamma (= Skt dharma) that was designed to appeal to all of his diverse subjects, carefully avoiding any specific sectarian terms or ideas.

In light of this scrupulous neutrality, some historians have even questioned whether Aśoka was really a Buddhist, but this skepticism is excessive. For in his explicitly Buddhist inscriptions, he speaks in a very direct and personal manner of his conviction and dedication to the Buddhist Dharma. For example, in his minor rock edicts Aśoka confesses that although he had joined the Buddhist saṅgha as a lay follower, he felt dissatisfied with his spiritual progress during the first year and was now applying himself more diligently. Also, in his rock edict at Bairāṭ in Rajasthan he addresses himself directly to the local Buddhist monastic community and recommends seven canonical texts for special attention and study.¹²

Thus there can be no reasonable doubt that Aśoka was personally a committed Buddhist. In his mixed messages, Aśoka follows the typical pattern of Indian kings who patronized multiple religions, as we shall also see in connection with the Kuṣāṇa emperors some four centuries later. In the complex religious mosaic of traditional India, it was only normal that the ruler of a large kingdom would strive to appear to be all things to all of his people.

Aśoka’s fourteen major rock edicts, recorded in three different local dialects in nine places around India, include two in eastern Gandhāra at two adjacent sites, Shāhbazgaṛhī and Mansehrā. But the problem with regard to our main concern, namely the origins of Buddhism in Gandhāra, is that both of these are nonsectarian edicts and include none of his explicitly Buddhist proclamations. Therefore we cannot assume on the basis of the inscriptions alone that Buddhism had been brought to Gandhāra by Aśoka. To determine the early history of Buddhism in Gandhāra, we need to examine other types of information, namely textual and archaeological materials.

With regard to the first category, we turn to an extensive body of legends about Aśoka preserved in various postcanonical Buddhist 21texts, most notably in the Mahāvaṃsa (the ecclesiastical chronicle of Sri Lanka) and in collections of avadāna legends in Sanskrit and in Chinese translation that are sometimes grouped together under the heading “Legends of Aśoka” (Aśokāvadāna).¹³ In these stories, Aśoka is presented as the ideal Buddhist emperor and lavish patron of the saṅgha, one who gave up to it everything he owned, down to his last possession — half a myrobalan fruit.

Aśoka’s image is modeled on the pattern of the royal patrons of the Buddha’s lifetime, Prasenajit and Ajātaśatru, but on a far vaster scale. His most important act of patronage, reported in the Legends of Aśoka, was to retrieve the relics of the Buddha, which after his parinirvāṇa had been divided and buried in eight stūpas, and to redistribute them into 84,000 stūpas, which he had caused to be constructed throughout the earth on a single day and which came to be known as the dharmarājikā, the stūpas “of the Dharma-king.” This widespread legend about Aśoka can be understood as a symbolic or mythologized presentation of his role in promoting the spread of Buddhism beyond its original homeland in central north India and into his vast territories and sphere of influence, comprising not only nearly all of the Indian subcontinent but also adjoining areas of Afghanistan. In short, Aśoka is portrayed as the patron who changed Buddhism from a regional religion into a pan-Indian, and eventually a pan-Asian, one.

The magical multiplication of the relics and their distribution far and wide has a resounding echo in the archaeological record, albeit only from a later period. The abundant relic deposit inscriptions from Gandhāra in subsequent centuries often celebrate the foundation of relic stūpas in “a part of the earth where a relic foundation had never been made before” (apratiṣṭhāpitapūrve pṛthivīpradeśe). This frequent addition to the basic relic-dedication formula reflects the belief that establishing a relic in a region where this had not previously been done earns the donor or sponsor an extra share of karmic merit, a notion that is explicitly confirmed in canonical texts.¹⁴ This shows how the cult of the Buddha’s relics continued, even after Aśoka’s time, to serve 22as both a mechanism of and a symbol for the implantation of Buddhism in new territories.

Particularly interesting for our purposes is a secondary episode in the legend of Aśoka and the relics, in which the residents of Taxila request an extra share of relics, thirty-six sets in all, one for each thousand residents of the city.¹⁵ Aśoka responds that he could give them only one set of relics, and so to respect their wishes, he would have to kill 35,000 of them. At this point, the people of Taxila quite sensibly withdraw their greedy request. This can be understood as a mythologized reference to the special vitality of the Buddhist relic cult in Gandhāra, as shown by the abundance of Buddhist reliquaries, inscribed and uninscribed, that have been found in that region; over four hundred examples are collected in a recent comprehensive study.¹⁶

Aśoka’s harsh response to the pious greed of the Taxilans may seem shocking in view of his portrayal in Buddhist literature as an ideal Buddhist emperor, and even more so by comparison with his self-presentation as a benevolent and gentle ruler in his inscriptions. But there is much more to Aśoka than this; he is on multiple levels a complex and enigmatic figure. Despite the veneration he receives in Buddhist texts, his character in them is ambiguous. For example, he is described as a monster of cruelty before his conversion to Buddhism. This can of course be understood as the usual hyperbolic rhetoric of the reformed convert, but even after Aśoka becomes a Buddhist, he is still viewed with some unease and ambivalence, as shown by this and other episodes.¹⁷ In part, this is no doubt a reflection of the tense symbiosis between Buddhist institutions and secular powers that is a constant of the history of Buddhism, but it is also characteristic of Aśoka’s many-faceted character. In fact, Aśoka’s own inscriptions and the Buddhist legends also have little, if anything in common,¹⁸ and even for the most part refer to him by different names. In Buddhist literature he is always called Aśoka, while in the inscriptions he almost always refers to himself as Devānaṃpiya Piyadassī, “beloved of the gods, of loving regard,” except for a few places where he adds the name Aśoka.

But the evidence presented so far still does not prove that Aśoka was actually responsible for the implantation of Buddhism in Gandhāra. None of the many inscribed reliquaries is earlier than the second century BCE, at least a century or so after Aśoka. This raises the suspicion that the legends about Aśoka’s role in Buddhist literature represent later fabrications that were anachronistically cast back to the time of the archetypal royal patron and credited to him. Unfortunately, other indications of Aśoka’s role in the spread of Buddhism into Gandhāra are also less than conclusive. Xuanzang, visiting Gandhāra and other parts of India in the first half of the seventh century, reported that six stūpas that he saw in Gandhāra had been built by Aśoka, but this too reflects the legends current in his time, nearly a millennium after Aśoka, so that their historical accuracy is by no means beyond doubt. Some relatively early inscriptions also credit Aśoka with this achievement; for instance, an inscription of the early first century CE refers to the rededication of relics that had been taken “from a stūpa of the Mauryan time,”¹⁹ while an inscribed statue of the Buddha of about the same period records its dedication to a dharmarājikā stūpa that had been established by King Aśoka.²⁰

One more clue to Aśoka’s role in the spread of Buddhism to Gandhāra involves a passage from the Mahāvaṃsa. This passage records the names of the missionaries who were sent to various regions of India after the third great Buddhist council, which had been convened by Aśoka at his capital, Pāṭaliputra. According to this account, a monk named Majjhantika was sent to the northwest, where he converted Gandhāra and Kashmir by preaching the Āsīvisopama Sutta. As it happens, this sūtra (in Gāndhārī, aśiviṣaama) is among the several dozen whose names are included in the list of texts in one of the index scrolls in the Senior collection of Gāndhārī manuscripts, although the text of the sūtra itself has not been found.²¹ This could be simply a coincidence, but the presence of this sūtra in Gandhāra might also support the accuracy of the tradition recorded in the Mahāvaṃsa regarding the conversion of Gandhāra in Aśoka’s time.

The Indo-Greeks

Even after the time of Aśoka, for about a century there is very little direct, datable evidence for Buddhist activity in Gandhāra. After the decline of the Mauryas in the early second century BCE, a succession of invaders and conquerors from the west dominated Gandhāra for four centuries. The first phase of this period involved the Bactrian Greeks and Indo-Greeks, inheritors of Alexander’s Hellenistic legacy in the eastern world, who conquered Gandhāra and other parts of northern India in the second and early first centuries BCE. During this period the Buddhist presence in Gandhāra gradually becomes more distinctly visible, until it reaches a climax in the first two centuries of the Common Era. But as is typically the case in the study of ancient India, our knowledge of the history of the thirty-odd Greek kings of Bactria and India is very incomplete. The main source for the history of this period is the abundant coinage of these kings; indeed, most of them are known from coins alone. Inscriptions, especially dated inscriptions, which are typically the best source of historical information in early India, are still very rare in this phase. The result is that the sequence and chronology of the kings is known only tentatively and approximately, as it has had to be reconstructed on the basis of interpretations, often quite subjective and controversial, of the features and relationships of the various coins.

Nonetheless, one point that is generally agreed on is that Menander, the Indo-Greek king who ruled in Gandhāra and adjoining parts of northern India around the middle of the second century BCE,²² stands out as one of the most prominent and influential of the Greek kings of India. This conclusion is based, first of all, on the abundance of his coins, which are the most numerous among all of the Indo-Greek rulers and which are found over a wide range from eastern Afghanistan to the central Ganges Valley.²³ But Menander’s greatest claim to fame is the paracanonical²⁴ Buddhist text whose title contains the Pali rendering of his name, the Questions of Milinda (Milindapañha). This work 25was probably originally composed in Gāndhārī, but it survives only in Pali and Chinese translations.²⁵ The text is set in Menander’s capital, Sāgala, whose exact location is uncertain but was probably in the Punjab. This long text (some three hundred pages in Horner’s translation) consists of a series of philosophical dialogues about Buddhist ideas and principles between the king and a learned Buddhist monk named Nāgasena. The dialogues show the king to be a penetrating thinker who expresses a lively interest in Buddhism and asks Nāgasena difficult questions about the subtleties of Buddhist doctrine.