The Spread of Buddhism

the spread of buddhism in serindia 117

were individuals. They left very few traces, but the mixture of Buddhism,

Daoism and wizardry in the Han reports on Buddhism, of Buddhism

and Mazdeism in some Sogdian texts, and the weight of iconography

let us gauge that the  rst missionaries were preachers and thaumaturges,

who showed images and who told stories. The earliest Buddhist texts

translated in Chinese were in fact doctrinally crude.

It may seem that Serindian Buddhism, the manifestations of which

are multifaceted and often as debased as acculturated, displays neither

unity nor individuality. In fact we should turn over this image: Indian

Buddhism has been for some time one of the factors of unity in

Serindia, and since it has survived up to now, albeit in a very modest

measure, it cannot have been a foreign transplant. Manichaeism and

Eastern Mazdeism have not been so resilient.^191

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(^191) But Nestorianism has survived among the Mongolian Erkuts.
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