The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [46]
From at least the beginning of the Common Era we have good evidence of the spread to southeast Asia of Indian cultural and religious influences, first Buddhism, and from the fourth or fifth centuries brahmanical Hinduism. Indeed, Glover claims that economic contacts began even around 500 BCE, so that even this early southeast Asia was linked to a vast trading world spreading from the Mediterranean to Han China (circa 200 BCE to 200 CE). It could be, he claims, that this trade was done by Buddhist missionaries, or alternatively that Buddhist missionaries even this early (remembering that the Buddha lived during the sixth century BCE) accompanied traders. Such very early contacts are not universally accepted46 yet certainly from the first century of the Common Era there is evident an increasing use of Indian Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas, monuments and icons, and Indian scripts and languages.
The connection between Buddhism and trade, including that to southeast Asia, is not really causal. Rather we can see in the early Common Era a mutually supportive interactive system. At the ideological level Buddhism encouraged lay devotees to accumulate wealth by trade; at the social level donations to Buddhist monasteries gave status to traders; and at the professional level Buddhist monasteries were repositories of knowledge and essential skills, such as writing. Not all traders were Buddhist, though many wealthy ones were. It is very unlikely that traders were the main agents in the spread of Buddhist, and later Hindu, ideas in southeast Asia, for most of them, while no doubt personally devout, were really ignorant peddlers whose opinions would carry little weight.
The initiative lay in southeast Asia. Local rulers there heard of south Indian ideas of kingship and ritual and imported Brahmins to raise their status and legitimise them. They were thus not mere passive recipients of a higher culture. These connections continued for centuries, as Buddhist pilgrims not only from southeast Asia but also East Asia visited holy sites in India, and studied in Sri Lanka. In Fa Hsien's time in the 420s we have two references to Sri Lankan Buddhist nuns travelling to China by sea,47 and from the fifth and seventh centuries we know of many Chinese pilgrims visiting Sri Lanka, and India. In the former they went to the tooth relic, that is an actual tooth of the Buddha in the interior at Kandy, and also studied important texts and worked with distinguished teachers. In India, where Buddhism was in decline, they went to places associated with the life of the Buddha, such as Bodh Gaya, where he attained enlightenment. There was a quite complicated circulation. In the early eleventh century the important southeast state of Srivijaya built a Buddhist shrine in Nagapattinam, the main port of the great Cola Tamil kingdom, and the Cola ruler, who was a Hindu, allocated revenue from a village to support this shrine.48 These contacts from insular, Malay, southeast Asia declined as Islam spread in the area soon after this, and new connections, now to Mecca, were created.
Others also travelled for religious purposes. In about 330 CE a Syrian Christian bound for India was shipwrecked off Ethiopia, and subsequently helped to convert the Aksumite empire to Christianity. Later a Bishop of Adulis called Moses visited India, along with a Coptic bishop from Egypt, to examine Hindu philosophy.49 The origin of the so-called St Thomas Christian community, and more generally other Christian activity in India, is a matter of much controversy. Perhaps our guiding principle here should be to follow a recent detailed study of early Christianity in Asia and ask ourselves which is most important, 'clearly established historical veracity or an ongoing enlivening tradition which has given and continues to give purpose, dignity and significance to the lives of