The Spread of Buddhism

114 xavier tremblay

With the gradual vanishing of Tocharian, Uighur Buddhism got more

and more intertwined with Chinese Buddhism, although direct Indian

contacts never died out, as the revival of Brhm to write Uighur from

the eleventh century onwards testi es.^183 The Tibetan in ux remained

marginal before the Mongol conquest.

The Uighur region remained a stronghold of Buddhism up to ca.

1430, when the Khan was forced to convert through the Chaghataid

prince Xizr HoÌa.

5. Conclusion

Not too many years ago, the role of the Kua dynasty and more

generally of the Iranians in the history of Buddhism was valued very

highly: “Der Yabgu Kanika [.. .] führte sein Reich zum Höhepunkt

der Kultur; sie trug buddhistisches Gepräge. An seinem Hof dichtete

Mtºceta seine Buddhahymnen, verfaßte A vaghoa sein Buddhaepos

und gestaltete Kumralta seine buddhistischen Erzählungen und

eine Sanskrit-Grammatik. Es war auch vermutlich hier, in Baktrien

[.. .], daß man zum ersten mal gewagt hat, ein Bildnis des Buddha zu

schaffen”.^184 The discovery that the Kuas were in all probability not

Buddhists has soberingly shown that the Buddhist accounts, written

long after the Kua dynasty, are to be used with caution, and that

many religious phenomena (such as Mahyna) could develop and be

propagated simply along trade routes without a foreign king’s hand.

The more detailed the evidence grows, the more insuf cient and piece-

meal it appears to us. Some momentous phenomena may have left no

positive traces: such as Gandhran Hinduism, Parthian Buddhism, the

Sogdians in China, or Mazdeism. Reality is always more intricate than

the image chance  ndings convey.

The earliest evidenced translations into the vernacular languages of

Serindia postdate by  ve centuries the arrival of Buddhism and, in the

Tarim Basin, the beginning of literacy in Indian languages: fourth- fth

century for Bactrian, sixth century for Sogdian (both languages had

already been written for centuries),  fth century for Khotanese, some-

(^183) See the TTT VIII manuscript.
(^184) von Gabain 1961b, p. 498. Similarly Litvinsky 1999, p. 2.
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