Theological advances in Buddhist patterns of worship, notably in creating a ritual need for certain precious stones that were worthy of possession as well as donation by the virtuous and the wealthy, created and sustained a market for these (and related) commodities that catalysed trade links that were bilateral, regional and extended as far out as the Mediterranean world. Indeed, the transport of pearls, corals and other precious stones from – and via – India to China stimulated a triangular economic network where the reverse movement of Chinese silks to India and the West balanced the overall trade.
If the transmission of Buddhist practices lay behind this efflorescence in Sino-Indian commerce and culture, Buddhism’s flexible doctrinal repertoire reinforced the link between culture and power across much of mainland and maritime Asia. Lacking a centre of orthodoxy that might place a check on doctrinal deviations and, further, needing to find accommodative hosts to facilitate its regional transplantation, Buddhism adapted interpretively to the interests of its hosts and protectors. To this end it served multiple roles and in many political guises:
as an auspicious sponsor of dynastic stability, with its genre of state-protection texts employed to ward off wars, famines and diseases;
as an instrument of statecraft via its official distribution as civilising texts and canons to neighbouring kingdoms in Korea and Vietnam – such that in its most extreme form it transformed Tibet’s warrior kings to a non-coercive Lamaist authority that was itself dependent on a ‘devoted’ external protector to guarantee its security;
as a tool of imperial legitimisation, with rulers (during the Liang and Tang dynasties) and pretenders (nomadic Mongol Khitan and East Siberian Liao tribesmen) alike having passages self-servingly interpolated into Buddhist texts to legitimise their newly established authority … indeed to the extent that Buddhism expanded in the train of, and reciprocally legitimised, nomadic/alien conquests of the Chinese heartland – particularly during that catastrophic period in the early 4th century A.D. when the ‘central kingdom’ that the Qin and Han had unified was first surrendered to semi-barbarian interlopers, it never quite managed to outgrow its taint as a foreign creed.
Even to this day, Buddhism serves in its country of origin as a fountain of lore, the symbolism of the Buddhist Wheel of Law on the national flag and the ruler Asoka’s lions as the national seal supplying a harmony that overarches deep cleavages of caste, language, region and religion.
If a few instructive parallels are to be gleaned from this earlier age of ‘open regionalism’, it is these: that continental Asia had once been a great originator of cross-border ideas and contact; that the architecture of such contact was not close-ended or exclusive but rather was open and inclusive; that trade and materialism was among its essential instruments; that lacking a centre of orthodoxy – that is, a veritable secretariat with power to compel, its ideas of private well-being and political organisation necessarily had to graft themselves onto state traditions and identities without deflecting the latter from their national trajectories; further, that lacking the force of arms, such ideas could rarely, if ever, overstay its welcome ….. in essence, then, a value system constructed in the consciousness of an amorphous syncretism (it would be premature to call it ‘Asianism’) could only be sustained by the consensual desire of each of its constituent units.
Asian International Relations – Back to the Future?
Yet perhaps the most enduring contemporary application of this earlier age of commerce, culture and contact appears in the arena of Sino-Indian and Asian international relations: as a supra-national bridge that might erase the diplomatic distance between two ancient civilisations whose telescoped dash to westernisation has also left a residue of aggressive nationhood (as Prof. Wang Gungwu has observed) and mutual antagonism. For the Buddha, the five basic precepts of morality had revolved around abstinences from harmful activity which if dutifully observed would foster a sense of consideration and tolerance towards all. Moral conduct of leaders (and subject alike), in the Confucian worldview meantime, was viewed as the principal driver of history – hence if everyone acted morally and in keeping with their correct definition of role, the collective goodwill of all would be advanced. Culled from this tradition of Buddhist ethical universalism and Confucian political morality, and woven subsequently together into the doctrine of Panchsheel (Panchshila)/Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, were the mutually reinforcing strands of responsible statesmanship and external non-intervention. Nations, like individuals and families, that discharged obligations individually and obeyed norms collectively also stayed together peaceably.
As the on-going intra-regional gravity shift away from north-east Asia compounds the existing structural tension between the hub-and-spokes trans-Pacific security system and the budding community-style pan-Asian economic structure (as detailed here previously ), this set of loose norms affords an immanent principle of order and self-restraint which might leaven narrower tendencies of ideology and raison d’état. In his seminal study of Vienna peace-making, Henry Kissinger argued that a balance of power shorn of a doctrine of legitimacy limits only the scope of aggression but does not prevent it altogether. Whether a journey that ended two millennia ago in Luoyang might furnish that principle of legitimacy to a region that is once again gradually re-discovering the bearings of its past successes remains as yet to be seen.
Sourabh Gupta is a senior research associate at Samuels International Associates, Inc.