The Silk Road Salad Bowl of Faiths

Where Buddhism Met Zoroastrianism and the Two Met Islam

Before we start this story, it’s important to understand its geography. If you look at a map of Central Asia, several rivers or daryas pop out in view, of which two are of immense import to every story of civilization—Amu and Syr. The Greeks called them Oxus and Jaxartes, respectively. Oxus originates in the Pamir knot and Jaxartes in the Tien Shan. Running more or less parallel, the two rivers irrigate a large expanse in between before finally pouring into the Aral Sea. This irrigated region between the two great waters is what the Greeks called Transoxiana, literally “Land beyond the Oxus.” This watershed is further split into Ferghana (northeast) and Sogdiana (southwest) by the Zarafshan or Sughd River (Polytimetus in Ancient Greek). Sogdiana is home to cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, and Ferghana would go on to gain notoriety as Babur’s homeland. Sughd, by the way, is Sogdiana in Tajik.

Sandwiched between the Amu and the Hindu Kush in the south is Tokharistan, better known as Bactria. This is where stood the famous city of Bactra, also known as Balkh. If Transoxiana is to the east of Oxus, what’s to the west? That’s the enormous territory of Khorasan, today split between Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan. And finally, to the extreme north of Khorasan is Khwarazm.

Fig. 1: A bird’s eye-view of Central Asia. Note the city of Balkh on a minor river that seems to originate in the Hindu Kush. That river is what gives Balkh its name. In ancient times, it emptied into the Oxus. [courtesy Cplakidas in “Map of Khorasan and its surroundings in the 7th/8th centuries,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 July 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Khorasan. Accessed 9 May 2024.]

To wrap it all up, we have Central Asia that covers it all. Within it lies Transoxiana, surrounded by Khwarazm, Khorasan, and Bactria. Within Transoxiana are Ferghana and Sogdiana (Sughd in Tajik) and within Sogdiana are cities like Bukhara and Samarkand. In Bactria is Balkh. With that picture in clear view, we can get on with our journey, which starts all the way back in the pre-common era when Buddhism had just started crystallizing its presence in the region.

Historically, this had been a Zoroastrian domain since at least 1200 BC if not earlier. Some traditions even name Bactria as Zoroaster’s birthplace, although not much is known for sure. The veracity of any of this notwithstanding, Balkh remained the epicenter of Zoroastrianism for centuries until the second century BC. Between the third century BC and the second century AD, this was the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Since the Greeks weren’t particularly intolerant to the local faith, some cultural synthesis was unavoidable. The real upheaval came with the landmark commercial innovation called the Silk Road.