Persian Influences on Indian Buddhism

Some people will be aware that when Buddhism flowed out of India it went West as well as East. The huge Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan are a result of this, as are, apparently the Arabian Nights stories which are based to some extent on the Jataka tales. But few people will know that there was some traffic in the other direction.

It should come as no surprise really. The Khyber Pass continues to be the main route into and out of Pakistan in the North-west. But the evidence for this inflowing of traffic is all rather sketchy. I want to discuss two main items here: the presence of Babylonian Omens in the Dīgha Nikāya; and aspects of the Arapacana Alphabet.

Some years ago now the late Professor David Pingree noticed that the first sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Brahmajāla Sutta, contained a list of omens. The context is that the Buddha is spelling out to the bhikkhus that he considers divination and the interpreting of omens as wrong livelihood for a bhikkhu. The reasons for this are not clear but I suspect that it was one of many ways in which the Buddhist sangha tried to make itself distinctive from a. laymen, and b. ascetics from other traditions. The interesting feature of this list is that in both form and content it very closely resembles a Babylonian omen manual preserved in cuneiform writing in what is now Iran. Professor Pingree closely compares the items on the two lists and the order in which they appear and concludes that they are practically identical. Now we know the date of the cuneiform writing since it is pushed into clay and it very definitely pre-dates Buddhism in India. It's widely known amongst historians, and largely overlooked by Buddhists, that the Achaemanid Empire was in control of much of what is now Pakistan at the time of the Buddha (even allowing for the disputes over his dates). Interestingly the Pāli commentaries tell us that kings of Magadha used to send their sons to Taxila to be educated in administration and other disciplines, and Taxila at the time was a Persian enclave. At some point one or other of these young nobles must have either returned with the knowledge of these omens, or with someone else possessed it. Another scholar speculates that the Buddha's father employed Chaldean (ie Persian) magicians though I think this is not supported by the evidence.

The Achaemanids were defeated and their empire destroyed by Alexander the Great whose own empire did not outlive it's creator by very long. It took a few generations for the Persians to regroup. By the time the Sassanian Persians were starting to make their presence felt, Gāndhāra had become one of the most important centres for Buddhist innovation and inspiration. The Persians by this time had abandoned the elaborate cuneiform script and begun to use a form of Aramaic. It is this Aramaic script which forms the basis for the earliest known Indian script: Kharoṣṭhī. Kharoṣṭhī is written right to left, and it has several characters in common (and with the same phonetic value) as Aramaic. It also only has one sign for initial vowels which is modified using diacritic marks to produce the full range of Indian vowels. This is because the Semitic Languages which employ Aramaic scripts do not allow words to begin with a vowel. The vowel sign in Kharoṣṭhī is modelled on, and is used like, a consonant. This is interesting in itself since Gāndhāra is probably the place where writing was first used in India, and it is one of the places where Buddhists first began to write down sutras.

Richard Salomon has shown with some certainty that the Arapacana alphabet is simply the Gāndhāri alphabet. He has hinted (to me in an email) that he knows why it is in the order that it is, which is different from other Indian alphabets, but as yet has not published his thoughts on this. One of the things about the Arapacana alphabet is that it is frequently associated with a series of verses in which a keyword starting with each letter of the alphabet either begins the line, or features prominently in it. Although the Indians did impose meter on their writings very commonly, and although collections of verses, such as the Vedas or the suttas in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, are arranged numerically, I am not aware of any other alphabetical list. But there are a number of Manichean hymns and Hebrew Psalms which are. So it seems as though the Arapacana was influenced by Semitic ideas via the Persians. What is more Jan Nattier has observed that the Arapacana verses are the earliest verses associated with the word "dhāraṇī", and could in fact be the original dhāraṇī. It is obvious that the alphabetical verses were a mnemonic aid, and so this accords with what is said about dhāraṇīs later. Actually it is interesting to note that most dhāraṇīs serve no obvious mnemonic function, and the association with memory is just a conceptual legacy. The conclusion here is that Persian influences were behind the creation and adoption of dhāraṇīs by Buddhists in Gāndhāra. I cannot prove this, but it is one explanation which fits the known facts.

The contact between India and the West, especially via the Khyber Pass is underplayed I think. More research might turn up more evidence of the cultural exchanges that took place and the way they shaped Buddhism over the years. It will reinforce the nascent realisation that Buddhism was not so different from other Indian religions in it's assimilation of ideas, concepts, and practices from the others.

Further Reading

Nattier, J. 2000. A few good men. (University of Hawaii Press)

Pingree, David.

• 1963. Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran. Isis. vol.54 (2), p.229-246.
• 1998. Legacies in astronomy and celestial omens in The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford University Press,) p.125-137
• 1991. Mesopotamian omens in Sanskrit paper presented at La Circulation des biens, des personnes et des idées dans le proche-oriet ancien. Actes de la XXXVIIIe Recontre Assyriologique Internationale. Paris, 8-10 juillet. (Paper is in English)

Salomon, Richard.

• 1990. New evidence for a Gāndhārī origin of the arapacana syllabary. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Apr-Jun, Vol.110 (2), p.255-273.
• 1993. An additoinal note on arapacana. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol.113 (2), p.275-6.
• 2006. Kharoṣṭhī syllables used as location markers in Gāndhāran stūpa architecture. Pierfrancesco Callieri, ed., Architetti, Capomastri, Artigiani: L’organizzazione dei cantieri e della produzione artistica nell’asia ellenistica. Studi offerti a Domenico Faccenna nel suo ottantesimo compleanno. (Serie Orientale Rome 100; Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2006), pp. 181-224. [many thanks to Dr Salomon for sending me a copy of this paper]

19.10.2012 Eisel Mazard recently wrote a blog post about a story that occurs in both the Jātakas and Herodotus. The latter attributes the story to the Persian king Darius, which may indicate that it is originally a Persian story. The link is a bit tenuous, but if a Persian story also ends up in a Jātaka then it is another thread connecting Persia and Buddhist India.

It's up to us!

Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
(unsourced and possibly apocryphal)

I recently accompanied my mother to a church service at King's College. Durelle is a Christian and wanted to go to church on Sunday anyway. I am interested in the King's College Chapel as a beautiful sacred space, and in the wonderful choral music that accompanies services there. It happened to be Whit-Sunday (or Pentecost) , an important Christian festival, and as such a guest speaker gave the lesson. Professor John Harper focused on creativity as a manifestation of the descent of the Holy Spirit. I did not find this particularly convincing, but I was quite taken by the quote that he gave from St. Teresa. I immediately saw that replacing "Christ" with "the Tathāgata" would make for an interesting exercise:

The Tathāgata has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
The Tathāgata has no body now on earth but yours.

This resonates for me. Although the Buddha's have vowed to save us (from ourselves) it seems to me that we cannot afford to be complacent. In order to keep the Dharma alive we must be the hands and feet of the Buddha. Some time ago I wrote a post on the idea of Grace in Buddhism - based on a translation of the Japanese kaji (Sanskrit: adhiṣṭhāna) as "grace". This rather beautiful teaching says that spiritual practice is a two way process: the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas do what they can for us, and our part is to be receptive to what they are offering.

Sangharakshita has said that an image for the spiritual community is the 1000 armed Avalokiteśvara - each of us being a hand of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, reaching out to help, provided with an eye in order to see where help is most needed. Avalokiteśvara's 1000 arms reach out to embrace all beings.

The call to action can be quite daunting. After all how can we mere mortals take up the burden of a Buddha? My approach to is to try to make a clear distinction between the ideal and what I'm capable of in practice. The ideal is universal loving kindness. The practice may be not acting out an angry impulse, or conversely doing something gratuitously generous. Such things may not "save" anyone, but they contribute to a better world. If everyone was making this kind effort then it really would be a better world. And in the long run generosity, kindness, selflessness etc are liberating.

In terms of our local Buddhist community I think this means helping others as best we can. Not everyone is skilled enough, or temperamentally suited to teaching, but those who are need to be supported. Reaching out to people who want the Dharma is demanding, and doing it without a supportive Sangha behind you is much more so - as those pioneers taking the Dharma to new towns or countries will know. Often just an enthusiastic presence at a centre can make a difference. It did for me when I first went looking for meditation instruction. Members of our community will need assistance from time to time, in all sorts of ways, and it is up to us to help them.

Compassion also means forgiving people. Forgiving them for letting us down, or even for harming us. And justice which involves harming or humiliating the other is no justice at all - the Karaṇiya Mettā Sutta makes this clear. We need to be rational about this also. If someone has harmed us, then it may not be sensible to be around them unless they have undergone a big change and sincerely renounced harm. It may be best to avoid someone who is violent. However it is important to try to see the suffering that the violent person is creating, and reflect on the consequences for them. If we wish harm or suffering on them then we too will reap the same fruit.

The quote above may be apocryphal, but this does not reduce it's applicability. As Buddhists we aim to follow the Buddha; we aim to be like him; to emulate his fine qualities and graceful bearing; we aim to in the long run become a Buddha ourselves.

image: St Teresa of Avila