While Jesus walked in Galilee,
the Han Dynasty in the East
was reaching its high mature phase,
and a strange new teaching entered its feast.
Emperor Ming of Han dreamed a dream
of a golden man flying west-to-east,
and his advisors said: this is the Buddha,
the sage from India, the teaching priest.
He sent ambassadors down the Silk Road
to find the monks and the scriptures both.
They returned with two Indian monks,
Kasyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna, of both.
They brought scriptures, statues, and monks
on a white horse, the legend says,
and the first Buddhist temple in China
was the White Horse Temple of those days.
This was the first crossing — around
sixty-seven of the Common Era.
Buddhism entered the Han Empire
by imperial sponsorship without fear.
But it would not take root for centuries.
The Chinese saw it as a curiosity,
a foreign teaching from the western regions,
not yet absorbed into their reality.
It competed with Daoism at first,
and the two borrowed from each other.
Daoists adapted Buddhist concepts.
Buddhists used Daoist terms as brothers.
The translation problem was immense.
How translate "nirvana" into Chinese?
How translate "dharma," "karma," "anatta"?
The monks did their best to seize.
They used Daoist "wu wei" for "nirvana,"
"dao" for "dharma," and hoped it stuck.
Later, better translators came who
coined new terms with better luck.
Meanwhile, to the east, in Korea,
a different strand of the Eastern story:
the legend of Heo Hwang-ok, princess
of Ayodhya, sailed for coastal glory.
The legend says she was a princess
of the Kingdom of Ayuta in India,
who sailed across the sea to Korea
in the first century, to marry plenty.
She married King Suro of Geumgwan Gaya,
became queen of that small kingdom,
bore him ten sons, and two took her surname,
founding the Kimhae Heo lineage wisdom.
Whether the legend is literal or
symbolic of cultural connection made,
the maritime links between South Asia
and East Asia were already there, unafraid.
The Kimhae Heo and Kimhae Kim clans
both trace descent from Heo Hwang-ok.
Millions of modern Koreans trace
their lineage back to this Indian shock.
Buddhism would later come to Korea
through Chinese channels, in the fourth century,
but already in the first, there were
threads of contact, mythic currency.
In India itself, Buddhism was
splitting into schools and lineages,
Theravada, Sarvastivada, Mahasanghika,
the Vibhajyavada and other sages.
The Kushan Empire under Kanishka
in the second century united
Bactria, Gandhara, and northwest India,
where Greco-Buddhist art ignited.
The Gandhara school carved Buddha statues
in a Hellenistic Greek style,
with flowing robes like Apollo's,
with Mediterranean faces, for a while.
This is the origin of all Buddha images.
Before Gandhara, the Buddha was
represented only by symbols — wheel,
footprint, empty throne, the cause.
After Gandhara, the anthropomorphic
Buddha with long earlobes, topknot, robe
spread across Asia from India east,
became the icon of the globe.
Kanishka convened the Fourth Buddhist Council,
where the Sarvastivada school was codified,
and missions went out across the Silk Road
to carry dharma to where it could hide.
Mahayana Buddhism was emerging,
"the Great Vehicle," with its new ideals:
the bodhisattva who forgoes nirvana
to save all beings, who feels what all feels.
The Lotus Sutra, the Heart Sutra,
the Diamond Sutra were being written,
expanding the scope of the teaching from
the arhat path to the Buddha's wisdom.
Mahayana would be the form that traveled east
to China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam.
Theravada would survive in the south,
in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia's psalm.
The Silk Road was the great conveyor.
From Kushan Gandhara eastward through
Tarim Basin oasis kingdoms,
monks and scrolls and statues flew.
Khotan, Kucha, Turfan, Dunhuang,
the desert stations where caravans paused,
became centers of Buddhist translation,
cave monasteries where the great texts were housed.
Dunhuang's caves would later shelter
the Diamond Sutra's earliest print,
the world's oldest dated printed book,
from the ninth century, in preserved stint.
But that was later. For now, in the Han,
the new teaching trickled in slowly,
a curiosity, a foreign cult,
not yet the cultural river, wholly.
The Han itself was showing strain.
The empress clans fought palace war.
The Yellow Turbans rebelled in anger.
The Han would fall in the third century, raw.
But that's the next chapter. For now,
mark the crossing: the teaching of
the Shakyamuni had crossed the mountains,
had entered China, the second love.
Two great transmissions. Two great streams
flowing out from the Indian source:
Ashoka's missions south and west;
these silk-road missions east, of course.
The dharma was becoming world-religion,
no longer just an Indian way.
The Buddha's "middle path" had proved
capable of crossing every sway.
Stand.