Tracing Buddhisms march through Asia
The Dhamma Times,  1 August 2004 

One reason is that instead of being built around clear-cut themes, it centers on the mass of written documents and artifacts collected by Marc Aurel Stein early in the 20th century in the area then known as Chinese Turkistan.

These do not tell a story with a beginning and an end. They are small pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the bulk of which is lost. The texts, mostly fragmentary, are in a number of languages belonging to the Iranian, Turkic, Tibetan, Indian or Chinese domain, not to mention long vanished languages like Tokharian or Khotanese. This diversity is reflected in the artifacts.

A framework is indispensable and a chronological table would be useful. Both are missing. One clear plot, however, emerges: the key role played by the Sogdians, the northeast Iranians whose homeland spread between Bukhara and Samarkand, which are in present-day Uzbekistan. From the third century A.D., they spread out into Chinese Turkistan and founded the oasis city famous for its Buddhist caves, Dunhuang, the Chinese form of Sogdian Dhurwan - which, oddly, is not mentioned in the book. From there, these intrepid missionaries and traders traveled to China establishing communities as far as Loyang.

Not least, they played a role in the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, and that weaves them into the subplot, the spread of Buddhism into China.

This philosophy without a deity born in the Himalayan highlands of India, possibly in the sixth century B.C., eventually metamorphosed into a religion with the Buddha as the Lord of the Universe. In this new guise, probably of East Iranian confection, Buddhism reached China where, sources say, its first missionary was one An Shigao, the sinicized form of the Iranian name Arshaka. A prince from the Parthian dynasty of Iran who became a Buddhist monk, he arrived in Loyang in 148 A.D., as Eric Zurcher wrote long ago in “The Buddhist Conquest of China."

What stages Buddhism went through during the next three centuries is virtually unknown. But by the time most of the texts, paintings or artifacts brought back by Aurel Stein from Dunhuang or Khotan were executed, Buddhism had become the prevalent faith in Chinese Turkistan, with Manichaeism far behind and Christianity even further away.

Buddhism inspired brilliant schools of painting. Unfortunately, their evolution is not easily reconstructed nor can we say for sure whether the artists were Sogdian, Uighur or Chinese.

Because of its date and provenance, one may assume, for example, that the wonderful silk panel of the early eighth century representing the Buddha Teaching the Law was painted by a Sogdian - it was sold to Aurel Stein as a painting from Cave 17, the "Library Cave," at Dunhuang. By the 10th century, the Sogdians were becoming a minority outnumbered by the Turkic-speaking Uighurs. Buddhist art became very different.

A large painting with Avalo-kiteshvara seated on the lotus throne is naïve, not to say gauche. Columns of Chinese characters indicate that the main donor, one Mi Gongde, was “prefect of Dunhuang." Presumably the work was painted locally. Was the artist Uighur? Sogdian? Or, perhaps, an inexperienced Chinese? Hard to tell.

Yet the diversity of origin of the paintings represented among the finds reputed to come from Dunhuang is not in doubt. A temple banner of the early ninth century depicting Vajrapani has two Tibetan inscriptions on the back and its style is distinctly Tibetan. This is clearly a Tibetan painting, either brought from Tibet or executed in Dunhuang during the Tibetan occupation.

Not even the period is assured by the Dunhuang provenance, although, as the Chinese scholar Rong Xinjiang plausibly conjectured, the cave must have been sealed for safe-keeping in 1006 A.D. The conquering armies of the Turkish Qarakhanid ruler who had just occupied Khotan then became uncomfortably close.

Xinjiang warns that Aurel Stein did not find the Dunhuang paintings and manuscripts himself. He bought them through his Chinese secretary from the cave guardian, Wang Yuanlu, who had taken out all the contents of the caves seven years earlier. This explains why a fine Tibetan painting tentatively dated “11th to 16th century?" is included among the supposed “Dunhuang finds."

Such uncertainty, though, is nothing compared with the lack of documentation plaguing many artifacts in the show.

One of the major consequences of Sogdian travel was the aesthetic upheaval that shook China in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Iranian fashions became the rage, from costume (as shown by the figures recovered from Tang funerary chambers wearing short tunics with lapels, baggy trousers and typical boots) to courtly pastimes (hunting with saluki dogs and hawks, the polo game) to silver vessels at aristocratic banquets.

A display of some of the artifacts from the excavations carried out by Chinese archaeologists over the last 40 years, many of them found in precisely dated contexts, would have been highly desirable. Instead, the objects come mainly from British or French institutions and have no provenance – they were acquired through donations or in the market. Artistically fine, they are historically useless. The same remark applies to the Iranian objets d'art. Several have been found in China, in precise contexts. These would be fascinating. Two glass vessels from the British Museum's own collections, acquired in the art market, are beautiful but irrelevant.

On closer inspection, even some of the most famous texts brought back by Aurel Stein raise provenance questions. Leaves from the "Book of Zambasta," written in Khotanese, were given to the British Museum by the British consul general in Kashgar. He bought them from one Badruddin, who in turn cited as their provenance some dwellers in Taklimakan, a huge desert. At least here authenticity is not an issue - Khotanese had not been deciphered, and the calligraphy is sublime.

Not all visitors will feel the same confidence when gazing at the carved marble panels of a funerary couch bought by the Miho Museum in central Japan from a New York dealer who acquired them in Hong Kong. (The catalog refrains from mentioning this).

The panels, of various sizes, display iconographic oddities. In one panel with a royal banquet, for example, a man stands holding a harp in an improbable posture while others hold lutes even more bizarrely. The handling of the cross-legged king's face bears a curious resemblance to the kind of Western sculpture beloved in the days of Socialist Realism. One of the couches from an archaeological site excavated by the Chinese would have been immensely preferable.

The overriding impression is of a show hastily cobbled together on the cheap. Some very interesting scholarly contributions in the book by Etienne de la Vaissière ("The Rise of the Sogdian Merchants and the Role of the Huns") or Prods Oktor Skaervo (“Iranians, Indians, Chinese and Tibetans: Rulers and Ruled of Khotan in the First Millennium”) do not make up for the complete lack of unity. Indeed, some other essays seem out of place. Not many in the general public may want to follow a linguistic commentary of a Tibetan text scrupulously transliterated.

The display, atrociously cramped and badly lit, does not help. Some will feel that the trek is as tough as any in the sands of the Taklimakan.