Political History of Ancient India, from the Accession of Parikshit to the Extinction of the Gupta Dynasty c23.14

c23.14

The Chinese pilgrim did not probably personally visit Persia. But no doubt need be entertained regarding the existence of Buddhist communities and *Saṅghārāmas* or monasteries in Irāṇ. Stein discovered a Buddhist monastery in "the terminal marshes of the Helmund" in Seistān.² Mānī, the founder of the Manichæan religion, who was born in A.D. 215-16, at Ctesiphon in Babylonia and began to preach his gospel probably in A.D. 242, shows unmistakable traces of Buddhist influence.³ In his book *Shābūrqān* (*Shapurakhan*) he speaks of the Buddha as a messenger of God. Legge and Eliot refer to a Manichæan treatise which has the form of a Buddhist Sūtra. It speaks of Mānī as the *Tathāgata* and mentions *Buddhas* and the *Bodhisattva*. In Bunyiu Nanjio's *Catalogue of the Chinese translation of the Buddhist Tripiṭaka*, App., II, No. 4, we have reference to a Parthian prince who became a Buddhist *śramaṇa* or monk before A.D. 148. In his *History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon*,⁴ Dr. Vincent Smith refers to a picture of a four-armed Buddhist saint or *Bodhisattva* in the guise of a Persian with black beard and whiskers, holding a thunderbolt (*vajra*) in his left hand, which has been found at a place called Dandān-Uiliq in Turkistan. Such figures are undoubtedly the products of a type of Buddhism which must have developed in Irāṇ, and enjoyed considerable popularity as late as the eighth century A.D. which is the date assigned by Dr. Smith to the fresco or distemper paintings on wood and plaster discovered at Dandān-Uiliq.