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- Buddhism in Central Asia
- CEUS-R 329/529
- Christopher Beckwith
This course covers the Buddha, his Saka background, and his own teachings; early Buddhism in India and its spread to Gandhara; the invasion of Alexander the Great and his Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek successors; Pyrrho and his sceptical Buddhist philosophy; the report of Megasthenes; Asoka and early Buddhism in Gandhara and Bactria; the Bactrian and Gandharan schools of Buddhism; the major Central Asian Buddhist teachers and their texts; Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosa; early Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia; the spread of Buddhism from Central Asia to China, Korea, and Japan; early Tibetan religious ideas and Buddhism in the Tibetan Empire; the Central Asian Buddhist college and the Central Asian Buddhist scholastic method; the Barmakids of Balkh and the Arabs; Indian-Central Asian texts, numerals, and atomism in Baghdad; Central Asian Buddhism and early mystical Sufism; transmission of Islamicized Central Asian Buddhist culture to Europe and beginning of the Scientific Revolution.
