BOOK VI

BUDDHISM OUTSIDE INDIA

CHAPTER XXXIV

EXPANSION OF INDIAN INFLUENCE

INTRODUCTORY

The subject of this Book is the expansion of Indian influence throughout Eastern Asia and the neighbouring islands.  That influence is clear and wide-spread, nay almost universal, and it is with justice that we speak of Further India and the Dutch call their colonies Neerlands Indie.  For some early chapters in the story of this expansion the dates and details are meagre, but on the whole the investigator’s chief difficulty is to grasp and marshal the mass of facts relating to the development of religion and civilization in this great region.

The spread of Hindu thought was an intellectual conquest, not an exchange of ideas.  On the north-western frontier there was some reciprocity, but otherwise the part played by India was consistently active and not receptive.  The Far East counted for nothing in her internal history, doubtless because China was too distant and the other countries had no special culture of their own.  Still it is remarkable that whereas many Hindu missionaries preached Buddhism in China, the idea of making Confucianism known in India seems never to have entered the head of any Chinese.

It is correct to say that the sphere of India’s intellectual conquests was the East and North, not the West, but still Buddhism spread considerably to the west of its original home and entered Persia.  Stein discovered a Buddhist monastery in “the terminal marshes of the Helmund” in Seistan[1] and Bamian is a good distance from our frontier.  But in Persia and its border lands there were powerful state religions, first Zoroastrianism and then Islam, which disliked and hindered the importation of foreign creeds and though we may see some resemblance between Sufis and Vedantists, it does not appear that the Moslim civilization of Iran owed much to Hinduism.

But in all Asia north and east of India, excluding most of Siberia but including the Malay Archipelago, Indian influence is obvious.  Though primarily connected with religion it includes much more, such as architecture, painting and other arts, an Indian alphabet, a vocabulary of Indian words borrowed or translated, legends and customs.  The whole life of such diverse countries as Tibet, Burma, and Java would have been different had they had no connection with India.

In these and many other regions the Hindus must have found a low state of civilization, but in the Far East they encountered a culture comparable with their own.  There was no question of colonizing or civilizing rude races.  India and China met as equals, not hostile but also not congenial, a priest and a statesman, and the statesman made large concessions to the priest.  Buddhism produced a great fermentation and controversy