by Kevin Reilly
Iranian Society . In Iran, the kings of the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE) gave large tracts of land to nobles who raised large horses for armed cavalries. They planted alfalfa, which added nutrients to the soil and provided enough hay to feed the large horses in the winter. With the use of underground irrigation tunnels called qanats, these nobles could raise thirsty alfalfa on relatively dry land. The large horses of Iran were able to support heavy suits of armor that protected Iranian horsemen from the arrows of the nomadic cavalry.
Large horses and armored knights were to become the medieval missile shield against the periodic invasions of nomadic horsemen. Thanks to the use of stirrups, probably invented by northern Chinese nomads about the fourth century, armored horsemen could also go on the offensive, wielding battering rams or lances that might otherwise throw them off their mounts.
The Iranian deterrent to nomadic invasions came at a cost. Since Iranian nobles raised their own horses and equipped their own armies, they, rather than the king, held the reins of power. The Parthian Empire and the succeeding Sassanid Empire (247–642) were almost feudal societies where power was ultimately local and tribal, the king a subordinate to his nobles. The same drawbacks later hindered western Europe when it adopted the Iranian system of feudal armies of armed knights.
Iranian Religions . Iranian religions were the first to spread across the large region of Southwest Asia. In the classical age of Achaemenid Persia, that religion was Zoroastrianism. The religion of Zoroaster was an important step toward universal religion. Zoroastrians were not strictly monotheistic since they believed in both Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and Angra Mainyu, the god of darkness. But key Zoroastrian ideas of a final conflict (between light and dark), the end of the world, the last judgment, the resurrection of the dead, personal salvation, and eternal life gained a wide following among non-Zoroastrians of Southwest Asia, including Jews and Christians. The spread of religious ideas from Persia can be seen in the names of the Parsees of India and the Pharisees of ancient Israel.
In Parthian and Sassanid times, however, Zoroastrianism answered Persian and Iranian national interests. While many of its ideas circulated widely, the teachings of Zoroaster and his priests remained Iranian. This was not the case with the reformulated version of Zoroastrian dualism presented by a later Persian, the prophet Mani (216–272), who actively sought converts of all nations. Believing his Manichaeism was a synthesis of the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha, Mani created a universal salvation religion that, during his lifetime, was more successful than the Buddhism and Christianity from which it sprung. Combining the roles of both Jesus and Paul in his own person, Mani traveled from his native Babylon throughout the Sassanid Empire to establish cells of followers from India to North Africa. St. Augustine (354–430) was a Manichaean before he converted to Christianity, as were many others in the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Manichaeism, like the Zoroastrianism from which it derived, provided consolation in a dangerous world by explaining the power of evil. Especially to young searching minds, like Augustine’s in his student days at Carthage, the idea of life as constant struggle between the forces of goodness and evil supplied a drama that matched the rhythms of youth as well as the threats of a hostile world. Manichaeism was to later spread to central Asia and China, and philosophies that paid tribute to darkness were never entirely extirpated by the monotheistic and universal salvation religions—Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—that swept Eurasia in the following centuries.
Thus, Iran, with its empires of large horses, served as a protective buffer between the grasslands of invaders and the Indian subcontinent. As a middle ground between the pastoral grasslands of nomad confederacies and the lands that pointed to tropical seas, Iran also prepared the way for universal faiths and new ways of life that were carried, sometimes with monsoon force, by winds from the south.
India and Southeast Asia
The Himalayan Mountains, the highest in the world, also protected India and Southeast Asia from the sort of massive nomadic invasions that undermined classical China and the Western Roman Empire. South Asia did not escape incursions completely, but, in general, the more threatening peoples, like the Xiongnu (Huns), pushed the more settled ones, like the Yuezhi, before them. The Yuezhi, already settled in the area of Bactria by the time of Zhang Qian’s visit, adopted elements of Greek and Indian culture in forming the Kushan state, which protected India from the Huns.
The Kushan Prelude . If the winds of hemispheric integration blew from the south, perhaps the first gusts came from the Kushan state. During the most intensive period of nomadic pressure from the Eurasian grasslands (200–400), the Kushan kingdom was one of the most sophisticated states in the entire world. Under Kanishka, who ruled around 100, the Kushans governed what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India.5 The combination of Indian and Greek traditions, the legacy of Alexander the Great, was a heady brew in Kushan culture. The Kushans evolved Ayurvedic medicine from Indian Vedic knowledge of botany and Greek science. Similarly, the collision of the two languages–Greek and Sanskrit—led Kushan thinkers to the first analysis of grammar and language structure in any language. And the different artistic traditions of Greece and India inspired Kushan artists to devise the first images of the Buddha and Boddhisatvas (Buddhist saints) as well as images of halos that were adopted by early Christians. In the end, the Kushanas gave India not only a respite from northern nomads but also a leg up when Indian political revival came after 320. And even before a new dynasty of Indian kings reunified the territories of the Mauryans, Indian merchant guilds and families were creating one of the most vibrant economies of their age. In sum, the forces of southernization between 200 and 1000 came from India even more than Iran, and they were as material as they were spiritual.
Monsoon Winds . One engine of Indian expansion was the seasonally variable winds. The principle is simple: oceans moderate air temperatures, cooling in the summer and warming in the winter. That is why the temperature of coastal areas is always more moderate than inland areas. Lands that are far from oceans become especially cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer. The area on the planet farthest from oceans is central Asia. Cold air is heavy and dense, warm air light and porous, so, as warm light air rises, cooler air pushes its way in and under. As the land area of central Asia cools in the winter, its dense air expands, displacing the warmer air over the southern oceans. This process is reversed in the summer when the hot air of central Asia rises and creates a vacuum that pulls in the cooler ocean air from the south. Consequently, from December to March, the prevailing winds blow south from cold central Asia across India and Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea. From May to August, the cooler winds flow north from the southern oceans toward the hot interior.
This rhythm has a profound impact on South Asian growing patterns. The summer winds from the oceans are laden with moisture, which they dump on land as far as the Himalayas (also creating the deserts on the northern “rain shadow” side of the mountains). In India and mainland Southeast Asia, this “monsoon season” is one of frequent and heavy rains. The winter winds are cool and dry as they cross the Himalayas and India, but over the oceans they pick up moisture to bring another monsoon season to coastal Southeast Asia and the islands. The heavy rain provides lush vegetation and allows a rice-based agriculture that can support a dense population. The predictability of the monsoons punctuates the growing seasons (since planting must be accomplished before or after the rains) and allows two or even three crops a year in some areas. But in the rare years when the rains fail, drought and famine are particularly disastrous.
Another consequence of the monsoons was that once sailors had mastered the winds, they were able to take advantage of an enormous natural energy source for travel and trade. These were the winds of southernization.
Malay Sails . The sailors of the Malay Peninsula learned to navigate the monsoon winds sometime in the first millennium BCE. Malay and Mala
y-Polynesian peoples were the first in the world to navigate the open seas, and they did so long before the invention of the compass. They were able to sail the vast Pacific by careful observation of the stars, ocean waves and swells, cloud patterns, bird movements, and the fish and plant life in the water. Able to sense islands 30 miles away, they settled the islands of the Pacific from the coasts of Southeast Asia to Easter Island. Others charted the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa.
The earliest sailing ships were fairly simple. Egyptian sailors on the Nile needed only to raise a square sail to catch the north winds to travel south against the current; to return, they needed only to lower the sail and follow the current north to the Mediterranean. Mesopotamian sailors clung close to the riverbanks of the Tigris and Euphrates and the ports of the Arabian Sea. Malay sailors were the first to sail the open seas. In their epic voyages across the Pacific, they invented double-hulled outrigger canoes (the ancestor of the modern catamaran) for stability in ocean swells. To tack or zigzag against the wind, they invented the balanced lug sail, a sail that looked like a blunted arrow pointed forward, the mast near the point, with the bulk of the sail rigged to a boom that could be swung out over the water so the wind could push the craft sideways. Malay sails may have inspired the Arab sailors who developed similar triangular lateen sails.
Malay sailors also pioneered the earliest water routes between India and China. Even in the classical age of the land Silk Road, Malay sailors had discovered how to ride the monsoon winds from southern India to China by way of the Strait of Malacca. From India or Sri Lanka, they would take the winter winds south through the Strait of Malacca, where they would wait for the summer winds to take them north to China, reversing the process on the return. Malay sailors also connected the products of East Africa and the Indonesian Spice Islands to the trade of the Indian Ocean, and they introduced the spices of the Molucca Islands east of Java to an international market. There—and nowhere else—grew mace, cloves, and nutmeg.
Tropical Crops . Imagine a world without oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, mangos, melons, and the dozens of other fruits that originated in India and Southeast Asia. Imagine no sugar to sweeten your tea; imagine no tea. Imagine no cotton, no pepper, no cinnamon, or no spices. That was the world of northern Eurasia before these tropical crops came from South Asia. Most of them were brought by Malay, Indian, and Iranian and other South Asian traders in the first thousand years CE.
Malay and Indian sailors brought the tropical plants of Indonesia—bananas, coconuts, taro, and yams—to the island of Madagascar, from where they entered East Africa and became staples of the African diet. Not only did these new crops fuel a population rise in Africa, but the timing coincided with and aided the great migration of Bantu speakers from their origins in western Africa throughout the continent.
Wet Rice . South Asian populations also grew thanks to the new crops. The most important agricultural innovation was the expansion of wet rice cultivation: transplanting young rice shoots to paddies filled with water. Wet rice yields were double those of dry rice. Planters cut down the trees of wet tropical forest areas and built dikes, canals, and paddies. Wet rice supported huge peasant societies and required their labor. As a result, wet rice spread throughout Southeast Asia as planters in areas like Thailand and Cambodia realized the potential return. Huge tax-paying peasant societies supported the ambitions of kings and priests in Cambodia, Java, Sumatra, as well as India. A kind of wet rice also spread to southern China, enabling a large increase in population growth.
Gupta India . The vibrant economy of the age of the Gupta dynasty (320–535) supported a political and cultural renaissance in India. The Gupta kings consolidated their rule of northern India and kept the nomads at bay for almost 300 years. While the Gupta kingdom was not quite as large as the earlier Mauryan dynasty, it was more prosperous and sophisticated. The court of one of the greatest of the Gupta rulers, Chadragupta II (375–414; also known as Vikramaditya), can serve as an example. It patronized the greatest of Indian poets and playwrights, Kalidasa, as well as astronomers and mathematicians who were the first to show the advantages of using a zero and a 10-digit decimal system. (We call our number system “Arabic,” but the Arabs called it “Hindi” since they got it from India.) The Chinese visitor Faxian wrote of the great palaces and charity hospitals of Chandragupta’s city of Nalanda. More recent visitors still admire a remnant pillar from Chandragupta’s palace made of such a high grade of iron that it shows no rust after 1,600 years.
Hinduism in Southeast Asia . During the Gupta period, Indian culture spread throughout Southeast Asia. Indian customs traveled the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, following the shifting winds of the monsoons. Gupta culture was Hindu and tolerant. Merchants transplanted their caste values as they settled in tiny trading communities throughout South Asia. In general, they kept to themselves and did not try to convert non-Indians. But expansive, seemingly successful cultures always attract converts, and Indian Hindu culture was no exception. Those who traded with the Indian merchants adopted Indian culture with its innovations in mathematics, accounting, and trading practices. At the same time, the traditional rulers of Southeast Asia were attracted to Indian ideas that kingship was the divinely instituted prerogative of Brahmins. New dynasties in Sumatra, Java, and Cambodia based themselves on these Hindu traditions of divine kingship and separate merchant communities.
The founding story of the rice-rich kingdom of Funan (ca. 100–613) on the border of modern Cambodia and Vietnam expressed a common Southeast Asian theme. According to the tale, the first king of Funan was the child of an Indian Brahmin priest who sailed east and the beautiful woman who paddled out to meet him. She turned out to be Queen Willow Leaf, the daughter of the Cambodian serpent god. Funan peaked under King Jayavarman I (478–518), after which it was challenged by kingdoms centered on the islands of Sumatra and Java. In 802, a Cambodian prince raised at the Javanese court declared an independent Cambodia. He was crowned as Jayavarman II Devaraja (god king) by a Brahmin priest. The remains of the temple complex of the kingdom can still be seen at Angkor Wat. Dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, devotees also worshipped Shiva. Indian Brahmin priests were invited to the royal courts to serve as advisers. In addition to teaching Brahmin religion, they taught the engineering skills used to create the irrigation system and the art of stone carving in the Indian architectural style. Hinduism spread as far east as the island of Bali, where it is still practiced today, and as far west as the east coast of Africa, where the descendants of Indian merchant families still live and work. But Hinduism was not the only Indian religion to integrate large areas of the world in the first millennium.
Buddhism beyond India
Buddhist monks sailed the same winds as Brahmin priests. Some of the rulers of Hindu states in Southeast Asia converted to the worship of the Buddha, in some cases, like Java, only temporarily and in some cases more permanently. In Khymer Cambodia, Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1219) changed Angkor from a Hindu to a Buddhist state, vastly expanding its territory. In addition, he created Angkor Thom and other new temple complexes and built more than 100 hospitals and another 100 guesthouses for missionaries and travelers, a common Buddhist undertaking.
Buddhist monks founded one of the first Buddhist states on the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), just south of India. From there they traveled to Thailand (Siam) and Burma, where they established Buddhist societies that reflected their orthodox beliefs, principally a strict adherence to the ascetic life for all devotees. Even today in such orthodox, or “Theravada,” countries, every young man is expected to don the saffron robes of the monk, carry the begging bowl for his daily rice, and live with other monks in a monastery or similar institution for at least the two or three years of early adulthood. Some men (and even some women) continue to live the monastic life into old age, and in Burma and Thailand one sees many men of varying ages in bright saffron. In a modern city like Bangkok, monasteries are dwarfed by high-rises, and monks’ robes are d
rowned in a sea of business suits, but the remains of a traditional Buddhist capital can still evoke a world in which spiritual matters were preeminent. Twelfth-century Pagan, on a bend of the Irrawaddy River in northern Burma, still shelters hundreds of white stone pagodas and little else. In its prime almost 1,000 years ago, one would have been overcome by the lines of men in deep orange, the sounds of their chanting, the heady smell of incense, and—the only sound one still hears today after the oxcarts have returned the tourists for the night—the music of temple bells tinkling in the wind.
Mahayana Buddhism
Most of the monks who brought Buddhism to Southeast Asia called themselves orthodox, or Theravada, Buddhists, and most Southeast Asian societies followed the orthodox path pioneered in Sri Lanka. It was an austere and demanding tradition in which a period of monastic life was expected and each monk or nun relived the original quest of the Buddha. By contrast, a different kind of Buddhism traveled north to central Asia and later to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. Called by its followers “Mahayana,” or “the greater vehicle,” it taught of a Buddha as savior for all. Its universalism may have been shaped by contact with Zoroastrian, Greek, and possibly even Christian ideas encountered in northern India and Kushana. For Mahayana Buddhists, the Buddha offered more than a model path to enlightenment. They believed that the Buddha and numerous Buddhist saints, called Bodhisattvas, postponed their own entrances into nirvana in order to help others achieve it. Thus, anyone could achieve salvation by appealing to one of the Bodhisattvas. There is help in achieving enlightenment. One need not do it alone.
