Buddhism and Gandhara

An Archaeology of Museum Collections

Himanshu Prabha Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351252744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Gandhara is a name central to Buddhist heritage and iconography. It is the ancient name of a region in present-day Pakistan, bounded on the west by the Hindu Kush mountain range and to the north by the foothills of the Himalayas. 'Gandhara' is also the term given to this region's sculptural and architectural features between the first and sixth centuries CE.

This book re-examines the archaeological material excavated in the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and traces the link between archaeological work, histories of museum collections and related interpretations by art historians. The essays in the volume underscore the diverse cultural traditions of Gandhara – from a variety of sources and perspectives on language, ethnicity and material culture (including classical accounts, Chinese writings, coins and Sanskrit epics) – as well as interrogate the grand narrative of Hellenism of which Gandhara has been a part. The book explores the making of collections of what came to be described as Gandhara art and reviews the Buddhist artistic tradition through notions of mobility and dynamic networks of transmission.

Wide ranging and rigorous, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers of early South Asian history, archaeology, religion (especially Buddhist studies), art history and museums.

1 Greek or Indian? The Questions of Menander and onomastic patterns in early Gandhāra

Stefan Baums

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between Hellenistic society and Buddhism in Bactria and Gandhāra between the third century BCE and the second century CE.¹ It does so with a dual focus: the question of the literary antecedents, authorship and audience of the Milindapañha/Nǎxiān bǐqiū jīng 那先比丘經 will be raised first; then it introduces new epigraphic evidence for the state of Hellenistic society and Buddhism in the period under consideration and presents a comprehensive analysis of the relevant onomastic data in the inscriptions; and finally, it concludes by bringing this epigraphic evidence to bear on the questions raised about the Milindapañha and its place in society.²

In briefest historical outline,³ Menander was a Bactrian Greek king who reigned around 150 BCE and conquered parts of India (up to Mathurā and, temporarily, Pāṭaliputra), leaving behind a very large coin issue, brief references in the works of the Alexander historians and – unique among Greek rulers – a literary echo as the interlocutor of the monk Nāgasena in the Buddhist scholastic dialogue preserved to us in Chinese translation as the Nǎxiān bǐqiū jīng 那先比丘經 (‘Sūtra of the Monk Nāgasena’) and in Pali translation as the Milindapañha (‘Questions of Menander’). The extant Chinese translation was prepared in the fourth century CE on the basis of an earlier translation of the third century CE and goes back to an Indian original in a language other than Pali, and possibly Gāndhārī.⁴ The Pali translation consists of an old core (pages 1–89 of Trenckner’s edition) corresponding to the Chinese translation (though itself incorporating several younger elements) and at least three later textual layers (pages 90–420 of Trenckner’s edition) that had been added to it by the time the Pali commentaries were composed in the fifth century CE.⁵ The dialogue of Menander and Nāgasena takes place over a period of two days. On the first day, Menander drives his chariot to visit Nāgasena in his assembly, challenges him with a series of questions on the nature of the world and leaves on horseback, thoroughly convinced by Nāgasena on all points. On the second day, Nāgasena visits Menander in his palace and answers a further series of questions (occasionally interjecting questions of his own). The text ends on the morning of the third day when Menander and Nāgasena meet one last time to assure each other of their respect.⁶

In an early article on Hellenism in Bactria and India, the Scottish historian W. W. Tarn (1902: 272–274, following Takakusu Junjirō 高楠 順次郎) suggested that the dialogue between Menander and Nāgasena may have been based on an earlier dialogue between the Buddha and a king Nanda (a version of which is preserved in a Chinese avadāna collection) and that the legend, reported by Plutarch, of the division of Menander’s ashes into eight parts likewise appears to be based on the division of the Buddha’s relics into eight parts. Concerning the historical king Menander’s attitude to Buddhism, Tarn considers it likely that he was favorably disposed to the Indian religion for political expediency, although we have no positive evidence for any more active support (the title δίκαιος = dhamika, Skt. dhārmika, and the eight-spoked wheel on Menander’s coinage can refer to general Indian notions of just kingship and universal rule).⁷ Tarn further suggested that the author of the dialogue may have been attracted to Menander simply because he was the most powerful and famous of the Indo-Greek rulers. (I will return to the larger question of why a Greek ruler was chosen at all.)

Meanwhile, after Albrecht Weber’s early proposal that the Milindapañha could be a direct Indian response to the Socratic dialogues, Indological opinion had come to prefer the Upaniṣadic dialogues and other inner-Indian models as its most likely literary antecedents.⁸ But Tarn’s thoughts on this matter developed in the opposite direction, and in an excursus in his groundbreaking history of the Greeks in Bactria and India,⁹ he presented an elaborate theory that the familiarity with Greek customs in the old core of the Milindapañha presupposed an original written by a Greek in the Greek language soon after Menander’s time; this hypothetical original was in turn based on the legend of Alexander asking ten questions of Indian gymnosophists and the hypothetical Greek Ur-Milindapañha itself travelled to the West and there inspired an unknown Greek author to compose the core of the dialogue between King Ptolemy II and the seventy-two Jewish elders that is preserved in Aristeas’ letters to Philocrates. For Tarn, his theory of a Greek Ur-Milindapañha formed part of a larger postulate of a body of lost Bactrian Greek literature, for which he could only adduce the evidence of one unusual city name ‘Iomousa’, which he explains as a nickname derived from the beginning of a hymn Ἰὼ Μοῦσα ‘Hail, O Muse’, and another slightly less unusual city name, ‘Euthymedeia’ (Εὐθυμέδεια), which he takes as a nickname plucked from a composition in hexameter verse (in which this name would scan).

Soon after the publication of Tarn’s book, Jan Gonda devoted an entire article¹⁰ to justified criticism of Tarn’s arguments for a Greek Ur-Milindapañha, favouring, like most of his fellow Indologists,¹¹ an Indian literary origin (and in particular Buddhist canonical dialogues like that between the Buddha and King Ajātaśatru in the Śrāmaṇyaphalasūtra), although Gonda cautiously adds that although he does not believe that Tarn’s specific arguments carry weight, he cannot entirely rule out a Greek prototype for the Milindapañha. A. K. Narain in Appendix I of his 1957 book on the Indo-Greeks similarly argues against that part of Tarn’s argument which hinges on a supposed underlying Greek distinction between the Indian variant word forms Yona and Yonaka (both meaning ‘Greek’ or ‘Western foreigner’ in general), but he does not address the larger question of a Bactrian Greek literature and a possible origin of the Milindapañha in it.

Tarn died in 1957, just one year before the first of an unbroken string of discoveries of Greek inscriptions from Bactria that support his theory of a living Greek literary tradition in this country in the third and second centuries BCE. This string of discoveries was foreshadowed by the single Greek phrase, διὰ Παλαμήδου, ‘on behalf of Palamḗdēs’, at the bottom of a Bactrian-language inscription discovered at Surkh Kotal and first published in 1954.¹² In 1958 this was followed by the discovery at Kandahar (Alexandria in Arachosia) of a bilingual Greek-Aramaic summary version of the Buddhist edicts of Emperor Aśoka, and in 1964 by the further discovery in the same city of a faithful Greek translation of Aśoka’s Rock Edicts XII and XIII,¹³ both dated to the third century BCE.

One year later, French excavations started in Ai Khanum (maybe Alexandria on the Oxus), and between 1965 and 1978 these brought to light a total of four Greek stone inscriptions, ca. thirty financial records inscribed on pottery and the remains of two literary manuscripts. Of special significance for our purposes is an extract from the Delphic Maxims inscribed around the year 300 BCE by a certain Kléarkhos in the heroon of Kinéas),¹⁴ a papyrus manuscript containing a Greek philosophical treatise dating from ca. 250 BCE and a parchment manuscript preserving fragments of a Greek drama dating from ca. 200 BCE.¹⁵ A later find at Kandahar (first published in 1979) was the statue of a hunting dog with a Greek verse inscription by its owner, the son of Aristō̃naks, expressing his gratitude for having been saved from the attack of a wild animal (third century BCE).¹⁶ Most recently, an altar of Hestía was discovered in Kuliab (ca. 100 km northeast of Ai Khanum) with an epigram recording its dedication by a certain Hēliódotos to King Euthúdēmos and his son, the ‘glorious conqueror’ (of Gandhāra) Dēmḗtrios.¹⁷ The historical reference assigns this inscription to the beginning of the se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Greek or Indian? The Questions of Menander and onomastic patterns in early Gandhāra
• 2 “Tis all here. A treasure locked”: unlocking the wonder house of the Chinese Buddhist travelogues
• 3 Numismatics of ‘the Other’: investigating coinage and ‘Greekness’ at Taxila
• 4 Region through text: representation of Gandhāra in the Mahābhārata
• 5 Charles Masson: a footloose antiquarian in Afghanistan and the building up of numismatic collections in the museums in India and England
• 6 The collection of Gandharan art in the residence of the Malakand Political Agent, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan
• 7 Vajīrasthāna/Bazira and beyond: foundation and current status of the archaeological work in Swat
• 8 The beginning and development of Gandhāran collections in German public museums
• 9 Decoding Gandharan art: the making of museum collections in India
• Index