Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

part iii | cultural and spiritual development
‘the Bodhisattva of Dunhuang’. He travelled to Chang’an and Luoyang alternating
trips with periods at home. Dharmaraksha is said to have possessed remarkable
knowledge and a phenomenal memory and also knew 36 languages. He is credited
with translating more than 150 Buddhist texts into Chinese and founding a monastery
in the suburbs of Chang’an, where several thousand monks were trained. His most
outstanding quality is said to have been his understanding of ‘the idea of the end of
the cycle of rebirth – nirvana’. He died at the age of 77.
Thus, all the facts referred to above testify to the prominent role of Buddhist
monks from Central Asia in spreading Buddhism in China in the first half of the 1st
millennium ad, in translating Buddhist works into Chinese, establishing Buddhist
schools and acquainting the Chinese with the Buddhist faith.
Let us now turn to an important feature of early Buddhist structures that shed
light on the nature of Buddhist beliefs in Central Asia.
Airtam is one of the earliest and main centres of Buddhism in Northern Bactria
but no images of bodhisattvas were found among the sculptures discovered here.
The sculpted images of the Airtam frieze show musicians of the ‘pancha mahashabta’
– the five sacred sounds. According to P. Bernard, the sculptural block found at this
site with a six-line Bactrian inscription shows the Hindu god Shiva and his consort,
Parvati. According to J. Harmatta, they are in fact Pharro and Ardoxsho. The Buddha
or bodhisattvas are not mentioned in the inscription itself. There are no images of
bodhisattvas among the paintings and sculptures discovered at Karatepa either. Nor
are they mentioned in the numerous Brahmi and Kharoshthi inscriptions found there.
There are also no images of bodhisattvas in the paintings of Fayaztepa or among the
sculptures found here.
There are no images of bodhisattvas even among a large number of secular and
religious figures found in the first Buddhist temple at Dalverzintepa built outside the
city. By contrast, during excavations of the second Buddhist temple, located in the
centre of Dalverzintepa, a number of sculptural images of bodhisattvas were found.
I believe that such clear-cut differences show us that Buddhist centres such as
Airtam, Karatepa, Fayaztepa and the first Buddhist temple of Dalverzintepa were
created in a pre-Kanishka period where the Hinayana tradition was dominant and
bodhisattvas were not worshipped.
It is significant that the depiction of bodhisattvas in comparatively large numbers
appears only in the second Buddhist temple at Dalverzintepa, the construction of
which has been dated by archaeological findings to the 2nd–3rd centuries AD.
The following observations are also significant. In a painting found at Fayaztepa,
a cursive Bactrian inscription behind the head of one of the male figures gives the
name of one of the main deities from the Kushan pantheon – Pharro – the deity of
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