The Sons of Heaven and the Silk Road
Under a bright sun on an April day in 630, the mendicant monk Xuanzang, nearly thirty years old, stood in awe before the colossal statues of Gautama Buddha, Vairocana, and Sakyamuni, cut from the sandstone cliffs overlooking the Bamyan Valley on the road over the Hindu Kush into India.1 Over a year earlier, Xuanzang had evaded imperial guards ordered by the Tang emperor Taizong to turn back all unauthorized travelers to the west. The emperor faced a possible war with the newest nomadic foes of China, the Gök Turks. But Xuanzang was determined to make his pilgrimage because he had been inspired by a dream from the Buddha. A learned man of a Confucian noble house, he vowed to visit the Buddhist monasteries to the west in search of manuscripts faithfully recording the Buddha’s enlightened word so that he could translate the Tripitaka more accurately into Chinese.2 He was a serious scholar concerned about the authenticity of the Buddhist doctrine that had been carried to China over five centuries earlier.3 Over the past year, he had toured Buddhist monasteries of the Tarim Basin, conversed with Buddhist rulers, and found his way to Bamyan after overcoming privations and bandits.4 Xuanzang would have gazed up at the decorated largest statues in the world, and yet he was even more impressed by the thousands of monks celebrating their faith, and the numerous richly painted cave monasteries that overlooked the valley. Soon after, Xuanzang crossed the Khyber Pass into northern India and spent the next fifteen years visiting the Buddhist shrines and collecting manuscripts.5 When Xuanzang returned home in 645, he retired to a monastery, where he translated the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra and, on the order of his emperor, composed a detailed account of the Western Regions. Xuanzang had moved through a cosmopolitan world of monasteries, caravan cities, and imperial capitals. Merchants from many lands traversed the Silk Road in search of profit, while missionaries of many faiths proclaimed their religion to converts. At the time of his death in 664, Xuanzang could not have anticipated that this world was soon to be violently overturned by the Arab armies fighting in the name of the Prophet Muhammad. What Xuanzang also did not know was this international world was also the creation of nomadic peoples whose ancestors had once dwelled on the western frontiers of his China: the Kushans.
During the first and second centuries AD, the Kushan emperors who styled themselves the Sons of Heaven, in the fashion of Han emperors, did more to promote the commerce of the Silk Road and the spread of Buddhism to East Asia than any previous rulers. They were descendants of Tocharian-speaking nomads who had dwelled in Gansu and had traded jade and horses with the Chinese since the Bronze Age.6
Modu Chanyu, ruler of the Xiongnu, out of personal hatred, attacked the Yuezhi, slew great numbers, seized livestock, and turned the skull of the Yuezhi king into a goblet.7 His son Jiyu, known to the Chinese as Laoshang, expelled the Yuezhi from their ancestral grasslands by the mid-second century BC.8 The Yuezhi first sought refuge in the upper Ili valley, and then moved west again into Sogdiana (Dayuan to the Chinese) and expelled the resident nomads, Iranian-speaking Sacae. The Sacae, over the course of the next fifty years, fled southwest first into the Parthian Empire, and then turned east, crossing the Hindu Kush and extinguishing the Greek kingdoms of northwestern India.9 These refugee Sacae, often dubbed Indo-Scythians, ruled thereafter as satraps in the Sind and Gujarat.10 The Jats, one of the favored martial castes of recruiting officers of the British Raj, today claim descent from the Sacae. Meanwhile, in Transoxiana, the Yuezhi, called by Greeks Tocharoi, pressed south from the middle Jaxartes. They overthrew the last Greco-Bactrian king, Heliocles (who might have fled to India), and took possession of Bactria (called Daxia in Chinese sources), where Zhang Qian found them in 126 BC.11 Together, Tocharian newcomers and Iranian Sacae abruptly ended the political legacy of Alexander the Great in Central Asia and India, but not the cultural one. The Hellenic cities of Bactria and Northern India still flourished, and imparted to their new masters a delight in Hellenic literary and visual arts. The nomads themselves hardly turned out to be the dreaded Gog and Magog in the legends about Alexander the Great, because they quickly appreciated the high culture they found in their new homes.
Zhang Qian reckoned the might of the Yuezhi between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand horsemen, but they still dreaded the Xiongnu and declined to enter into an alliance with the emperor Wudi.12 For the Tocharian newcomers had imposed themselves on a subject population ten times their number. They had to come to terms with Sogdian merchants, Greek residents of the cities, and native Iranian-speaking agriculturalists, all of whom paid tribute. Furthermore, the Tocharian tribes lacked political unity when Zhang Qian visited. In the early first century BC, Chinese sources report a confederation of five Yuezhi tribes each ruled by a dynast or yabgu (xihou in Chinese), a title later designating a subordinate Turkish kaghan.13 Some of these Tocharian dynasts struck silver coins in their own names and based on Greco-Bactrian originals, but the Greek inscriptions are so blundered that the coins are illegible. The yabgu of the Kushan tribe (or Guishuang in Chinese) soon emerged as first among the Tocharian princes. The first Kushan yabgu known by name, Heraeus (ca. 1–30 AD), is only recorded on his large silver coins, tetradrachmae, that replaced those minted by the Greco-Bactrian kings that had circulated as the trade coin of Central Asia for two centuries. The face of a nomadic conqueror occupies the obverse of these first Kushan coins in place of the exquisite portraits of the heroic, clean-shaven Greek rulers who had emulated the look of Alexander the Great.14 The Greek artists designing the coins were hard put to render their Kushan lord according to the canons of their art. Heraeus is depicted sporting the diadem of Hellenistic kings, but his rough face with a drooping mustache shows his head with the ritual deformity practiced by many steppe nomads—a practice verified by skeletal remains from Scythian kurgans and descriptions of the later Huns, Turks, and Mongols.15 On the coins’ reverse, in place of the heroically nude divine protectors Zeus, Apollo, or Heracles, the yabgu himself, attired in felt cap, kaftan, and trousers, is astride a Ferghana horse. Heraeus (whose Tocharian name is unknown) is styled in Greek as tyrant rather than king. The title was meant to convey the sense of dynast, but it also denoted the true feelings of his resentful Greek subjects.
The successor and likely son of Heraeus, Kujula Kadphises (ca. 30–80), united the Tocharians in Transoxiana, and subjected Afghanistan and Gandhara so that he controlled the caravan routes through the Khyber and Bolan passes linking India to Central Asia. Kujula Kadphises was the first of seven remarkable Kushan rulers who transformed the Tocharians from nomadic warriors into the masters of one of the world’s four mightiest empires by the early second century AD.16 Kushan rulers had to win over their diverse subjects by a heady array of symbols and appeals. The second Kushan emperor, Vima Taktu (ca. 80–105), went so far as to emulate Alexander the Great, for his coins depict the royal portrait as a clean-shaven youth, wearing the diadem of Hellenistic kings, who was assimilated to the features of both Hellenic Helios and Persian Mithra.17 Greek inscriptions on his coins’ reverse hail the emperor, depicted as a mounted nomadic warrior, not as tyrant but rather as king of kings and great savior (soter megas), the traditional sobriquet accorded to royal benefactors of Greek cities.
The greatest Kushan emperor, Kanishka I (127–153), ruled a realm stretching from the caravan cities of the Tarim Basin across the Central Eurasian steppes, Transoxiana, and northern India to Pataliputra (today Patna) on the middle Ganges. Pataliputra had been the capital of the Mauryan emperors who had first united India three centuries earlier. Kanishka’s empire matched that of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who had embraced Buddhism, and it anticipated the Moghul Empire of Akbar.18 Yet the Kushan emperors failed to write their own history. Instead, chroniclers of the later Han Empire, Greek and Roman authors, and Buddhist writers record their dealings with and opinions of the Kushan emperors. The Kushan emperors, however, struck a remarkable series of coins in gold and copper that reveal much about their aspirations and piety.
Kanishka corresponded as an equal with both the Han and Roman emperors, each of whom sought from him a commercial treaty and an alliance against common foes, either the Xiongnu or the Parthians.19 At court, Kanishka received Han envoys as the Son of Heaven, in the Chinese manner. On his exquisite gold and copper coins, he reveals himself as the heir of Persian Great Kings, Greco-Bactrian kings, and Mauryan emperors. The coins proclaim him in the Bactrian language written in a Greek script King of Kings, Kanishka the Great Kushan—a title of Persian monarchs since Cyrus the Great.20 Kanishka officially declared Bactrian, an eastern Iranian tongue, the language of his court in place of Greek. We now know this not only from his coins, but also from a monumental inscription found at Rabatak in Afghanistan in 1993, where Kanishka dedicated a sanctuary to the Iranian goddess Nana on the Silk Road and proudly listed his illustrious progenitors.21 But the coins record much more about Kanishka.22 On the obverse of his coins, Kanishka is depicted as a towering figure standing before a Persian-style fire altar in an act of sacrifice. The stately, bearded emperor is clad in felt cap, leather kaftan, leather belt, silk trousers sewed with jewels and pearls, and leather riding boots. He wields a ceremonial mace and long scepter, and included in each coin’s field is the emblem of the emperor’s nomadic clan, called tamgha by the Mongol khans or tughra by the Ottoman sultans. The coins reproduced in miniature royal statues that graced every city of Kanishka’s realm. One such, with its head and arms missing, survives from Mathura.23 This was the first time a great ruler was so depicted, standing in the garb of an equestrian conqueror. The image has long persisted from India to Britain. In a manuscript illumination overlaid by an encomium, Louis the Pious, Holy Roman Emperor and son of Charlemagne, differs little in his symbolic pose from Kanishka on his coins.24
On the reverse, the coins reveal even more about the piety of Kanishka. Leading gods and goddesses of the Greek, Iranian, and Hindu pantheons are depicted and identified by name in the Bactrian language written in a Greek script. Foremost is the emperor’s favorite goddess, Nana.25 The most remarkable Kushan god is Oesho, with four arms and associated with the bull, who is a composite of Avestan Vayu, Greek Heracles, and Hindu Shiva.26 Before him stands a heroic bull, Nandi, the vehicle of Shiva. Kanishka’s son Huvishka, who appears with a halo on his coins, favored Hindu divinities. He is depicted on his coins often astride an elephant, making the royal progress among the sacred cities of Aryavarta, the heartland of the Vedic gods.27 Kanishka I shared with his nomadic ancestors a pragmatic respect for all divinities whose rites and holy ones conferred legitimacy on their cults. Perhaps he too, like Napoleon, humored all the gods, but we shall never know his true religious sentiments because he never confided them to a biographer.
Foremost, Kanishka struck coins that are among the earliest depictions of the Buddha in human form. These rare ceremonial gold coins, struck at Pataliputra, depict a standing haloed Buddha, flanked by his name in the Greco-Bactrian script and the emperor’s own clan emblem or tamgha.28 Buddhist writers had no doubt as to what the coins only suggest, namely that Kanishka converted. They praise Kanishka as second only to the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, the first great ruler ever to embrace the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama. Whereas Ashoka elevated Buddhism to favored status in his empire, Kanishka turned Buddhism from an Indian faith into a world religion that today claims over 535 million adherents or 10 percent of the globe’s population. Kanishka, just like all Kushan emperors, imposed order over the nexus of strategic central sections of the Silk Road. Over these routes, Buddhist missionaries trod from his realm to Han China. Nearly five centuries later, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang traversed this same path in reverse on his own spiritual quest to reach Sarnath, where the enlightened Siddhartha Gautama first preached under a bodhi tree.
Kanishka, however, was more than an admirer of Buddhism. He patronized Buddhist monasteries, and constructed a great stupa, the domed monumental shrine of Buddhism, located near his palace at Purusapura (today Peshawar in Pakistan). Successive Kushan emperors enlarged the stupa until it rose to 55 feet in height. The ruins still impress the visitor, for the base measures 175 feet on each side as a perfect square, and it is oriented on the four points of the compass. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, Xuanzang’s predecessor writing over two centuries earlier, was likewise awed by the stupa.29 Its copper-plated wooden tower was the tallest Buddhist building at the time. He reports that the vindha, the Buddhist monastery in the complex, was richly decorated with painted relief sculpture, and it housed many relics. A reliquary with three bone fragments of the Buddha was recovered in the excavations directed by David Brainerd Spooner in 1908–1909.30 It has since been transferred to the Burmese monastery of U Khanti Hill in Mandalay.31
The stupa of Kanishka also housed golden leaves that recorded the rulings of the Fourth Buddhist Council held at Harwan in Kashmir.32 Kanishka convened this council on the recommendation of his spiritual mentor Asvaghosa, who was the first scholar to translate the Buddha’s teachings from the original vernacular Prakrit into classical Sanskrit. The council upheld the rulings of earlier councils in favor of Mahayana Buddhism or the Greater Vehicle. This was the Buddhism destined to win East Asia, for it taught that any believer, even one who had not taken ascetic vows, could attain enlightenment in a single lifetime, and so break dharma, the law governing the cycle of rebirths. Five hundred monks from the monasteries of Kashmir got to work compiling the Mahavibhasa under the direction of Asvaghosa. This compendium completed over a generation after the council summarizes in classical Sanskrit five centuries of learned commentaries on the faith.33 For two years, in 632–633, Xuanzang assiduously studied with masters in the monasteries of Kashmir to perfect his understanding of these Sanskrit commentaries. By mandating that philosophical disputation should henceforth be written in Sanskrit, the council ensured that Buddhist thinkers could debate on equal terms with their rivals, the Brahmins, who upheld caste (varna), the Vedic cults and Sanskrit scriptures, and who demoted the Buddha to an illusionary avatar of Vishnu, the lord of creation. Over the centuries, Brahmins had transformed the spoken Sanskrit of the Rig-Vedas into a beautiful literary language ideal for expressing every subtle poetic or philosophical nuance. To be sure, the council had probably reasoned, Siddhartha Buddha had taught in Prakrit, but he must have surely contemplated in Sanskrit. At the same time, Buddhist missionaries in the cities of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the Tarim Basin commenced the translating of the Buddhist texts and commentaries into Tocharian and eastern Iranian languages. In time, they universalized the appeal of what had been an Indian religion. These translations removed the primacy of Sanskrit as language of the faith outside of India, and so stressed the message over the word. In this regard, Buddhism and Christianity share the same position on scripture. They have upheld the universal validity of their faith’s message, which can be expressed in every language rather than in a single sacred one.
Kanishka was for Buddhists a second Ashoka, who had summoned the second Buddhist Council (which is considered by many to be the first historical council). He also has been compared to the Roman emperor Constantine, who summoned the First Ecumenical Council so that learned theologians could expound to him the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the reckoning of the date of Easter. Kanishka, like Constantine, also decisively transformed the visual presentation of his favored faith. The Kushan emperors were sophisticated in their aesthetic tastes, patronizing artists working in Hellenic, Central Asian, and Indian traditions. In the 1930s, French excavators at Begram, fifty miles north of Kabul in Afghanistan, found in two storerooms a cache of fabulous luxury items from Rome, China, and India. Among the objets d’art were glassware and jewelry from the Roman world, Chinese silks and lacquers, and carved ivories from India.34
Given the range of objects, the cache was initially interpreted as a treasury of the Kushan summer palace at Begram, the ancient city of Kapisa. Instead, the cache is far more likely the inventory of a merchant prince who supplied his royal customers along the Silk Road with exotic and prestigious goods. Even so, the Begram treasure attests to the eclectic tastes of Kushan elites. Alexander the Great settled Macedonian veterans in Kapisa, which was renamed the Hellenic city Alexandria in the Caucasus. It lay on the main route from Bactria, across the Persian satrapy of Paropamisadae, to Gandhara, the gateway to the Indus valley. The Kushan kings maintained one of their courts at Kapisa, where they attracted to their service artists and architects from across Eurasia.
During the reign of Kanishka, sculptors worked in two separate traditions, a Hellenic one in Gandhara and an Indian one of Mathura, the site of a Kushan palace, which has yielded many royal portrait statues that are a perfect blend of Indian and Greco-Iranian art. These sculptors created new visual arts that forever enriched Buddhism. In Gandhara, Greek-trained artists produced the first sculptures of the Buddha in human guise.35 Previously, the Buddha was portrayed symbolically as a parasol conveyed in a cart.36 Under the Kushan emperors, artists applied their genius to creating the likeness of the Buddha in his many guises, either carved out of living rock, or sculpted from stone blocks, or cast from gold, silver, or bronze. Relief sculpture and mural paintings in Buddhist sanctuaries henceforth greeted worshippers with beautiful visions of the Buddha’s life, teachings, and ascent to nirvana. Some of the finest such relief sculptures of the Kushan era are still found on the monumental gateways (torana) of the great stupa at the monastery of Sanchi on a hilltop in the scrub forests of the central Indian district of Madhya Pradesh.37 The complex is an architectural tour de force of Hellenic, Middle Eastern, and Indian traditions. The Kushan emperor Vasudeva, even though a devotee of Shiva, patronized the monastery. Remarkably, neither the Chinese pilgrim Faxian nor Xuanzang is reported to have visited the site, probably because Sanchi lay too far south of the Buddhist heartland in the Ganges. Each would have been dazzled by its beauty just as I was when I visited the complex in 2010. Sanchi remains to this day the most profoundly moving spiritual site I have ever experienced.
When Xuanzang entered India in 630, he traveled across a spiritual landscape filled with the most diverse of sanctuaries.38 Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain temples coexisted side by side, and often shared many of the same worshippers. The Gupta emperors, who had succeeded to the Indian domains of the Kushans, had promoted the Brahmin caste and the Vedic cults in the fourth and fifth centuries, but the Buddhist monasteries remained equally pervasive and equally appealing to the masses thanks to the patronage of Kanishka and his successors. The commerce of the Silk Road, which soared under the protection of the Kushan emperors, enriched many families of the merchant caste, Vaishyas, who were attracted to Buddhism. Their success in business reflected well on their karma, and so their worthiness for nirvana. In thanks, they commissioned many of the rock-carved sanctuaries of Ajanta decorated with masterpieces of Buddhist religious painting inspired by Hellenic, Central Asian, and Indian traditions.39 Xuanzang was amazed by the outpouring of such expressions of popular piety that have characterized Buddhism since the Kushan era. Xuanzang eventually found his way to Kannauj, home of the emperor Harshavardhana (605–647), who had reunited northern India after the fall of the Gupta dynasty. Harshavardhana, in policy and outlook, was the heir of the Kushan emperor Kanishka. He too was eclectic in his faith, honoring Shiva, but he also patronized Buddhist scholars and monks, because many members of the royal family, including his brother, were convinced Buddhists.40 He warmly welcomed Xuanzang, and so together, monarch and monk exchanged spiritual views. The monarch was ever ready to discuss with scholars how to break the cycle of lives and achieve either moksha of the Hindus or nirvana of the Buddhists. To Xuanzang, Harshavardhana was a devout Buddhist in all but name. The emperor had raised thousands of stupas and hospices for pilgrims of all faiths along the banks of the Ganges. He outlawed animal sacrifice to the Vedic gods, one of the most objectionable Hindu practices to Buddhists. His charitable foundations and alms conformed to the best tenets of karma. Xuanzang witnessed at Kannauj a spectacular three-week festival that climaxed when Harshavardhana and his vassal kings paid obeisance before a life-sized golden statue of the Buddha. Xuanzang even offered to act as an envoy of Harshavardhana to convey greetings and gifts to his own emperor, Taizong.41 To be sure, Xuanzang hoped to win back favor from Taizong because he had violated the imperial travel ban. Yet Xuanzang aimed for a far more significant success, namely bringing together the two greatest sovereigns, Harshavardhana and Taizong, who could assure the universal acceptance of the teachings of the Buddha. Such cooperation was never realized. Upon his return home, Xuanzang advanced the faith in China, but with the death of Harshavardhana, Buddhism waned in India until it was dealt a fatal blow by the Muslim army of Muhammad Ghor in the early thirteenth century.
The spectacular success of Buddhism as a world religion depended so much on the policies and patronage of the Kushan emperors of the second and third centuries AD. The proliferation of dedications of cave monasteries by successful merchants attest the prosperity of communities of Buddhist merchants along the Silk Road in the Tarim Basin, Transoxiana, and northern India for the next four centuries.42 The success of the Kushan emperors, in turn, depended on the revenues gained from taxing commerce on the Silk Road. Under the peace imposed by the Sons of Heaven, Sogdian caravan cities, especially Samarkand and Bukhara, boomed, as did the new towns of Chorasmia (Khwarazm), in the lower valley of the Oxus between the Karakum and the southern shores of the Aral Sea. Once Kanishka extended his sway over the Tocharian-speaking cities along the northern route of the Tarim Basin, Kashgar, Kucha, and Turfan enjoyed one of the most prosperous eras in their long history. Meanwhile, the Indian subjects of the Kushan emperor prospered too because merchants of the Roman world pioneered a complementary ocean route to the ports of India. At the end of the second century BC, either a Greek merchant named Eudoxus of Cyzicus, or a skipper, Hippalus, discovered how to use the winds of the monsoon season to sail across the Erythraean Sea (the Indian Ocean).43 These first voyages of discovery gave way to large-scale commerce once the emperor Augustus secured the Roman peace.44 At Rome, the demand for Chinese silk, along with Indian pepper and beryls, soared. Demand often exceeded supply. Parthian officials drove up prices by levying high customs duties on caravans crossing their section of the Silk Road. Hence, Roman merchants sought more direct access to Chinese silk in the markets in the Kushan Empire. The geographer Strabo of Amasia, writing at the end of the first century BC, notes that each year in July, 120 merchantmen departed from the Roman ports of Berenice or Myos Hormos on the Red Sea. Favorable winds propelled the heavy ships across the twenty thousand nautical miles of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.45 Three months later, the ships arrived at the ports of either Barbaricum, at the mouth of the Indus River, or Barygaza, at the mouth of Narmada River opposite Gujarat. There Roman merchants exchanged luxuries and coins from the Roman world for Chinese silk and lacquers, to the profit of the subjects of the Kushan emperor.46 From there, Roman ships often continued sailing along the Malabar coast to Muziris (today Cranganore), in the heart of the pepper plantations of Tamil Nadu, or farther south to Taprobane (Sri Lanka), the source of emeralds and rubies.
Yet with the death of Vasudeva I (190–230), the Kushan Empire rapidly declined. Foremost, the Kushans faced new and far more dangerous rivals.47 To the west, their foes the Parthians were overthrown by a vassal prince, the Sassanid shah Ardashir I, in 227. Ardashir and his even more brilliant son Shapur I (240–270) waged wars of conquest under the banner of a resurgent Zoroastrianism to restore the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid kings. Persian shahs declared their intent to reconquer the Upper Satrapies, the heartland of the Kushan Empire. They also aimed to retake the Indian lands that had once been Achaemenid satrapies. In a series of campaigns in 240–248, Shapur, during a time-out from attacking the Roman Empire, ended the power of the Kushan Sons of Heaven and imposed his suzerainty over the Upper Satrapies (Bactria and Sogdiana) and Gandhara.48 Over the next three generations, the Sassanid shahs fought to impose direct rule over the cities and nomadic tribes of Transoxiana. To the south of the Hindu Kush, lesser Kushan princes in Northern India reigned as vassals of the Shah, but by the mid-fourth century they bowed to a new overlord, the Gupta emperor, who styled himself the heir to the Mauryan legacy.49 In effect, the Sassanid shah of Iran and the Gupta emperor of India partitioned the Kushan Empire.
Today, the Kushans are largely unknown not just because they never wrote about themselves, but also because they do not fit neatly into modern nationalist histories. They were far too tolerant and eclectic in religion and culture for ardent Hindu nationalists. The Kushans are disliked because they favored Buddhism even though they also upheld dharma essential to the Hindu cults. As nomadic invaders in India, they could never be accommodated within caste. Later Hindu writers deplored Kanishka for committing unspeakable atrocities against the sacred cities of Aryavarta, whereas they lauded Gupta emperors for sponsoring classical Sanskrit letters, Hindu art, and the Vedic cults. Sassanid shahs, who were militant Zoroastrians, and their Muslim successors, the Arab caliphs, preferred to forget the Kushan legacy. To fundamentalist Muslims of today, the Buddhist legacy of Central Asia created by the Kushans is unsettling. This hostility is epitomized by the Taliban’s dynamiting of the two colossal rock-carved statues of the Buddha at Bamyan in 2001.50 The statues so lovingly described by Xuanzang are now a mass of fragments that scholars and conservators are struggling to reassemble. The Taliban committed more than a savage act of vandalism; they committed a deliberate policy of rewriting their own history. The Taliban aimed for a cultural amnesia to remove the distressing fact that most Muslims of Central Asia today are descendants of people who were once Buddhists, compliments of the tolerant Kushan emperors who came from the Eurasian steppes. Even so, the commercial world of the Silk Road long prospered, and the new world religion Buddhism still endures, even after the Kushans have been long forgotten.