by Sun Shuyun
‘But do people actually use the weapons?’ I asked the two of them, who were going in and out of the shops, comparing prices.
‘Why not?’ the guard replied in surprise.
‘But on whom?’
‘On your enemies, on your relatives, even on your friends if they cross your path,’ Keewar said, his eyes now fixed on a Lee-Enfield. ‘Isn’t it a beauty? They make them here.’ And then he turned to me. ‘That is how the Pashtuns settle their disputes and blood feuds, with guns.’
‘What about the tribal council? I thought their job was to keep law and order.’
‘They try, but people don’t have to listen to them, especially if the clan is big, with lots of men. In the end only your guns can protect you.’
My mind still full of guns and bullets, we reached Landi Khotal, the summit of the Khyber Pass, near lunchtime. Our guard whispered something in Keewar’s ear and then disappeared, leaving us to a dozen soldiers who were checking a long queue of trucks filled to the brim with Afghans. This was called the gateway into Asia, and standing here I understood what that meant. The steep mountains on both sides converge here, and have left a space barely wide enough for two trucks. As the Chinese say, ‘If a man stands here, ten thousand men will not be able to take it.’ Xuanzang would have been thoroughly checked, as were the passengers on the trucks today. Little seemed to have changed in this barren land. This narrow pass was the only way into India before the sea routes opened. The fabled riches of India – precious jewels scattered on the ground like dust, and fields so fertile that crops would grow on their own – were an irresistible lure. Throughout the centuries, the Khyber Pass has seen invaders of all kinds with their minds set on conquering the Indian subcontinent – Greeks, Persians, the Kushans, Huns, Turks, Arabs, Mughals and the British. Each bringing destruction, as Xuanzang had experienced so painfully, but each also bequeathing their culture and their men and women to settle here. The Pashtuns, of Iranian descent, were among the last to arrive in the fifteenth century.
I wanted to walk down the pass – the border is barely a mile away, but the soldiers waved me away with their rifles. Reluctantly I turned back. In the distance, I could see the roads and villages inside Afghanistan on this cloudless, warm day. Keewar said if he got a lift, he could be home for dinner with his wife and three children, whom he had not seen for a long time. They lived in a village not far from Kabul. He did not bring them over because they would have to stay in a refugee camp until he had saved enough money to rent a house. I asked him why he had not gone to visit them.
He shook his head. ‘The Taliban are really crazy. If I walked in the street like this, I would be fined on the spot, or even locked up,’ Keewar said, touching his beard, ‘because this is way too short by their standards. You know every man has to wear a beard, up to the required length; every woman has to wear a burkha. I could not listen to music or read books, or hang pictures in my house. My kids cannot fly kites or play in the park. How can people live like that? They are fanatics.’
The Taliban, or ‘Students’, were mainly Pashtuns. They made themselves known to the world when they took Kabul in 1996. Before that, they were just one of the warring factions in the fighting in Afghanistan after the Soviets’ humiliating defeat. At first people were impressed by their toughness and efficiency; they were even welcomed by many Afghans for bringing order to the country and eliminating corruption. But soon their religious fanaticism shocked the world. Intent on establishing the purest possible Islamic state, they pursued the most extreme form of Islam, including all its harsh punishments, amputating thieves’ hands and stoning adulterous wives; as became well known, they were particularly oppressive towards women, forbidding them to work or visit doctors, hospitals or schools, virtually confining them like prisoners to their homes.
I found them horrifying, as did most people. They seemed to be returning Afghanistan to the Dark Ages. But Xuanzang would have found their fanaticism true to form. ‘These people are remarkable, among their neighbours, for the strength of their faith,’ he says of the locals. ‘From worshipping Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, the three jewels of Buddhism, down to the worshipping of local spirits in their hundreds, they have the utmost devotion of heart and sincerity.’ Xuanzang’s observation, remarkable for its continuing relevance, came from his personal experience, as well as his historical knowledge. According to legend the first disciples of the Buddha were two merchants from today’s Afghanistan. They met the Buddha just after his enlightenment and offered him wheat-cakes and honey; in return, the Buddha taught them what he had just realized. Xuanzang says they were so impressed, they asked for something to remember him by. The Buddha gave them a lock of his hair. When they returned to their country, they built a stupa in the way that the Buddha had taught them and put the hair in it. This, Xuanzang tells us, was the first stupa in the world. He even saw it when he travelled through the country.
For over a thousand years, Buddhism flourished in Afghanistan. The giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, the tallest in the world, were witness to the piety that Xuanzang records. Not content with worshipping the Buddha in their own homeland, the Buddhists in Afghanistan played an important role in promulgating Buddhism along the Silk Road. The Chinese canon records the names of seventeen distinguished monks from the Kabul valley who, risking their lives, arrived in a strange land with sacks full of scriptures, and devoted themselves to translating them into Chinese. Only the Indians did more to spread Buddhism in China. Xuanzang was trained on their translations and when he passed through the country, there were still tens of thousands of monks. Their knowledge and earnestness affected him so deeply that he spent four months studying with them, in particular the doctrines of Theravada Buddhism, which he felt he should know more about, after his experience in Kucha.
Xuanzang was moved by the teachings – and something more. He found Afghanistan full of places that were made sacred to the Buddha in the Mahayana sutras. He was particularly joyful when he visited the town of Hadda, whose shrines he tells us held the Buddha’s skull bone, his eyes, robe and staff. Xuanzang donated a large share of the King of Gaochang’s gifts to the shrines. The guardian priest then told the pilgrim that he could tell his fortune for his journey by making an impression from the skull bone, with incense powder wrapped in silk. He simply could not resist the idea. He had been on the road for a year, a very difficult year, and he was now on the edge of the holy land. He wanted to be assured that his journey ahead would be successful. On his piece of silk was an impression of the Bodhi Tree, the tree of enlightenment. Xuanzang was overjoyed when the priest told him, ‘That is a rare omen; it signifies that you will surely realize Bodhi.’
A casket made for the Buddha’s relics is still with us, bearing the inscription ‘For the Lord’s relics, in honour of all Buddhas’. It contained a small round reliquary of pure gold, with images of a standing Buddha flanked by Brahma and Indra, the Indian gods who became part of the Buddhist pantheon, and two Bodhisattvas. It is a prized possession of the British Museum. The explorer Charles Masson discovered it in the 1830s in a ruined stupa at Bimaran west of Jalalabad – a few miles from Hadda. His beautiful drawings of the stupas, monasteries and caves that littered the plains of the Kabul valley and Jalalabad give us some reminder of the great riches of the Buddhist past of Afghanistan that Xuanzang saw. Until fifteen years ago, the Hadda museum housed some of the most beautiful Graeco-Roman friezes: the heavenly god who looked exactly like Hercules, a Buddha like Zeus, and a classical temple dedicated to the Buddha. The whole museum was reduced to ashes in the Afghan civil war.
Keewar said Jalalabad was a stronghold of the Taliban. He pointed it out in the distance. ‘I never knew it had such a rich history.’ He turned to me. ‘I thought it was just another shanty town. But if the Taliban have their way, we will not have any history left. Since they took control of Bamiyan, their soldiers have turned the cells behind the Buddhas into barracks and storage rooms for ammunition. Then they blew off the head and shou
lders of the small Buddha and fired rockets at the big Buddha’s groin. They even threatened to destroy them.’
So it was out of the question for me to see them? Even if I went in dressed in a burkha?
He turned around and looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Do you really want to end your journey there?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Taliban won’t let you near the statues. You can’t go, it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t dare to myself.’
Another time, I said to myself.
Keewar suggested we go and find our guard. We came to a house not far from the pass, a group of old men sitting outside, drinking khawa, a clear, sweet Chinese green tea. Inside it was dark, with only a ray of sunshine slanting through the window, glistening in the dusty air. Our guard was nodding off in a druggy haze in the corner. I wondered if he was capable of fighting back if his fellow-Pashtuns attacked us. But this is the home of the drug trade. Keewar said every drug was available here. The men who served us food would sell us hashish, opium and heroin. ‘Most of the drugs in Britain come from here. That’s what keeps the warlords going in Afghanistan.’ From the look of our guard, it also gave the Pashtuns themselves one of the few comforts in their harsh and violent world.
We arrived back in Peshawar in the early afternoon, and returned our guard safely to the tribal authorities. From there it was only a short distance to the Peshawar Museum. It holds a superlative collection of Buddhist statues, some of which Xuanzang may have seen in their original stupas and monasteries.
Keewar was not interested. ‘We Muslims don’t go in for idols, you know,’ he said.
‘I need you to protect me,’ I joked.
‘Don’t worry. It’s absolutely safe there. That’s one place you won’t need me,’ he said seriously. He dropped me in front of an elegant Victorian colonial building, with oriental turrets on the roof.
I went inside, and the noise of the streets gave way to a profound silence. There was no one there. The main hall is quite grand, its two floors surrounding a central atrium, from which you walk under stone Islamic arches into the galleries on either side, filled with Buddhist statues, reliefs and stucco heads collected from monasteries all over the Peshawar valley. It was so quiet: the only sound was my own footsteps on the marble floor. I looked around. Some Buddhas and Bodhisattvas stood against the pillars of the hall, larger than life-size, looking down benignly at me. Others were in deep meditation. There were rows of busts and heads, some brightly painted, with expressions of sadness and serenity. The longer I gazed at them, the more I felt as though I was in a monastery.
Would Xuanzang have found anything unusual about the statues – the curly hair tied in a knot on the crown of the Buddha or Bodhisattva, the robes they wear over one shoulder or both, with flowing folds cascading down to the ankles, the sandals on their feet? On the panels and reliefs depicting the life of the Buddha, there are buildings with Corinthian columns, trefoil arches and triangular pediments. I remembered being puzzled by the Buddha’s curly hair in Chinese temples and asked a monk about it.
‘The Buddha is an Indian,’ he said indignantly, as if I had asked something foolish.
‘But the Indians have straight hair like us,’ I said.
‘What are you implying?’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you mean the Buddha was a Westerner?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘but his curly hair is rather unusual.’
‘They always make it like that,’ the monk explained patiently. ‘You haven’t seen many so you are surprised easily.’ He used a Chinese idiom to bring his point home.
But the curls did belong to Westerners, or the Greeks, to be more precise, as I discovered to my surprise. The making of these images of the Buddha is one of the most extraordinary stories of cultural fusion on the Silk Road. The Buddha forbade the worship of his image. ‘Follow my teaching, not me,’ he told his disciples repeatedly. For several hundred years, his followers adhered to the advice, worshipping the Bodhi Tree under which he became enlightened, his footprint, or a stupa. They also felt that nothing could express the sublime state of enlightenment. As the Sutra Nipata, a text of the Pali canon, says, ‘He who (like the sun) has gone to rest is comparable to nothing whatsoever. The notions through which his essence might be expressed are simply not to be found. All ideas are nothing; all modes of speech are, with respect to him, unavailing.’
Xuanzang would have seen these Greek-influenced statues in many places he visited, and possibly he saw the particularly fine ones in Gandhara, without knowing they could have been among the earliest images of the Buddha to be produced. If anything, he looked for a divine origin. He records this story. After his enlightenment, the Buddha spent some months in Tushita, the paradise of the Maitreya Buddha, preaching the Dharma to his mother who had been reborn there. An Indian king who revered him was worried that he might not return, and wanted to have at least his image. By magical means, a Bodhisattva sent an artist up there to memorize the Buddha’s features and come back and carve a figure of him in sandalwood. When the Buddha did return the statue rose to welcome him. This was supposed to be the first Buddhist statue in the world. Xuanzang was so impressed, he had a replica made of it and brought it back to China.
The truth was that sculptors working in the Greek tradition represented the Buddha in human form some five hundred years after his death. The Greeks first came to the area with Alexander the Great. Having conquered the entire classical world and brought the Persian empire under his control, he made his way through Afghanistan. Once past the valley of Peshawar, meeting with little resistance, he was poised on the edge of India. But his men were unimpressed: they were worn out and homesick after eight years of continuous fighting. They had had enough and wanted to go home. Facing a potential mutiny, Alexander had no choice but to turn back, leaving a series of Greek garrisons behind to guard his conquests. He died on the return journey in Babylon in 323 BC, and his empire fell apart. But one of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, came back to take hold of parts of India in 305, eventually giving them all back except Bactria in the northern Afghanistan of today. The Bactrian Greeks, in turn, were eventually pushed southwards, but Greek influence persisted in the region for a long time, as we know from coins and sculptural reliefs.
One of the most famous converts in the history of Buddhism was the Indo-Greek King Menander of Bactria of the second century BC, or Milinder as he is known in Buddhist scriptures. Learned and wise, the king was fascinated by the teachings of the Buddha, but he had many questions, and doubts. If lay people like him, living at home and enjoying the sensual pleasures of the world, could achieve enlightenment, what was the use of monks inflicting austerity on themselves for the same goal? Why did the sutras say if the faithful worshipped the remains of the Buddha, they would go to paradise, while the Buddha told his disciples not to worship them? Why was there no self in Buddhism? What was the nature of nirvana, the highest goal and the final liberation for Buddhists? These are some of King Milinder’s Questions, a classic Buddhist text, with which Xuanzang would have been very familiar. The questions are like the FAQs on the Web; they cover the kinds of difficulties many people have with Buddhism, especially when it is completely new to them. That is why it is a very popular text. It responds to doubts I have myself.
Nasagena, the great Indian master, made the most subtle, difficult and transient concepts easy to understand by using metaphors and similes. Deeply embedded in the Greek philosophical tradition of reason and logic, King Milinder found the notion of nirvana difficult to grasp, as many people still do. He thought it could not exist.
‘Is there, great King, something called “wind”?’ Nagasena asked him.
‘Yes, there is such a thing.’
‘Please, will Your Majesty show me the wind, its colour and shape, and whether it is thin or thick, long or short.’
‘One cannot describe the wind like that. For the wind does not lend itself to being grasped with hands, or to being touched. But nevertheless there is such a thing as “wind”.’
‘Just so, Your Majesty, there is nirvana, but one cannot point to nirvana, either by its colour or its shape.’
We do not know why images of the Buddha appear round about the first century AD. Someone may have asked the same question a Chinese Buddhist was to ask later, when he inscribed this on the bottom of a Buddha figure: ‘The highest truth is without image. Yet if there were no image the truth could not manifest itself. The highest principle is without words. Yet if there were no words how could the principle be known?’ An image could not attain the ultimate truth, but it could help the faithful meditate on the truth, lead them by its very beauty to the verge of the absolute, and enable them more easily to transcend the bounds of worldly phenomena.
Some argue that the very first Buddhist images came from Mathura in northern India. Precisely how the very different Gandhara style, as it is called, percolated into the local sculpture is uncertain; it was just part of a prolonged cultural exchange between Asia and the Graeco-Roman world. But not long after the Mathura images were created, Buddhists in Gandhara – conceivably descended from Greek settlers in the region – wanted images of the Buddha of their own, and perhaps based them on icons they knew, statues of the Greek gods. The artists dressed the Buddha in a toga and Athenian sandals; they also followed the Greek tradition of giving him becoming curly locks rather than depicting him as a bald-headed monk. But they did not forget that he had been an Indian prince, so he was given perfect almond-shaped eyes and a finely trimmed moustache, and his earlobes were lengthened, a reminder of the heavy jewels that he used to wear. The Gandhara Buddhas are unmistakably Indian in conception and Greek in execution.
