Silk Road Dharma

A History of Uyghur Buddhism spans the 6th to the 15th centuries and highlights the aspects of Buddhism adopted by Uyghur culture over a period of nearly a thousand years. This time frame is bookended by a previous period when Manichaeism (a dualistic religion founded in Persia in the 3rd century CE) was dominant, and later, when Islam finally prevailed. Johan Elverskog, the author and professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, argues that the Uyghur conversion to Buddhism (and later Islam) did not occur as a singular event but developed as a response to factors that included geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation during Uyghur culture’s centuries-long engagement with Buddhism.

This history reminds us that Buddhism, like all religions, constantly responds to cultural, political, and economic forces. Elverskog details how Uyghur culture, particularly the elites, incorporated Buddhist ideas and portrayed those ideas through art, texts, and ritual objects. His work demonstrates how Buddhism engages with new cultures, as seen today throughout Europe and North America, and how it influences and responds to the cultural contexts and social needs of new ecosystems. As with much contemporary historical research, we are once again reminded that Buddhism does not always look the same in different historical periods and places.

The Uyghurs discussed in the book are a Turkic people from the steppes of Mongolia and Russia. Over time, a portion of these people moved west into what is now Xinjiang, China, and while they retained the name Uyghur, they are not identical to the Uyghurs who practiced Buddhism in centuries past. As the center of a network of trade routes, the Uyghur cultural area in Central Asia has seen many migrations and interactions with other cultures and fluctuated in size over time. Elverskog’s book embraces and explores that complexity.

A History of Uyghur Buddhism follows chronological and thematic frameworks to pursue its subject. In his introduction, Elverskog shows that an understanding of Uyghur Buddhism requires not just familiarity with ritual practices or pilgrimage but also an understanding of Uyghur society’s political, economic, and social conditions. For example, in the section on Buddhism and the economy, he reveals that Buddhist monasteries, despite Buddhism’s prohibition of intoxicants, produced wine, and that there was a Uyghur ritual for good harvests that included offerings of wheat beer. We may forget how readily religion accommodates itself to circumstance.

The opening chapter focuses on the Uyghurs’ adoption of Buddhism. Several ideas are explored as to why Manichaeism might have failed the Uyghur culture. Manichaean views of the body and cosmos may have seemed outdated as new Indian and Chinese ideas gained dominance in East and Central Asia.

Ideas on the body, medicine, and technology are prominently explored throughout the work. Elverskog details Uyghur culture’s flexibility in adapting texts, practices, and languages that incorporated Buddhism that simultaneously allowed them to maintain elements of Manichaeism and Chinese religious culture. Indeed, Elverskog points out that despite being an important cultural force over many centuries, Buddhism never became a state religion for the Uyghurs.

Just as Buddhism was intertwined with the economy from its beginnings in India, so was it intertwined with the economy in 11th-century Uyghur society. One area of study for Elverskog is donations from the laity to monastics for the performance of rituals. Another section details how Uyghur Buddhist monasteries were active participants in the economic activity of the West Uyghur kingdom. The West Uyghur kingdom gained considerable economic clout during its transition to Buddhism. Horses and cotton, two of the Uyghurs’ main trade goods, were sold in China. This trade flourished during the 11th and 12th centuries, and the wealth was shared as offerings to Buddhist institutions for the performance of rituals.

Elverskog makes a point to say that we cannot define or limit Uyghur Buddhist practices into one of the three yanas. He writes that lay Uyghur Buddhists, generally elites, were “interested in generating good karma for themselves and their family members through ritual performances, artistic and textual production, pilgrimage, and the confession of sins.” He also says that in the 10th and 11th centuries, Uyghur Buddhists focused on purifying and accumulating karma and the cult of Maitreya, as an aspiration to be reborn during the time of Maitreya. Later, in the 13th century, Uyghurs adopted Tibetan Buddhism.

Just as Buddhism was intertwined with the economy from its beginnings in India, so was it intertwined with the economy in 11th-century Uyghur society.

Elverskog refers to “Uyghur Buddhisms,” a nod to the multiple expressions of Buddhism across Uyghur culture, which covered a vast swath of Central Asia. Rather than being “one line of thinking,” Uyghur Buddhism embraced many different ideas and forms over the years. And none of this happened in isolation. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Mongol influence is evident in the historical and archaeological record, and we see an influx of Buddhist texts, both Chinese and Tibetan. One practice embraced by the Uyghurs was the cult of Avalokiteshvara, and the recitation of the mantra Om mani padme hum. Evidence of this practice is seen on the walls of Dunhuang caverns.

Elverskog concludes with the transition from Buddhism to Islam from the 13th to 15th centuries. He highlights the small steps individuals took to “become Muslim,” such as consulting Muslim doctors because their medical knowledge was more advanced or converting to Islam to avoid the non-Muslim tax. This transition occurred through a series of microshifts that were spottily recorded, leaving us to rely on macronarratives to explain it. We are warned that “Islamization was a process no less complicated and drawn out than that of the Uyghurs’ conversion to Buddhism.” Any process of conversion on a societal level is necessarily complex and dynamic, as indeed was the case in Buddhism’s disappearance from India, which predated the Uyghurs’ conversion to Islam.

This book includes more than seventy illustrations including maps, texts, and photographs of Uyghur material art distributed throughout the world. In this way, the reader is able to review material scattered across numerous archives, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library in London, or key locations that were once found on the Silk Road, such as Dunhuang and the Bezeklik “Thousand Buddha” caves in northwestern China. The maps ground this complex historical narrative, introducing the geography, geology, and cultural areas of a region that may not be familiar to readers.

The strengths of this book are its comprehensive overview of Uyghur culture and the changes undergone by its religions over a millennium. A History of Uyghur Buddhism shares with a wider audience scholarship gained through the archives previously mentioned and projects like BuddhistRoad, which examines the cultural encounter and religious transfer in premodern Eastern Central Asia along the Silk Road. Elverskog incorporates a remarkably vast body of research and information and packs it into an accessible and approachable format for those who may have little familiarity with Uyghur culture, Central Asian history, or the relevant forms of Buddhism from this period. This volume makes an excellent resource for scholars and readers of Buddhist history.

Buddhism extends far beyond meditation and cultivating virtuous behavior. Elverskog points out that scholars over the past thirty years, to their credit, have worked to dispel “popular (mis)conceptions about Buddhism.” He also dismantles the concept of Buddhism as a singular entity, demonstrating how various forms of Buddhism were taken from other cultural sources and blended into a new culture. This blending and cross-fertilization show us the importance of the Uyghurs and their Buddhism(s) to Central Asian history and their relevance to Buddhism today as it engages new cultures.

There is much to admire here. But at times, it can be difficult to follow the historical threads. The book addresses an extensive time frame and thematic overviews; it rapidly moves through people, places, events, vanished cultures, and historical periods. For example, Chapter One begins with the consolidation of a Buddhist Uyghur kingdom. While the book says that the Uyghurs were situated within the larger Turkish Empire, it races through details. It can be difficult to see the through line when reading so many different references within each paragraph and section.

Overall, there is great value in this book, and it is one that I plan to incorporate into my courses and one I will personally revisit from time to time. The broad overviews and introduction to Central Asian history and Uyghur Buddhism in the context of political, economic, and daily life are excellent presentations of how Buddhism (like everything else) does not remain static but reflects and informs culture, just as it is likewise influenced.

The rich offerings have encouraged me to deepen my reading on the religious cultures of Central Asia. It should inspire more readers to enter this lost Buddhist world.