Buddhism rides the Silk Road that Han imperial wars opened

Han China before Buddhism

In the early first century CE, the religious life of the Han Chinese was organized along three intersecting axes.

The first was the imperial state cult. The Han emperor presided over a calendrical liturgy that connected the imperial throne to Tian — Heaven, an impersonal cosmic order rather than a personal deity. The emperor was Tianzi — Son of Heaven — and his correct ritual conduct was understood to maintain the harmony between Heaven, Earth, and the human realm. Major imperial sacrifices took place at the Temple of Heaven and other state altars; failure to perform them correctly was understood to cause floods, famines, and barbarian invasions. The state cult had been formalized under the Western Han emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) but built on much older Zhou-period traditions of royal sacrifice. It was the religion of the imperial elite, conducted in court Chinese, with ritual handbooks studied by the boshi ("erudites") of the imperial academy.¹

The second was ancestor worship. Every Han Chinese household, from the imperial family down to the agricultural household of a peasant tenant, maintained an ancestral shrine. The deceased ancestors were addressed directly, fed at calendar intervals, consulted at decisions, blamed at misfortunes. Ancestor worship was the religion of family continuity; it presupposed that the dead remained interested in the affairs of the living and that proper care of the dead — burial, mourning, periodic offering — was the most important religious obligation. The Confucian classics codified the ritual technicalities; the Liji (Book of Rites) and the Yili (Etiquette and Rites) prescribed the exact conduct of mourning, offering, and ancestral memorial. This was the religion that connected every household to its lineage and its lineage to the state through the ritual position of the emperor as the senior ancestor of all Chinese.²

The third was popular religion: a vast, regionally varied complex of nature spirits, local deities, mountain gods, river spirits, fox spirits, ghost-cults, divinations, and shamanic practices that had no single organizing institution. Wu (shamans) operated in most communities to handle illness, infertility, weather, and the dead in ways the state cult and the family ancestral religion did not address. This was the religion of the peasant household, the village headman's wife, the woman in childbirth.

What did not exist in Han China before Buddhism is worth listing. There was no concept of karma — that is, no doctrine that ethical action accumulated consequences across lifetimes. There was no concept of rebirth in the Indic sense; the ancestral cult presumed continuity of the deceased as ancestor-spirit, but not reincarnation as another being. There was no doctrine of śūnyatā — emptiness, the Mahāyāna teaching that all phenomena lack inherent self-existence — or any comparable metaphysical framework. There were no monastic communities. There were no celibate religious specialists organized into orders with their own land, scripture, and discipline. There was no soteriology in the Buddhist sense: no "liberation" as a goal, no Nirvana as an end-state, no Buddhahood as an achievable transformation. The religious life of Han China was overwhelmingly this-worldly — concerned with the maintenance of cosmic harmony, family continuity, and immediate well-being — and overwhelmingly aristocratic in its formal institutional life.

This was the receiving culture. What Buddhism would bring was not an addition to existing categories. It was a set of categories the Han Chinese had not had.

The Silk Road was an imperial extraction project

The Silk Road that carried Buddhism to China did not exist before the Han state built it.

The Han had been at war with the Xiongnu — the steppe confederation north of the Han frontier — since the dynasty's founding. Under Wudi (r. 141–87 BCE), the war became existential. Wudi's armies pushed the Xiongnu out of the Hexi Corridor in the 120s BCE through a series of campaigns under generals Wei Qing and Huo Qubing; tens of thousands of Xiongnu were killed in these campaigns and their pastoralist tribes were forced north and west. The Han then established four commanderies along the corridor — Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang — as agricultural-military colonies populated by transferred Han farmers and garrison soldiers.³

Further west, Wudi's general Zhang Qian had been sent in 138 BCE on a diplomatic mission to find Yuezhi allies against the Xiongnu. Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held for ten years before escaping; he completed his journey to Bactria, returned via the Pamir route, and reached Han China in 126 BCE with the first detailed Chinese knowledge of the Western Regions. His missions were followed by a sustained Han military and diplomatic campaign in the Tarim Basin through the late second and first centuries BCE. The Han installed garrisons in the oasis city-states (Loulan, Khotan, Kucha, Turpan); they intervened in successions; they fought wars against local resistance; they extracted hostages and tribute. By the late first century BCE, the Han Western Regions Protectorate (西域都護府) controlled, with greater or lesser firmness, the trade routes from the Hexi Corridor through the Tarim Basin to the Pamir passes.⁴

The casualties of this campaign were not modest. Han records of the Tarim wars and Hexi pacification are sparse, but the cumulative scale of the campaigns — multi-decade military operations against the Xiongnu, against the Yuezhi, against the Wusun, against the Tarim oasis populations who resisted Han garrisons — runs into hundreds of thousands of dead across the second and first centuries BCE. The Xiongnu confederation never recovered as a unified power; the southern Xiongnu surrendered and were partly absorbed into Han frontier populations, the northern Xiongnu were eventually pushed west into the steppe. The depopulation of Mongolia and the displacement of central Asian pastoralist populations during the Han wars is the demographic backstory of the Silk Road.

This is not the conventional way the Silk Road is taught. Conventional histories present it as a benign trade network through which silk moved west and Buddhism moved east; the military infrastructure that opened and held it is treated as background. But the Silk Road that monks could safely travel between Bactria and Luoyang in the first century CE existed because the Han state had spent two centuries clearing it militarily and garrisoning it with permanent military colonies. The cost was not paid by the monks. It was paid by the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi, the Wusun, the Tarim oasis populations, and the conscripted Han soldiers who had built and held the corridor.

The peaceful religious transmission of the second century CE rode atop a violent imperial extraction of the second through first centuries BCE.

Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya, Gandhara, 3rd century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Open Access (Met OASC) via Wikimedia Commons. · Public Domain (Met OASC)

The Bai Ma Si legend and the documented record

The traditional Chinese narrative of Buddhism's arrival is contained in three principal sources, all later than the events. The Mouzi lihuolun (Master Mou's Treatise Resolving Doubts), traditionally attributed to a late second-century author, is the earliest surviving Chinese text that argues for Buddhism as compatible with Confucian and Daoist tradition; it presupposes the religion's presence as known and contested. The Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han, compiled in the fifth century from Han records) narrates the Bai Ma Si legend at the entry for emperor Ming. The Sishierzhang Jing (Sutra in Forty-Two Sections), traditionally one of the texts the legendary monks brought, is preserved in Chinese tradition as the first Chinese-language Buddhist text but contains anachronisms suggesting a third-century or later compilation.⁵

The documented record is more conservative. The earliest secure evidence of Buddhist activity in Han territory is at Pengcheng in modern Jiangsu province, where a memorial of 65 CE refers to Prince Liu Ying of Chu sponsoring "Buddhist sacrifices" along with Daoist and traditional Chinese ceremonies. This is the first datable mention of Buddhism in a Chinese imperial document.⁶ The first systematic Buddhist translation activity is associated with two foreign monks active in Luoyang from the mid-second century: An Shigao, a Parthian, who arrived around 148 CE and translated about thirty-five texts of the early Buddhist scholastic tradition; and Lokakṣema, a Kushan-Bactrian, who arrived shortly after and produced the first Chinese versions of important Mahāyāna texts including the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and an early version of the Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra.⁷

By 200 CE there was already a recognizably Chinese Buddhist textual culture: foreign monks teaching, Chinese disciples translating with them, manuscripts copying, lay patronage forming. The early Chinese disciples who collaborated with An Shigao and Lokakṣema — Yan Fotiao, Meng Fu, others — are individually named in the catalogues. The translation method was institutional: a foreign monk who knew the source-language text would produce an oral rendering or rough Chinese; one or more Chinese-speaking collaborators would polish and write down the result; the rendered text would then be checked against the source. The collaboration produced a hybrid technical vocabulary in which Buddhist concepts were given Chinese equivalents — sometimes by inventing new compounds (niepan 涅槃 for nirvāṇa via phonetic transliteration; fa 法 for dharma), sometimes by repurposing existing Daoist terms (wu wei 無為 was used for both Daoist non-action and Buddhist asaṃskṛta, the unconditioned).

Translation as discipline

What the Han Chinese received with Buddhism was not only the religion. It was a sustained translation enterprise that lasted six hundred years and produced one of the largest literary translation projects the pre-modern world ever undertook.

The scale matters. Between An Shigao in the mid-second century and Xuanzang in the seventh, Chinese translators rendered into Chinese — from Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari Prakrit, Khotanese, Kuchean, Tibetan, and other source languages — thousands of Buddhist texts ranging from short discourses to multi-volume Mahāyāna sutras and Vinaya disciplinary codes. The Chinese Buddhist canon that consolidated by the Tang period runs to over five thousand fascicles; the modern Taishō Tripiṭaka catalogues 2,920 titles in eighty-five volumes. Across this enterprise, Chinese acquired a vast technical vocabulary for metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and cosmology that the language had not previously had. Yuan 緣 for the Sanskrit pratyaya (conditional cause); kong 空 for śūnyatā (emptiness); xin 心 for citta (mind, in the technical Buddhist sense); zheng 證 for adhigama (realization, in the spiritual-attainment sense). The translation enterprise was, simultaneously, a vocabulary-building enterprise. By the time of Kumārajīva (active in Chang'an 401–413 CE), the technical vocabulary had stabilized enough that subsequent translators could refine rather than invent.

The disciplinary infrastructure was institutional. By the fourth century CE, the yijing (translation bureau) was a permanent establishment at major Buddhist temples — funded by aristocratic patronage and, increasingly, by imperial grants. The bureaus had specialized roles: the zhuyizhe (chief translator, normally a foreign monk), the biyuzhe (oral renderer into Chinese), the zhengyi (meaning-checker), the runwen (literary polisher), the bishou (scribe). A complex translation could occupy a team of twenty or thirty for years.

What changed in the receiving culture

Within three centuries of Buddhism's arrival in Han China, the religious geography of East Asia had been substantially redrawn.

Metaphysics. The Chinese acquired karma, rebirth, and śūnyatā as live categories. These were not merely religious doctrines; they shaped Chinese vernacular speech (the everyday verb yuan, "to be karmically connected," enters the language from Buddhist usage), Chinese poetry (the consciousness of impermanence in Tang and Song verse owes considerable debt to Buddhist anitya), and Chinese popular morality (the karmic understanding of present misfortune as consequence of past action becomes a cultural commonplace). The Confucian and Daoist traditions adapted: Neo-Confucianism in the Song period incorporated Buddhist meditative and metaphysical categories under Confucian frames, and the resulting synthesis (most fully articulated by Zhu Xi, 1130–1200) became the orthodoxy of late imperial China.⁸

Architecture. The pagoda — the Chinese reception of the Indian stūpa — became a permanent feature of the Chinese landscape. The earliest Chinese pagoda, the brick-pagoda at Songyue Temple in Henan, was built in 523 CE; thousands followed across the next millennium. Buddhist temple architecture introduced the multi-courtyard plan with the main hall, side halls, and abbot's quarters that became standard for monastic compounds. Greco-Buddhist sculptural form — the standing Buddha figure with classical drapery, developed under Kushan patronage — moved east with the monks; by the Wei-Jin period, Chinese Buddhist sculpture was distinctly Gandharan in lineage even when the workmanship was local. The grottoes at Yungang, begun under Northern Wei imperial patronage in 460 CE, are unmistakable evidence of how thoroughly Indian and Central Asian Buddhist visual traditions had been absorbed into the Chinese sphere.⁹

Photograph by BabelStone, 2010. Yungang Grottoes, Datong, Shanxi Province, China. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. · CC BY-SA 3.0

Liturgical Chinese. The phonetic transcription requirements of Buddhist mantras and dhāraṇī forced Chinese phonologists to develop, over centuries, a precise account of Chinese pronunciation. The fanqie spelling system used by the Tang dictionaries — in which a syllable's pronunciation is given by the initial consonant of one character and the rime of another — emerged partly from the requirements of accurate Buddhist text recitation. The Yunjing (Mirror of Rhymes) and other Tang phonological works are the basis for the modern reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

Monasticism. The Buddhist monastic order — celibate religious specialists organized into orders with their own land, scripture, and disciplinary code — was a wholly new institution in China. By the Tang period, Buddhist monasteries were the largest landowners in the empire, the most important charitable institutions (operating hospitals, granaries, and refugee shelters), and the most important centers of literary production. The institutional model was eventually borrowed by Daoism, which in the early period had not had monastic orders.

The lineage continued. Buddhism's transmission did not stop in Han China. From Eastern Han Luoyang, the religion moved to the Korean peninsula by the fourth century CE — Goguryeo received Buddhism in 372, Baekje in 384, Silla a century later — and from Baekje to Yamato Japan in the sixth century. Hidden Threads documents the Baekje–Yamato step separately as the second link of this chain. The transmission continued further: from Tang China to Tibet (through the Princess Wencheng's marriage to Songtsen Gampo in 641 and the introduction of Mahāyāna and tantric texts thereafter), from Tang and Song China to Vietnam, from medieval Korea and Japan back to the Western world through the modern period via Zen and Pure Land traditions reaching twentieth-century European and American readers.

Anti-Buddhist memorials and the persecutions

What the conventional narratives of Buddhism's reception in China underemphasize is how violently the religion's institutional life was repeatedly attacked.

Anti-Buddhist memorials at the Chinese imperial court began in the late Han period and continued for the rest of imperial history. The standard arguments were three: that Buddhism was a foreign religion (hu jiao, "barbarian teaching") incompatible with Chinese tradition; that Buddhist celibacy violated the Confucian filial obligation to produce heirs; and that Buddhist tax-exempt monastic landholding starved the imperial fisc. The arguments accumulated in literary memorials by figures like Han Yu (768–824), whose Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha (819) condemned the Tang court's veneration of a relic and was one of the most influential anti-Buddhist statements in Chinese history.¹⁰ But memorials are talk; the persecutions were action.

The first major persecution was under emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei in 446 CE. Taiwu, advised by his Daoist counselor Kou Qianzhi and the Han Confucian official Cui Hao, ordered the destruction of Buddhist monasteries and the laicization of monks across the territories of his northern Chinese empire. Existing monasteries were burned; surviving monks were forced to return to lay life on pain of execution. The persecution lasted until Taiwu's death in 452, when his successor Wencheng restored Buddhism and even sponsored the great rock-cut sculpture program at Yungang as imperial expiation. The Northern Wei persecution killed an unknown but substantial number of monks and destroyed centuries of accumulated Buddhist material culture in northern China.¹¹

The second was under emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou in 574 CE. Wu, ruling a smaller northern Chinese state, ordered both Buddhist and Daoist monastic establishments dissolved across his territory; monks and nuns of both traditions were laicized; monastic property was confiscated. The dissolution lasted until 577, when Wu's military success in conquering the Northern Qi extended the dissolution to a much larger area. The Northern Zhou persecution affected an estimated three million monks and nuns and the destruction of around forty thousand monasteries across the conquered territories. Wu died in 578; his successor Xuan partially restored Buddhism. The persecution had been brief but extensive.¹²

The third — the most catastrophic in Chinese Buddhist memory, and the one cited most often in subsequent histories — was the Huichang persecution under emperor Wuzong of the Tang in 845 CE. By this period, Tang Buddhist monastic establishments had grown to a scale that the Tang state experienced as an existential fiscal threat. Monastic lands were tax-exempt; monastic populations were exempt from corvée and military service; the metallic offerings to monastery treasuries had drained substantial silver and copper from the imperial economy. Wuzong, advised by Daoist counselors and motivated by both Daoist religious commitments and pragmatic fiscal concerns, ordered the comprehensive dissolution of Chinese Buddhism in 845.

The scale of the 845 persecution is recorded with unusual precision in the Tang official histories. The Jiu Tang Shu (Old History of the Tang) records that 4,600 large monasteries (si) were destroyed, that 40,000 smaller temples and shrines (zhaolan) were confiscated, that 260,500 monks and nuns were laicized, that 150,000 slaves owned by the monasteries were freed (and added to the tax-paying population), and that vast quantities of monastic land were redistributed.¹³ Some monks were killed in the dissolution — particularly those who resisted laicization or were caught hiding scriptures and images — though the persecution was not primarily a campaign of execution. It was an institutional dismantlement of a scale unmatched in subsequent Chinese history.

Wuzong died in 846 — possibly from elixir poisoning prescribed by his Daoist advisors. His successor Xuanzong I partially reversed the persecution, allowing some monasteries to be re-established. But Chinese Buddhism never fully recovered the institutional scale it had reached before 845. The destruction of monastic libraries, the laicization of trained scholar-monks, and the loss of accumulated material culture set Chinese Buddhism on a smaller institutional footing for the remaining millennium of imperial Chinese history.

The pattern of anti-Buddhist persecution did not stop with 845. Smaller campaigns followed under the Later Zhou (955), under various local Yuan and Ming officials, and most recently under the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when Buddhist temples were closed, monks laicized, and a great deal of monastic property destroyed.¹⁴ In every case, the institutional vulnerability was the same: Buddhism's tax-exempt landholding, celibate clergy, and foreign doctrinal lineage made it a periodically attractive target for state actors needing fiscal resources or cultural-nationalist legitimation.

What the cost was

The transmission of Buddhism from Kushan India to Han China is, in its act of transmission, peaceful. The monks who came east came as religious specialists offering a doctrine; they did not come at the head of armies. The Chinese who received them — first as elite curiosities, later as systematic translators, eventually as the religion's institutional leaders — did so without compulsion. The early relationship was, by the standards of imperial-period cultural transfers, comparatively voluntary on both sides.

But the transmission did not happen in a peaceful context. Three layers of cost belong to the honest accounting.

First, the Silk Road's military cost. The infrastructure that allowed monks to travel safely from Bactria to Luoyang was produced by Han imperial wars against the Xiongnu (second through first centuries BCE) that displaced or killed an unknown but large number of central Asian pastoralist populations. The Han Tarim wars subjected oasis city-states to garrison rule for centuries. The military death toll across the construction of the corridor cannot be precisely calculated but ran into hundreds of thousands. The monks of the second century CE rode atop this infrastructure without paying for it; the populations who paid for it had been dispossessed long before the religion arrived.

Second, the institutional persecutions. Five named anti-Buddhist persecutions across imperial Chinese history — Northern Wei 446, Northern Zhou 574, Tang Wuzong 845, Later Zhou 955, and the broader pattern of smaller campaigns including the Cultural Revolution 1966–1976 — destroyed an enormous body of accumulated Buddhist material culture and forced hundreds of thousands of clergy back into lay life. The 845 figures alone — 4,600 monasteries destroyed, 260,500 clergy laicized, 150,000 monastic slaves freed — are the largest single state action against an organized religion documented in pre-modern world history. The scale is sometimes obscured by Chinese Buddhism's narrative emphasis on its eventual survival and continuing vitality, but the persecutions are part of the record.

Third, the religion's own role in subsequent state violence. Buddhist institutional history in China and across East Asia includes its own contributions to violence: the Buddhist warrior-monk traditions in medieval China and Japan; the sōhei armies of medieval Japanese temples that fought their own civil wars; the Ikkō-ikki uprisings of fifteenth-century Japan that mobilized Pure Land Buddhist peasants against samurai authority and were crushed by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi with massacres in the 1570s and 1580s; the Tibetan civil wars over Bön and Buddhism in the 9th and 10th centuries; the Buddhist–Taoist persecutions in Korea and Vietnam at various periods. A doctrine of nonviolence carried plenty of state violence in its institutional wake, both as victim and as participant.

The transmission of Buddhism from Kushan India to Han China is one of the great cultural enrichment events in the history of East Asia. It is also entangled with a long imperial extraction project that opened the route, with five named state persecutions that nearly destroyed the religion's institutional life on multiple occasions, and with subsequent Buddhist participation in violence on its own behalf. The honest version of the story holds all of this at once: a doctrine of liberation arrived; it changed everything; and nothing about its transmission, settlement, or onward propagation was free of cost. The monasteries the modern visitor sees standing today are the survivors of long centuries during which most of their predecessors burned.