Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [97]
Hence in the first century AD Buddhism, with its attendant scriptures, spread northward, perhaps here again trekking back up the historic route that Sanskrit speakers had used to enter India over a millennium before. But past Bactria, instead of turning left into the central Asian steppes, it turned right and, picking up the Silk Road, headed into China. Received by the rising Tang dynasty, and ultimately propagated by them, Buddhism became coextensive with Chinese culture. Thence it was ultimately transmitted, along with its Sanskrit and Pali scriptures, to Korea and Japan, its most easterly homes, arriving at the end of the sixth century.
Other, closer, areas took much longer to receive the doctrine, borne as ever by its vehicles Pali and Sanskrit. Nepal had been part of the early Indian spread of Buddhism under Aśoka, in the third century BC; but the first Indian monk invited into Tibet, Śāntarak⋅ita, came in the second half of the eighth century AD, a full 1200 years after the Buddha had lived just two hundred miles to the south (admittedly, over the Himalayas) in Magadha; and the religion was firmly established in Tibet only in the eleventh century.
The last area to be exposed to Buddhism (and hence sacred Sanskrit) on a large scale was Mongolia, its northernmost home. For many centuries there were strong links between the Tibetans and the Mongols, who from 1280 to 1368 achieved ascendancy over China. Kublai Khan, for example, the Mongol emperor of China well known in the West as the host of Marco Polo, was keen to spread Buddhism to the Mongol homeland in the early fourteenth century. But this aim was only achieved permanently by Chinese preachers rather later: in 1578 the Altan Khan of Mongolia accepted a version of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on behalf of his whole realm.
Sanskrit, then, has a far-flung history, and has been in contact with cultures conducted in other languages all over southern, eastern and central Asia. And an interesting generalisation emerges. Nowhere has this linguistic contact led to loss or replacement of other linguistic traditions, even though Sanskrit has always been central to new cultural developments wherever it has reached. This record makes a striking contrast with the impact, too often devastating, of languages of large-scale campaigning civilisations, such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French and English.
But in another way this widespread embrace of Indian culture is highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for Americana that captured the whole world, and certainly the South-East Asian region, in the second half of the twentieth century. In that advance too the primary motives were the growth of profits through trade, and a sense that the globally connected and laissez-faire culture that came with the foreigners was going to raise the standard of life of all who adopted it. As with the ancient advance of Indianisation, there has been little or no use of the military to reinforce the advance of Microsoft, Michael Jackson or Mickey Mouse. There has been little sense that the advance is planned or coordinated by political powers in the centre of innovation, whether in India then, or in the USA today. And the linguistic effects are similar too: English, like Sanskrit, has advanced as a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion.
A major dissimilarity is the absence of any religious element in the American movement. There is nothing in it to set against the cult of Hindu deities, or the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. This may be significant for the future of English, since we shall see that it was ultimately only religion, whether Hindu or Buddhist, which was to preserve any role for Sanskrit outside India. But with this one caveat, it seems more helpful than misleading to compare these two rising tides—of Indian culture in the early first millennium AD, and of American culture