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Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2014

Roxann Prazniak*
Affiliation:
Robert D. Clark Honors College, History, University of Oregon

Abstract

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

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115 Jacoby, David, “Marco Polo, His Close Relatives, and His Travel Accounts: Some New Insights,” Mediterranean Historical Review 21, 2 (2006): 193218CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 203.

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117 Polo, Travels, 283. Kamalashri also conveyed that the Buddha died and was reborn eighty-four thousand times. There are also numerous references to animals and non-killing. Karl Jahn, “Kamalashri-Rashid al-Din's Life and Teaching of Buddha,” 96, 103,105,111.

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