The Silk Road: A New History (11 page)

The unusual circumstances leading to the preservation of excavated documents mean that only a tiny portion of the original evidence survives. Still, the finds from Niya and Loulan do not consist of a single accidental find but multiple groups of documents, some deliberately buried, some carelessly discarded. These different caches of documents, with only one mention of “merchants,” and the limited use of coins do indicate that the Silk Road trade of the third and fourth centuries
CE
in this area was indeed minimal. These documents clearly attest to the migration of people to Xinjiang from the Gandhara region of modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. They also show how often local kings dispatched envoys to neighboring kingdoms. But the evidence of private commerce is slight.

Read and analyzed as a group, the Kharoshthi documents illuminate the most important groups in Niya society in the third and fourth centuries. The local people, who farmed the land and maintained herds, recorded transfers of property witnessed by the cozbo and other officials. The king, living in Kroraina’s capital, frequently wrote to the cozbo with instructions to investigate a wide range of matters. Other groups—Supi raiders, refugees from Khotan, runaways, envoys—came to the settlement, and officials tried to resolve the various conflicts that arose. The main innovation brought by the refugees from Gandhara—the technology for writing on wooden documents—allowed local officials to record a wide variety of disputes and property transfers, hardly any involving long-distance luxury trade.

In addition to their writing system, the refugees introduced Buddhist teachings, a religion new to the area that subsequently had an enormous impact on all of East Asia. The Gandharan migrants who arrived in Niya in the third and fourth centuries were already Buddhist devotees, many with Buddhist names. The documents refer to them using the standard Buddhist term
shramana,
usually translated as “monk.” According to Buddhist
vinaya
law, all shramana should have adhered to vows of celibacy. But clearly the shramana at Niya did not. They lived with wives and children, and they engaged in the same kind of disputes over milk fees and the status of adopted children that embroiled ordinary people. Many of these Buddhists, even if called shramana, lived at home with their families.

Some Buddhists lived in distinct communities. One royal order records a set of rules issued to the “community of monks” at Niya by the “community of monks” in the capital, who appointed two elders to “be in charge of the monastery (viharavala)” to enforce these rules. The new rules concerned the
posatha
ceremony, on the first and fifteenth day of each lunar month, during which Buddhist rules were explained to the monastic community. Fines, in bolts of silk, were stipulated both for failing to attend the ceremony and for wearing “householder’s dress.” Such a regulation implies that members of the Buddhist order only wore Buddhist robes when attending group ceremonies.
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Other documents confirm that the community of monks met as a body and constituted a legal entity that could witness the transfer of property and decide disputes.

Much of the evidence concerning Buddhism at Niya comes from house 24, the location of Rustam’s archive. This was a big home, with ten rooms, one measuring 25 feet (8 m) by 19 feet (6 m), and clearly the residence of a well-off person. House 24 produced four documents not in Gandhari but in a form of hybrid Sanskrit that combined classic Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary with more vernacular forms. The four documents include a list of syllables used to memorize certain teachings, a fragment of the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, a
pratimoksha
text listing rules for monks, and a long wooden plaque promising tangible benefits, including “a good complexion” and “a sweet-smelling body,” and the ultimate promise of all Buddhist teachings, “an end of birth and death” to those who wash the image of the Buddha.
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Clearly members of the Buddhist order participated in ceremonies like the bathing of the Buddha. House 24, with its large meeting room and additional nine rooms may have served as the main place for Buddhists to meet, and for some to reside on a full-time basis. Other Buddhists put on their lay clothing and returned to their families once the ceremonies had ended.

One tantalizing Kharoshthi letter has attracted the interest of many researchers because it uses the term “Mahayana,” the Sanskrit word meaning Greater Vehicle. Adherents of the Greater Vehicle believed that even lay people could attain salvation. They applied the derogatory label Hinayana, or Lesser Vehicle, to these earlier teachings that limited the attainment of nirvana to only those who joined the monastic order. Historians of Buddhism have recently revised their earlier assessment of the black-and-white division between Hinayana and Mahayana.
⁹⁵
Individual monks identified themselves as members of given school depending on the vows they took at ordination. These varied slightly among the different schools, of which the Sarvastivadins and Dharmaguptakas were the most active in Central Asia in the third and fourth centuries. Once ordained, some members of a given school chose to study Mahayana teachings, while others did not, with the result that followers of Mahayana teachings lived alongside those who did not accept the teachings.

The letter using the term “Mahayana” begins, as many letters do, with several phrases praising the virtues of the recipient, in this instance a local cozbo official named Shamasena: “At the feet of the great cozbo Shamasena, beloved of men and gods, honoured by men and gods, blessed with a good name, who set forth in the Mahayana who is of infinitely pleasing aspect, the tasuca … makes obeisance, and sends the health of his divine body, much, immeasurable.” The phrase “set forth in the Mahayana” appears in at least two other inscriptions: one, written in the mid-third century, at Endere, praises the ruler of the Shanshan Kingdom, while the other, praising the Kushan ruler Huvishka, the successor of Kanishka, appears in a fourth-century manuscript from Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
⁹⁶
The use of the phrase, though, does not reveal how Mahayana beliefs affected local Buddhist worship at Niya. Nor do the surviving materials indicate which schools of Buddhism were active at Niya.

Evidently stupa worship constituted an important focus for Buddhist worship at Niya, as it had for the migrants from Gandhara who left so many drawings of stupas along the Karakorum Highway. The site’s most prominent ruin was a square-based stupa with a bowl-shaped top made from earthen bricks and grass-filled mud, shown in color plate 6. Located in the center of the settlement, it stands 23 feet (7 m) tall, with a base 18 feet (5.6 m) tall. Even in Aurel Stein’s time robbers had emptied its central chamber—where Buddhist relics and sometimes objects of value given to the Buddhist order were placed—so that it slumped over slightly.

SQUARE STUPA AT NIYA
This Buddhist stupa, square in shape, was unearthed in the 1990s. It measured 6.5 feet (2 m) on a side and was surrounded by a passageway for circumambulation 3.6–4.6 feet (1.1–1.4 m) across. The walkway was originally decorated with paintings, whose remnants are visible on the upper left-hand outer wall. Courtesy of Wang Binghua.

The Niya site contained a second Buddhist stupa, square in shape, whose remains were excavated by the Sino-Japanese expedition near house 5. Similar square structures have been found at other places along the southern Silk Road, including the site of Keriya, upriver from Khotan.
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Buddhist devotees worshipped at these sites by walking clockwise around the perimeter of the square to express their devotion. The paintings in the passageway around the stupa at Niya portrayed individual buddhas, as is the case at Keriya, and no narrative scenes.

Stein found much more elaborate Buddhist structures, including a monastery, at the site of Miran, which lay to the east, about halfway to Loulan.
⁹⁸
The use of the Brahmi script alongside Kharoshthi suggests that the site dated later than Niya, most likely to sometime after 400
CE
. There Buddhist devotees walked around covered circular stupas, whose central pillar contained relics of the Buddha and whose walls portrayed different Buddhist scenes. The roofs of these round buildings had collapsed, so Stein and his men had to remove the sand to reach the original passageway where worshippers left offerings so long ago.

In one ruin, Miran 3 (M3), they uncovered a cloth landscape, illustrated with flowers of silk and cotton sewn onto a background (possibly by individual believers), and also scraps of cloth with Kharoshthi script on them, praying for the continued health of the donors’ relatives. The wall paintings Stein found were particularly striking; on the lower edge of wall, below waist level, were paintings of sixteen winged figures, with distinctly Western-looking faces (shown in color plate 5B). The paintings above them survived only partially, but Stein was able to make out a Buddha and his disciples. The paintings formed a narrative depicting different scenes from the Buddha’s life. Such narratives came from a later period than the individual portraits of the Buddha found at Niya.

Another building some 200 feet (60 m) away was, like M3, a round covered stupa with a painted corridor around it. More of the paintings survived at M5 than at M3, allowing Stein to identify a scene from the life of the Buddha, who appears while still a young prince riding a horse and leaving his father’s palace. The artist signed his name “Tita” in Kharoshthi script and recorded the amount he had been paid. Stein, always quick to detect Western influence, concluded that Tita was the localized name of a Roman painter originally named Titus; even if the artist was really a Central Asian with a foreign name, the iconography of the painting, particularly the lower band showing cherubs among undulating wreaths, uses motifs borrowed from Roman art, perhaps brought by artists who came from the eastern edge of the Roman Empire in Syria or copied from sketchbooks.

The Kroraina Kingdom’s residents continued to live in the harsh conditions of the desert kingdom until sometime in the fifth century. Surviving documents do not explain why the residents abandoned the sites of Loulan, Miran, and Niya. While some sites along the southern Silk Road, like Keriya, show clear signs of environmental degradation at the time they were abandoned, at Niya archeologists have found healthy petrified trees, some large enough to cut down for timber, dating to the third and fourth centuries.
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The Niya site gives every indication that the residents expected to return. They left a considerable amount of millet in different places, and they carefully buried documents and marked the holes so that they could find them again. They had sufficient warning to pack before leaving the site; Stein observed that they had left almost nothing of intrinsic value behind. Perhaps an attack by the Khotanese or the Supis prompted the residents to leave, and they were never able to return.

All we have to tell us about when the end came is a Chinese-language source by the famous Chinese monk and Buddhist pilgrim Faxian. In 401, he passed by Kroraina and wrote these subdued lines:

The land is uneven and infertile. The clothing of ordinary people is coarse and the same as in the land of the Han people. The only difference is in felt and coarse cloth. Their country’s king worships the dharma. It is possible that there are over four thousand monks; all are adherents of Hinayana. The ordinary people of various countries and the shramana all carry out the dharma of India, but to a greater or lesser degree.
¹⁰⁰

It is not clear exactly which city he visited, since the city of Loulan was abandoned in 376, when one regional dynasty replaced another that had been based there. Chinese official histories mention the Shanshan Kingdom in the first half of the fifth century; this was a period when a non-Chinese dynasty, called the Northern Wei, gradually conquered different regional dynasties in north China. The Shanshan rulers submitted to the Northern Wei in 450. Twenty years later, a Central Asian confederacy of tribes from north of the Gobi Desert, called the Rouran, occupied the Shanshan Kingdom.

The fifth century was a time of great turbulence in Central Asia, and traffic across the Taklamakan came to a halt. After the year 500 the Chinese histories no longer mention the Shanshan Kingdom as a destination, and most travelers shifted to the northern route around the Taklamakan, the subject of the next chapter.
¹⁰¹

CHAPTER 2
Gateway to the Languages of the Silk Road

Kucha and the Caves of Kizil

A
s a meeting place for peoples of multiple nationalities, the Silk Road was a site of sustained language exchange in an era long before the development of modern learning aids like dictionaries and textbooks. Among the most dedicated language teachers were Buddhists who hoped to convey their sophisticated teachings as originally expressed in Sanskrit to potential converts. The residents of the prosperous oasis of Kucha on the northern route around the Taklamakan enjoyed an advantage over other language learners along the Silk Road, since their native language of Kuchean (a Kuchean document is shown on the opposite page) belonged to the same Indo-European language family as Sanskrit. Kucha (this is the Uighur pronunciation; the Chinese say Kuche) provided a natural gateway for the entry into China of Buddhist teachings. The oasis also afforded Buddhist teachers the opportunity to meet with multilingual travelers who came to Kucha—then the largest and most prosperous settlement on the northern Silk Road, rivaled only by Turfan.