CQ2 | Ed Murphy

Kathie Brobeck was kind enough to send this photo of a pillar inscribed with Ājīvika ascetics from the south Kōśala site of Mallar/Malhār in what used to be western Orissa and eastern Madhya Pradesh but which is now a part of the new state of Chhattisgarh.  (More on the enigmatic Ājīvikas previously and, much better, in Basham’s History and Doctrine of the Ājīvikas.)

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The Pakistan Taliban war is being fought in areas that 1500 years ago were Buddhist. The districts of Dir, Buner, and especially Swat are rich with Buddhist ruins, a record of a time when they were part of the Gandharan Buddhist heartland centered on the ancient capital of Taxila, now on the outskirts of Islamabad/Rawalapindi. Padmasambhava, for instance, was from Swat, ancient Uddiyana, before he went on to convert Tibet to Buddhism. These were rich, sophisticated centers of learning and art, famous for their monasteries, now sadly the locus of much suffering.

[updated 13 May 2009 with the maps above; for more detail you're wanting John Huntington's gorgeous map.]

[22 June 2009: It turns out that the identification of Uddiyana with Swat is contested; it might instead refer to modern-day Orissa, in eastern India.]

Cranganore (Kodungalur or Kodungalloor) is India’s Edessa.  Today it’s a minor port at the mouth of the Periyar River at 10.217°N, 76.217°E, but in antiquity it was the best harbor on the Malabar coast and probably the ancient Muziris.  It’s absurdly significant in what might be called the history of the people of the book in South Asia; a major port of trade with Rome, the port where tradition claims St. Thomas landed and where Syrian Christianity is centered, the location of the first mosque in India (the second anywhere, after Medina), supposedly built in 629 during the life of Mohammed, and the landing place too of the first Jews in India, possibly around the time of the destruction of the second temple.  It may be that the specific location of Muziris is a few kilometers northeast of Paravur (Paravoor).  In antiquity, it was the only entrance to the Kerala backwater; the port of Cochin didn’t exist until the fourteenth century.

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Christian monasticism, the story goes, began all at once with the hermit St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert in 310 AD, to be precise in a way that seems improbable.  However it started, it spread rapidly.  Within a few years, the phenomenon is widespread, with centers in Syria and Egypt.  Within the lifetime of Anthony’s devotee, St. Macarius, there were 50,000 monks in the Egyptian desert; an apocryphal number, to be sure, but still: many.  Peter Brown in his essential Rise of Western Christendom notes Martin’s Loire Valley monastery with monks wearing Egyptian camel hair robes and Roman Christian women travelling to nunneries in Jerusalem by 380 AD. By the fifth century we have the Rule of St. Benedict and evidence of Christian monasticism in Ireland (and, eventually, California.)  The Irish for monastery is “mainistir” but it was common to name monasteries in Ireland “deserts” (disert, dysert, dysart, disart, desert), since they wanted to emulate the desert fathers of Syria and Egypt even in the wet green fields of Ireland.

Did all this spring from nothing?  It seems that there were, in the first centuries after Christ, wandering bands of celibate renunciants in Syria.  And we know about sadhu-like movements and charismatic preachers throughout the world of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.  Around this time there were also ‘philosophical schools,’ such as the Neopythagoreans, which had many characteristics that later came to be called monastic.  But there are many ’sadhu-like’ movements and philosophical schools and few monastic ones.

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