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Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2014

Roxann Prazniak
Roxann Prazniak*
Affiliation:
Robert D. Clark Honors College, History, University of Oregon
*
prazniak@uoregon.edu
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Abstract

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 650 - 680
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

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111 The ideal of inclusiveness associated with Mongol rule was still in vogue when Edward Gibbon wrote his celebrated History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen & Co., 1909)Google Scholar, vol. 7, 4, n. 8, in which he referred with admiration to the religious tolerance of the Mongols: “But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonesense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticitpated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.” Accurate or not, this was a long-lived perception from the Mongol era.

112 Hillgarth, J. N., Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1971)Google Scholar, 49.

113 “The Third Letter of John of Monte Corvino,” in Dawson, Christopher, ed., The Mongol Mission (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 228–31Google Scholar, here 228.

114 “The Letter of Andrew of Perugia,” in Dawson, Christopher, ed., The Mongol Mission (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 235–37Google Scholar, here 237.

115 Jacoby, David, “Marco Polo, His Close Relatives, and His Travel Accounts: Some New Insights,” Mediterranean Historical Review 21, 2 (2006): 193–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 203.

116 Polo, Marco, The Travels, Latham, Ronald, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1958)Google Scholar, 279, 283.

117 Polo, Travels, 283. Kamalashri also conveyed that the Buddha died and was reborn eighty-four thousand times. There are also numerous references to animals and non-killing. Karl Jahn, “Kamalashri-Rashid al-Din's Life and Teaching of Buddha,” 96, 103,105,111.

118 See Wilson, Joseph A. P., “The Life of the Saint and the Animal: Asian Religious Influence in the Medieval Christian West,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3, 2 (2009): 169–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 179, 181, 183.