And Man Created God by Selina O'Grady

Author:Selina O'Grady
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857898760
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

THE BUDDHA IN A TOGA

It is better that I [the bodhisattva] alone suffer than that all beings sink to the world of misfortune. There I shall give myself into bondage, to redeem all the world from the forest of purgatory, from rebirth as beasts, from the realm of death. I shall bear all grief and pain in my own body for the good of all things living.

From Siksasamuccaya (Compendium of Doctrine), compiled in the seventh century AD from earlier Buddhist writings

Around 65 AD, about a year after Paul and a group of fellow Christians were probably put to death by Nero, the inhabitants of Taxila desperately tried to bury their gold jewellery and their precious silver and bronze vessels. They were trying to escape from the Central Asian nomads who came thundering into the city on horses and elephants. The nomads, from what is now Mongolia, wore felt caps, thick fur-lined knee-length coats and baggy trousers – silk in the summer, woollen in the winter – tucked into soft padded boots. The Chinese called them Yuezhi; the Indians called them Kushans. Their chief and first king, Kujula Kadphises, was building an empire and using Buddhism to do so.

It was a new version of Buddhism, one which was remoulding a severe, ascetic religion fit for a spiritual elite into a more comforting religion fit for ordinary people. Yet though Mahayana Buddhism spread to China and around Asia, it never displaced Brahmanism/Hinduism, the religion that confined people to their caste, in the affections of the people of India. Buddhism tried to break down divisions and differences, just as Pauline Christianity tried to do. But Buddhism failed to oust Brahmanism, while Pauline Christianity universalist and populist like Mahayana Buddhism, managed to supplant the old Roman religions. Why one universalist religion established itself and the other did not, will, I hope, start to become clear in this chapter.

The Yuezhi/Kushan nomads were ‘excellent soldiers’, but better merchants. They were ‘skilful at commerce and will haggle over a fraction of a cent. Women are held in great respect, and the men make decisions on the advice of their women,’1 according to the Chinese diplomat Zhang Qian who visited them in 126 BC. The Yuezhi had been trading with the Chinese since the sixth century BC, exchanging jade and ‘heavenly horses’ for silk. But in the second century BC they had been squeezed out from the steppe pastureland on China’s western borders as China expanded its empire. In a great ripple effect, the tribes forced to migrate from China’s borders displaced other tribes, triggering a series of invasions west and south into the Indian subcontinent. The Kushans were already conquerors of the vast Greek kingdom of Bactria in Central Asia when their chief Kujula led them over the Hindu Kush Mountains and began encroaching on Gondophares’ kingdom.

An illiterate tribe, the Kushans were becoming masters of highly literate kingdoms that had been ruled by the Greeks since the time of Alexander. Their self-styled ‘Tyrant’ Kujula had to convince

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