Punjab's Buddhist Millennium

For most of a thousand years, the country between the Indus and the Beas was Buddhist. Its emperors endowed monasteries at Taxila; a Greek king ruled from the city now called Sialkot and survives in a Buddhist text as a philosopher; its workshops made the first images of the Buddha in human form. Then, within a few generations either side of 500 CE, that world ended. This is the one chapter of Punjab's history that belongs to a tradition no longer practised on this ground — which is why it belongs on the record.

Causes and beginnings — Ashoka

Taxila was a provincial capital of the Mauryan empire, the first state to govern most of the subcontinent. Buddhist tradition — the Aśokāvadāna — has Ashoka (r. c. 268–232 BCE) serving as viceroy at Taxila before becoming emperor; treat this as tradition rather than documented fact. After his conversion, Ashoka's patronage carried Buddhism outward from the Gangetic plain along exactly the trade roads that pass through Punjab.

Ashoka's rock edicts in the north-west, at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra, are carved in Kharoṣṭhī — a script written right to left, derived from Aramaic and native to this region. The land of the five rivers has been reading in two directions since the third century BCE, which is worth remembering when Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi are described as a modern accommodation. They are not. They are the region's oldest habit in its latest form.

Menander, and the Indo-Greeks

The Greek kingdoms left behind by Alexander's campaign eventually produced Menander I (r. c. 165–130 BCE), whose capital was Sāgala — modern Sialkot, Punjab, Pakistan. He is firmly historical: his coinage is among the most abundant of any Indo-Greek ruler and is found across the north-west. He is also the “Milinda” of the Pali text Milindapañha, “The Questions of Milinda,” which stages a long philosophical dialogue between him and the monk Nāgasena on whether a self exists.

The Kushans and Gandharan art

Under Kanishka and his successors, from roughly the first to the fifth century CE, the region became the centre of a Buddhist artistic tradition working in grey schist: Hellenistic drapery, Roman-influenced modelling, Indian subject matter. Its most consequential innovation was the depiction of the Buddha as a human figure. Earlier Buddhist art had represented him by symbols — a footprint, an empty throne, a wheel, a parasol above an absence.

The end

From the late fifth century the Alchon Huns moved into the north-west. The ruler Mihirakula is remembered in Buddhist sources as a destroyer of monasteries — sources which are hostile witnesses and should be read as such. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, travelling around 400 CE, found Buddhism flourishing here. Xuanzang, travelling around 630 CE, found many of the same monasteries deserted and ruined.

Long-term impact

Gandharan sculpture is now in museums in Lahore, Peshawar, London, Paris and New York, and it shaped Buddhist art as far as China and Japan — the image of the Buddha that a worshipper in Kyoto bows to has an ancestor made in this region. In Punjab itself the inheritance is quieter: unexcavated mounds across both Punjabs, place-names, and the standing ruins at Taxila.

Every other era on this site's timeline belongs to a tradition still practised in Punjab. This one does not — and a civilisation's history includes what it used to be. Leaving it off would mean recording only the Punjab that survived into the present, which is not the same thing as the Punjab that happened.

Modern place-names

Taxila, Rawalpindi District, Punjab, Pakistan (UNESCO World Heritage Site, 1980). Sāgala → Sialkot, Punjab, Pakistan. Gandhara → chiefly the Peshawar valley and Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with Taxila as its eastern anchor inside Punjab.