“A History of Uyghur Buddhism” by John Elverskog

Now merely one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups in the People’s Republic of China, for almost a millennium the Uyghurs were among Central Asia’s most dominant political, economic and cultural forces.

From their beginnings as a Turkic people over two thousand years ago, the Uyghurs were subjects of various political entities and authorities until finally establishing for themselves two separate Uyghur kingdoms in the ninth centuries. From this point forward, they controlled territory spanning the southern Tarim Basin in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.

Contemporary perceptions of the Uyghurs often center their status as Muslims within the Sinosphere. However, it was not until the 14th century that the Uyghur civilisation converted to Islam in large numbers. The pre-Islamic history of the Uyghurs was largely forgotten for centuries, the result of a deliberate act of erasure by subsequent Muslim Uyghur rulers who wished to assert and strengthen their legitimacy as rulers in the Islamic tradition. It was not until the early 20th century when new European field research across Central Asia revived the common understanding that before their conversion to Islam the Uyghur civilization had been home to a unique and robust strain of Buddhism.

 

A History of Uyghur Buddhism, Johan Elverskog (Columbia University Press, June 2024)
A History of Uyghur Buddhism, Johan Elverskog (Columbia University Press, June 2024)

A History of Uyghur Buddhism by John Elverskog builds upon this scholarship to shed further light on the history of the Uyghurs as not only practitioners of Buddhism but as an important regional influence in the promotion and practice of Buddhism in Asia. The book covers the full life story of Uyghur Buddhism, from its birth to maturity and eventual demise.

Elverskog begins in the 10th century introducing the Uyghurs as followers of Manichaeism, a belief system that came to Central Asia from Persia that emphasised the duality between good and evil that manifests itself in the world and human nature itself. From this point onwards, Manichaeism was the official state religion—and indeed remained the traditional belief system professed by the Uyghur nobility even centuries later when large swathes of the Uyghur population had turned to Buddhism.

Elverskog starts with the Uyghurs’ Manichaean beginnings for two key reasons. First, Manichean beliefs influenced later Uyghur Buddhist art and literature and, second,the Uyghur transition from Manichaeism to Buddhism acts as a foreshadowing of their later adoption of Islam. In doing so, he seeks to promote popular understanding of the Uyghur embrace of Islam as a complex, gradual process—just one of several experienced by the Uyghurs throughout their history—rather than something that was short and sharp.

The book makes clear that both Uyghur conversions—to and from Buddhism—were a result of multifaceted influences, including the geopolitical, economic and spiritual rather than simply those of force and conquest.

 

Elverskog rejects the two most popular academic theories for the shift from Manichaeism to Buddhism, which argue for the change representing a strategic reaction to the military threat from the expansionist Muslim Qarakhanids of Central Asia or an intellectual response to the conceptual limitations of Manichean traditions. His explanation is far simpler—everyone else was doing it.

While not the only growing religion at the time, Buddhism is the only religious system that successfully established a presence across all of Asia in the premodern period, from Sri Lanka in the south, to Japan to the East. In this context, the Uyghur adoption of Buddhism was both a practical and logical decision.

Another of Elverskog’s key concerns is the relationship between Buddhism and state power under the Uyghurs. It is perhaps an unappreciated fact that Buddhism has often been valued by the ruling classes of Asia for its capacity to leverage political power. As he argues: 

The Dharma not only provides various models and theories that can be mobilized for political legitimacy but also… offers spiritual powers that can be used to maintain and project political power.

 

Interestingly, however, the uptake of Buddhism by the Uyghurs in around 1000 CE was led from the middle by the noble and merchant classes rather than top-down from a central ruler or authority. Merchants in particular became the true champions of Buddhism among the Uyghurs. While this may surprise those more accustomed to Western tropes about Buddhist asceticism, Buddhism has long resonated with merchant classes across Asia. As Elverskog notes:

 

In Buddhism, making money is nothing to be ashamed of, as it is essential to creating merit and thus a fundamental part of being Buddhist.

 

The Uyghurs’ fortuitous geographic location between the wealthy empires of China, Tibet and the Mongolians saw them uniquely placed to assume a lucrative role as the middlemen of East-West trade. As one Chinese observer is quoted as saying:

 

Whenever Tibetans and Chinese trade, if there is no [Uyghur merchant] serving as middleman, they cannot complete the transaction.

 

The Uyghurs’ growing wealth helped finance the construction of new Buddhist institutions and allowed an ascendant Uyghur state to consolidate its power. However, this did not translate to formal state patronage. In fact, throughout the 11th and 12th centuries, Uyghur rulers maintained their Turkic and Manichaean royal titles and their claimed line of descent from the Mongolian empires of the past. Elverskog suggests this may have been a calculated effort to maintain their notional status as neutral middlemen between the Islamic West and Buddhist East trading blocs which surrounded them on either side.

This absence of formal endorsement from Uyghur rulers translated into their general absence from most Buddhist texts produced by Buddhist Uyghurs at this time—quite distinct from the practice common elsewhere in Asia where great effort was made to use veneration to curry favor with those in power.

However, the lack of direct political intervention of the state into Buddhist practice also allowed a more fluid and flexible form of Buddhism to develop within Uyghur society that was both innovative and unique. More than elsewhere in Asia, Uyghur Buddhism encouraged ideological and institutional fluidity. As Elverskog notes,

 

They had no qualms mixing and matching texts from diverse Buddhist schools of thought and practice into distinctive new texts…

 

The lack of a political authority defining the Dharma made this freedom possible. The Uyghurs created their own distinctive Buddhist texts and by extension their own form of Buddhism…

 

They readily deleted passages, added explanatory passages, and changed verse to prose or vice versa.

 

The Buddhist tradition is so diverse in its practices and doctrines that it has been suggested it would be more apt to speak of “Buddhisms” in the plural rather than singular. Without the limitations imposed by a Buddhism authority, Uyghur Buddhists had carte blanche to draw from the full pallet of Buddhist thought and practice when developing their form of Buddhism.

While Elverskog does consider the complexities of liturgical differences, he is ultimately more concerned with the practical motivations and practices of everyday Buddhist Uyghurs, seeing it as the best way to understand the Uyghur experience of Buddhsm. He acknowledges that:

 

The laity were not engaged in thorny theological debates about the nature of the Buddha; they were interested in generating good karma for themselves and their family members through ritual performances, artistic and textual production, pilgrimage, and the confession of sins.

 

Such practices make up everyday, lived Buddhism, which focuses less on doctrinal minutiae and more on rituals securing blessings for money and health.

 

In 1209 CE, the Uyghurs voluntarily submitted to the authority of the rising Mongol Empire, looking to them as guarantors of their security. This was to have implications for the lived experience of Uyghur Buddhism in the 13th and 14th centuries with the adoption of Buddhism by the Mongols. With this shift, Buddhism increasingly became part of the state apparatus and therefore lost much of its capacity for flexibility and uniqueness. As Elverskog notes, “Uyghur Buddhism became yoked to an imperial project and with that, came to be defined by developments in the metropole.” While Uyghur Buddhism continued to be somewhat more diverse than Buddhism elsewhere in Asia, it was now under the influence of the Mongol imperial enterprise.

Elverskog charts the rapid popularization of colophons praising Uyghur rulers for their Buddhist piety or righteousness at this time, a dramatic shift from previous centuries. The Uyghurs also slowly adopted the Mongol devotion to Tantric Buddhism that had occurred after the Mongol conquest of Tibet—as well as their use of block printing technology for printing Buddhist texts.

Mongol influence would also play a part in the Uyghurs’ conversion from Buddhism to Islam in subsequent centuries. After the death of Genghis Khan in 1227 CE, the Uyghurs were caught up in the Mongol civil wars as various factions fought for supremacy and control of the Mongol legacy. The Uyghurs were caught between the Qaidu Mongols of Central Asia to the West and the Yuan Mongol Dynasty to the East. Their historically beneficial central location was now a source of danger rather than economic opportunity. With the two sides fighting, the Uyghurs’ trade routes were severed and their economy collapsed. The subsequent shift to international sea trade by the Chinese Ming Dynasty ultimately saw the end of the Silk Road trade routes that had formed the basis of the Uyghurs economy.

Elverskog does not attempt to presuppose he understands the decision-making process that led individual Uyghurs to convert from Buddhism to Islam. However, he does suggest that the waning economic and social capital afforded to Buddhism in an increasingly Islamic world was a major contributing factor.

Often in the West, the spread of Islam is seen as a rapid, brutal force that swept through the Middle East and Asia trampling disbelievers underfoot. However, Elverskog warns of allowing preconceptions about Islam to color our perspective of the Islamisation of the Uyghurs. He instead suggests that the conversion to Islam by the Uyghurs was a gradual process. Many Uyghurs continued to follow Buddhism for centuries after their then-rulers the Mongol-Turkic Chagatai Khanate adopted Islam and there is no evidence of Mongol persecution of Buddhists during that time.

There is no official Uyghur history of their embrace of Islam and therefore we do not know exactly how long Buddhist practices endured in the region. In adopting a new Islamic identity, the Uyghurs erased their pre-Islamic Buddhist history and their unique contribution to Buddhist history. It was not until the 20th century that Uyghur nationalists saw the value in reclaiming the Uyghur’s Buddhist past as a means of restating the existence of a unique and distinct Uyghur identity.

The History of Uyghur Buddhism continues this important project of reclaiming the Uyghurs’ underappreciated Buddhist history. The Uyghurs’ contribution to the practice of Buddhism in Asian history was an important one, and this book will increase broader appreciation of this fact. Elverskog brings to this important task a sophisticated understanding of Uyghur language and literature forms as well as wider Asian history.

At one point in the book, Elverskog laments that the potential for a more nuanced study of the political impacts of Buddhism in Asia has been frustrated by the fact that most scholars are usually only ever experts on either Buddhism or Asian history. Thankfully, with this sophisticated chronicle of the history of Uyghur Buddhism Elverskog has provided evidence that it is possible to demonstrate authority on both.


Dr Joshua Bird is an international development professional working across the Asia-Pacific and the author of Economic Development in China's Northwest: Entrepreneurship and identity along China’s multi-ethnic borderlands (Routledge, July 2017).