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Greeks and Buddhists
in Afghanistan
Once again let me urge you to visit the show of classic sculpture from India now at the De
Young Museum. This is an experience not likely to be repeated in your lifetime.
My colleagues in reviewing the show have mentioned the Greek, or at least Hellenistic,
influence which is apparent in several of the pieces. It is not generally known that after
Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire to its eastern limits at the Indus River he
established a number of Greek, or Greek garrisoned, cities in what is now Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Cut off from the rest of the Greek world, Greeks ruled here until the
beginning of the Christian Era.
This was the Bactrian Kingdom which at one time included most of Afghanistan (Bactria
is the Afghan city of Balkh), Turkestan, Pakistan, and even, for a while, a large section
of India south of the Indus.
We know little of the rulers, but they left behind their faces on the coins, the finest
examples of portrait coinage ever done. Their subtle, arrogant faces look much like the
British gentleman adventurers of the East India Company who were to come after them in
2000 years. Eucratides even wears something remarkably like a pith helmet.
Here Mahayana Buddhism grew up, flourished, and spread across Asia to Japan. With it
went artists and decorators who filled the temples and monastic caves of Further Asia with
paintings and sculpture that derive their plastic inspiration from the far away Greek
Mediterranean. Their artistic output was incredible: its limitless bulk staggers the
imagination. Although I suppose it was what we would call today a kind of commercial art,
the product of studios organized on a modern production basis, it is nevertheless
unquestionably the finest expression of the Greek genius after the days of Alexander,
except possibly for some work done for the Romans during the reign of Augustus.
This is one of the most fascinating episodes of history, and it is tantalizing because
we know so little about it and what we do know is so extraordinary.
We know that the plays of Euripides were performed in courts that looked out from the
Hindu Kush over the deserts of Central Asia. We know that Hercules and Vishnu, Bacchus and
Shiva were confused on their coinage. We know that Buddhism, originally a kind of
atheistic religious empiricism, was turned into a Mystery Religion of the Mediterranean
type.
A Mahayana Sutra, The Questions of Milinda, has as interlocutor the adventurer
Menander who, driven out of Bactria by invading barbarians, conquered a sizable piece of
western India. Here and there along the coasts as far south as Bombay are gravestones with
Greek names. Some dedicate the dead man’s soul to Buddha and his Bodhisattvas, some
to the Hindu gods, some to the deities of the homeland, half a world away.
All this has little enough to do with the main body of Indian art. Modern Indian
critics and historians, intensely chauvinistic, resent any implication that they owe
anything whatever to the West, at any time, ever. It is true that the main India tradition
in sculpture had its origins northeast of the Ganges and in the non-Aryan south, and in
the course of time came to push aside all Hellenistic influence from the northwest.
Had this been a show of the art of Pakistan, the story would have been different. It is
there that most of this Greek-inspired sculpture — called, by the way, Gandharan art,
after a place in Pakistan — is to be found.
A last detail — for a long time philologists were puzzled by an Aryan language
spoken by a few savage, murderous, filthy robber bands in the mountains and valleys of the
Northwest Border. They were certainly the most debased and intractable of all the
inhabitants of an intractable region. Then somebody pointed out that the language was
simply a degenerate form of the language of Plato.
A friend just asked me, “Is this sort of thing good newspaper copy?” Why not?
I can’t be controversial three weeks running. I get elastic fatigues, like a tired
bridge. It is unusual and fascinating information. And it is relevant and bears pondering.
Amongst what sort of savages in what lonely mountains do you suppose English will survive
two thousand years hence?
KENNETH REXROTH
1964
This text — one of Rexroth’s semiweekly newspaper columns — appeared in the San
Francisco Examiner (21 June 1964). Copyright 1964. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
Two of Rexroth’s plays are set in Afghanistan during the period discussed here
— see Beyond the Mountains (New Directions). For more information on the
period, see W.W. Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India and John
Marshall’s The Buddhist Art of Gandhara.
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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