Christians, Buddhists and Manichaeans in Medieval Central Asia

Abstract

The oasis towns along the silk routes connecting China with Central Asia, India, Persia and the Near East, have been, since times immemorial, centers of contact between peoples from the most varied cultural and religious backgrounds. It was especially after the first centuries AD, after the spread of Buddhism through present day Afghanistan, Soviet Central Asia and China's Sinkiang and Kansu provinces, that an encounter took place between the two great world religions that shaped the intellectual history of Europe and Asia respectively. Just as Buddhism had expanded along the silk route, Christianity in its Nestorian garb also spread beyond Persia to the lowlands of Turan in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The history of its expansion beyond the Oxus and through the Tarim basin to the heart of China cannot be reconstructed in detail, but it is known that Bishop A-lo-pen was received with honours at the Chinese court in the 7th century. In the 8th century, a mission organized by the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I had considerable success among the peoples along the Syr Darya. In Kashgar, one of the main commercial centers along the southern silk route, a Christian king reigned in the beginning of the 8th century. Of the Iranian people in Central Asia, it was especially the Parthians and Sogdians who were open both to Christianity in its Nestorian form and to its Gnostic Manichaean offshoot. Though regarded as a heresy by Christians, it understood itself as a fulfillment of the Christian message. Its founder Mani (216-276) grew up in a Jewish-Christian baptist community in Mesopotamia and spread his message of the Kingdom of Light throughout the Persian empire of the Sasanians and sent missionaries to the Central Asian kingdom of the Kushans.