Chapter 3 Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Tibet 91ing a life of ascetic renunciation. Giving alms, carrying a rosary, occasional
meditation, and the sponsoring of sutra copying and other acts of faith could
salve the conscience of a busy man of the world. The multiplying schools of
Mahayana Buddhism offered this new kind of Buddhism at the same time that
the Silk Roads were entering a period of fluorescence.
The faiths that traveled the Silk Roads were changed by the travelers and
their journeys; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, and Sufi Islam all
emerged along the Silk Roads as variants of their original forms in the Middle
East (see box 3.2).Barbarians
The histories of nomadic peoples are often told on their behalf by their sed-
entary neighbors, so that we know the Scythians, the Parthians, and the Mon-
gols through the accounts left by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese,
respectively. Popular images of these nomadic peoples are replete with visions
of raiding hordes on horseback, uncivilized and brutal in both their war-mak-
ing and their cultures. Conflicts and interactions that reinforce prejudices of
these nomadic peoples often get most of the ink in the relatively voluminous
historical accounts by their sedentary neighbors, so that exceptions only prove
the rule of barbarity.Pagodas and the Mogao cave structures at Dunhuang in the far west of China’s western Gansu
Province represent the importance of Buddhism to many of the travelers of the Silk Roads.