Course Overview: Historically, Inner Asia was marked by trade routes (the 'Silk Route' or 'Silk Road') which crossed this vast landscape of deserts and mountains between China, India, the Iranian Plateau and the Mediterranean world. For a few hundred years, this region was virtually unique in the extent to which it flourished as a result of cultural interchange with nomadic peoples and peripheral states. Although the kingdoms and cultural traditions that emerged and disappeared in this great inner basin of Asia shared to some extent in the more stable and enduring cultures of China, India, and Iran, they developed their own very distinctive styles and media. The result was a cultural tradition that reached its most brilliant expression in the art of Buddhism.
In this course we will consider:
The art of Buddhism:
its doctrinal and artistic origins in India
its development in Gandhara, in the kingdoms of Central Asia, and at the edge of China
its final vital elaboration through the tradition of Lamaistic Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia
We will also briefly consider the impact of later nomadic and Islamic cultures on art of the Silk Road
Our discussions will offer an opportunity to look at the records of early Chinese travelers through Central Asia, 'in search of the Law,' and the reopening of the Silk Route by Western explorers in the late 19th - 20th c.
