Buddhism among the Göktürks

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Göktürks of the First Khaganate met Buddhism as they met most things from the south: through a prisoner.^[1] One khan took it up. The account of what happened next is four sentences long. What the sources leave unsaid around those sentences is as informative as the sentences themselves.

Huilin and Taspar

The Sui Shu tells it in a single passage. There was a monk of the Qi named Huilin, who was carried off as a captive into Göktürk country.^[1] He said to Taspar: the reason the state of Qi is rich and strong is simply that it has the Buddha’s law.^[1] He went on to expound cause, effect and retribution.^[1]

Taspar heard him and believed. He built a monastery. He sent an embassy to the Qi asking for the Vimalakīrti, the Nirvāṇa and the Avataṃsaka sutras, and for the Ten-Recitation Vinaya.^[1] He fasted and observed the precepts himself, walked the circuit round the stupa, and regretted that he had not been born in China.^[1] A modern study adds that a Turkic version of the Nirvana sutra was made at the end of 575, and that an Indian monk taught in the Turkic country from 574 to 584. It judges the turn to Buddhism a mistake that did not suit the character of the Turkic people.^[2] A study of the Bugut stone says that Taspar took Buddhism as the religion of the state in 574, that Wu-ti banned it in the north directly afterwards, that the Indian Jinagupta came to the Turkic country with pupils and taught there for ten years, that there were translations into Turkic and monasteries, and that Taspar took part in the ceremonies himself. It names no source for these statements.^[3]

The argument Huilin makes is not a religious one. He does not offer Taspar salvation. He offers him an explanation of why his neighbour is richer and stronger than he is, and names a technology of state. The khan who said elsewhere that he need not fear poverty while his two filial boys in the south kept sending silk is the same man here. In both cases he is reasoning about the sources of Chinese strength.^[4]

The request for the Vinaya is the detail that shows how far it went. Sutras can be read at court. A book of monastic discipline, by contrast, is only useful if there are monks to be disciplined by it.

Absence of a following

No member of the Ashina, no beg and no commoner is recorded as following him.^[1] No Göktürk monastery is named after the one he built. No Göktürk monk appears in any source. No successor of his is described as Buddhist. The khaganate broke apart in the decade after his death. Nothing in the quarrel had anything to do with religion.

That silence has to be handled carefully. The Chinese histories record what interests a Chinese court, and a conversion interests it a great deal more than its absence does. What can be said is that the same chapters which found Taspar’s Buddhism worth four sentences found nothing of the kind worth reporting about anyone else.

On the best-supported view, the conversion did not take. It was an attempt to import the source of a rival’s strength. It did not fit the way the people lived and left no institution behind it. That is a position, and the evidence for it is an absence.

The Bugut inscription

The stone set up at Bugut around 584, in Sogdian and in Brāhmī, is held to be Buddhist in content. If that view is right, it is the one material trace of the episode.^[5] That view is not secure, and the stone is damaged. The first publication gave the faces B I to B III as Sogdian and B IV as Sanskrit.^[6] It read a line of the Sogdian text as “create a new great samgha”, a Buddhist community.^[7] That reading has since been corrected, and a later edition finds in the word a term for stone.^[8] By the first reading the text was written by a man who knew Sogdian very well, perhaps a Tarkhan called Buqa. He used terms from the Avesta, which speaks against his being a Buddhist.^[9] There are three views on whom the stone was set up for. One dates it to 582 and sets it up for Taspar. A second places it about 584. A third makes it the monument of Mahan Tegin, a younger brother of Mukan who acted as regent under Mukan and under Taspar, and takes the text to tell events of the years 572 to 580.^[10]^[11] A relief of a she-wolf with a small human figure under her belly stands on the stone.^[12] One survey holds that Sogdian became the official language of the khans’ administration in the second half of the sixth century.^[13] Turkic Atlas treats the question under the inscription.

The stone does show without dispute that the khaganate’s official writing at that date was Sogdian, done by Sogdians in their own script. Whatever religion came into the Göktürk court in those years came along the same road and in the same hands as the chancery did.

Afterwards

Buddhism kept working on the Turkic peoples after the khaganates, and it did so where they became settled. In the Tarim oases and at Gaochang the Uyghurs who moved there after 840 produced a large Buddhist literature in their own language. The vocabulary of that literature is where figures like Ärklig Qan enter Turkic at all. According to one account, the Western Göktürk khan Tong Yabgu was converted by an Indian monk called Prabhakaramitra, and that several other minor Turkic rulers showed respect and devotion to Buddhism.^[14]

The wall paintings of Bezeklik near Turfan show the same oasis world in pictures. In the corridors of temple 9 the portraits of monks have name tablets in Brahmi script with Sanskrit names such as Mahendrarakṣita and Dharmasena. Other tablets, in Old Uyghur and Chinese, have the same content and name a tutung bäg.^[15] The paintings are not dated here.

That is a different history from the one told here, and it belongs to a different kind of society. A steppe khaganate whose khan builds a monastery and whose people do not notice is one thing. An oasis kingdom that translates a canon is another. Running them together is how Taspar’s four sentences come to be read as the conversion of a people.

At the Karakhanid court of 1069–1070 Buddhism appears as the faith of an enemy. The Kutadgu Bilig has Highly Praised tell the king to burn the unbelievers’ houses and break their burhan, the image. The king is to build a mosque in its place.^[16] Some scholars take the passage as aimed at the Buddhist Uyghurs to the east.^[17] Some also take the book’s ascetic, Wide Awake, for a Buddhist figure. Others reject this, because the names of the four figures are allegorical and the ideal of the ascetic is at home in Islam as well.^[18]

References

^ a b c d e f g Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Taşağıl 1995, p. 28, 34
^ Çağatay 1976, p. 248
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Bugut inscription
^ Çağatay 1976, p. 246
^ Çağatay 1976, p. 248, 251
^ Erdal 2004, p. 35
^ Çağatay 1976, p. 248, 252
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 337
^ Çağatay 1976, p. 247
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 324
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 242
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 351
^ von Le Coq 1913, pl. 16
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 5486
^ Hacib 2006 (Birinci Basım Nisan 2006, İkinci Basım Eylül 2008), p. 32
^ Dankoff 1983, p. 12–15

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Albert von Le Coq, Chotscho. Facsimile-Wiedergaben der wichtigeren Funde der ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan (1913)
Ahmet Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, Bd. I (1995)
Saadet Çağatay; Semih Tezcan, Köktürk tarihinin çok önemli bir belgesi: Sogutça Bugut Yazıtı (1976)
B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Yusuf Has Hacib; çeviren Reşid Rahmeti Arat, Kutadgu Bilig (2006 (Birinci Basım Nisan 2006, İkinci Basım Eylül 2008))