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SILK AND BUDDHISM

-Dr. V. R. Shenoy and Dr. A. R. Shenoy

INTRODUCTION

The story of silk is in many ways a story of human proto-history as well as history; it is a story of human observation, curiosity and inquiry. According to a Chinese legend Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih, wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, who was said to have ruled China in about 3000 BC is credited with the introduction of silkworm rearing and the invention of the loom. The legend also gives Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih the title ‘Goddess of Silk’. New archeological finds along the lower Yangzi River in China such as, a small ivory cup carved with a silkworm design and thought to be between 6000 and 7000 years old, and spinning tools, silk thread and fabric fragments place the origins of sericulture to be even earlier than previously thought, even perhaps before recorded history!

In the British museum, there is an artifact; a painting on a wooden panel which shows scenes from the Central Asian story of the Silk Princess – the story is a legend in which a Chinese princess smuggled the secret of ‘how to make silk’ out of China and into the country of her new husband, the 1st Century AD king of Khotan (now in Xinjiang province, China).  As she was a princess the border guards did not dare search her. In this painting her elaborate headdress conceals the cocoons of the silk moth and the seeds of the mulberry tree. The most interesting aspect about this wooden object panel was that it was found from a Buddhist shrine in Khotan and therefore had its standing in a religious context. It is evidence for the close interaction between religion, ritual and daily life of Ancient Khotan along the Silk Road and the role that silk had as an important relic in Buddhist rituals.

Also, considering the fact that silk was known to the Chinese since proto-history, the smuggling out of silk know-how from China as depicted in the British museum Khotan artifact also reveals how zealously and successfully, the Chinese guarded their secret of silk and sericulture for thousands of years! The genesis and establishment of Buddhism in the ancient Indian subcontinent and its subsequent spread to the Far-east, namely China was to have a positive impact on the silk trade between China and India. In fact, early Sino-Indian civilizational interactions can be seen through the prism of the intimate connection between Buddhism and Silk.

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That silk was used in ancient India is borne out by the wall paintings of the Buddhist caves of Ajanta dating from 2nd century BC to around 7th century AD. Here, one can notice the manner in which Central Asian style of clothing, such as caps, tunics and boots influenced Indian attire as such gear often appear in the Ajanta art works. In cave xviii at Ajanta, the wall painting shows a royal attendant wearing 'silk brocade with a floral design or a maid servant with a skin of striped silk'.

The Sino-Indian silk connection was so enduring and so lasting that in the memory of many of our elderly parents as well as grand parents the image of the Chinese silk seller at our doorsteps hawking silk fabrics was stereotypical till the early 60’s. This image even became the subject of a cartoon by R.K Laxman in Times of India in the wake of the Chinese invasion of 1962. In that particular “You Said it” cartoon a husband in Mumbai reading about the Chinese invasion faints at seeing a Chinese Silk Seller at his door! The wife reassures him that it is not a Chinese soldier but just the Chinese silk seller! The bitter atmosphere of suspicion and animosity towards anything Chinese or remotely Chinese that followed the Sino-Indian War of 1962 destroyed the practice of Chinese/Tibetan silk sellers, who would go door to door trying to sell their silk merchandise.

SILK IN BUDDHIST ESCHATOLOGY

The thought of death and afterlife, the concept of the ‘hereafter’ has been with humans ever since the dawn of their evolution. Proto-historical burial sites from the Stone Age containing objects revered by the dead bear ample testimony to man’s concern with his final destiny. This eschatological zeal was carried to an extreme in the Egyptian pyramids and ancient Chinese burial sites where multitudes of relics and provisions were kept in a methodical manner to see that the superior and royal dead did not suffer from lack of any wants in their eternal afterlife. Silk was naturally a part of the catalog of objects at the burial sites in China, but what appears completely surprising is the fact that silk has also been found from pyramids of ancient Egypt. Egyptologists found silk tissues from a 30-50 year old female mummy in Deir-el-Medina in Thebes. Even though silk became more common in Egypt from the 4th century AD, the Deir-el-Medina silk

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tissue find suggests that silk was in fact used in Egypt as long ago as 1000 years BC, suggesting perhaps an indirect or even direct Sino-Egyptian trade linkage involving silk as a commodity

In Buddhism, theological discussions and ritual practices served to address eschatological concerns, relic worship was an important expression of this concern. The use of silk both as a sacred object and as a currency of transaction in the purchase and upkeep of Buddhist relics and in the construction and maintenance of Buddhist shrines has been extensively reported in historical literature.

Buddhism, originating in India around the time of Confucius, continued to flourish during the T’ang period and was adopted by the imperial family, becoming thoroughly sinicized and a permanent part of Chinese traditional culture.

 

Figure 1 ‐ A page from the Mahayana Buddhist Diamond Sutra(Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra), printed in the 9th year of Xiantong Era of the T’ang Dynasty, i.e. 868 A.D. Currently located in the British Library, London.

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The use of silk as an element for Buddhist rituals began at the latest by the 4th century AD. From the 5th century AD, in both India as well as in China, silk banners were considered obligatory for ceremonies. The custom of emperors' granting ritual robes to monks became particularly significant during the T'ang Dynasty, though it probably started in the sixth century. The quality of the silk robe granted became a status symbol among Buddhist monks and other religious figures and attained symbolic significance. Buddhist Sanskrit texts openly expounded the offering of silk by devotees. In the Mahavastu, a text of the Lokottaravāda school of Early Buddhism and one of the major Buddhist texts extant from the early centuries AD, it is stated that 'he who has placed a festoon of fine silk on a monument of the saviour of the world prospers in all his aims, both among gods and among men, avoids base families and is not reborn among them; he becomes wealthy and affluent, a sovereign in this world'. In the T’ang records of the miracles in India, a passage from Fa-yuan-chu-lin contains the information that when Sakyamuni reached nirvana, he left the golden woven robe made by his aunt to Maitreya, the future Buddha. His favourite disciple, Mahakasyapa, was entrusted with the task of delivering the robe. Twenty years later, Mahakasyapa climbed a mountain to wait for the Maitreya to inherit this robe.

Indian silks 5th to 6th century AD probably reached China. A Chinese document found in a tomb dated 574 AD in Turfan, Central Asia, names a kind of silk textile 'deva brocade' made without killing the silk worm in order to protect the length of the cocoon filaments. When Buddhism flourished in China, auspicious objects in India, such as the peacock, lion, elephant and bodhi tree joined in the menagerie of Chinese animals on textile design.

Yu-yang Tsa-tsu (Miscellany of Forgotten Lore), a Chinese work of 9th century AD authored by Tuan Ch’eng-shih mentions the custom of people covering the dead with a face-cover (made of silk) in T’ang China. An inventory dated 437 AD, after naming the clothes of the dead, lists ‘a bundle of yellow silk yarn thirty feet long in his hand’, followed by the Chinese geomantic symbols: ‘black dragon on the left, white tiger on the right, red skylark in front, Hsuan-wu (an imaginary animal, a combination of a turtle and snake)behind’. In the Chinese literature Tu-lu-fan Ch'u-t'u-wen-shu, a rather typical inventory dated 548 AD of artifacts from a tomb contains ‘ten thousand gold coins, one million silver coins, one thousand pieces of brocade, ten thousand bolts of damask, one thousand catties of silk floss, ten

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thousand bolts of plain silk, and a 1,000,090,000 foot long silk yarn for climbing to the heaven’. In another image from a tomb from T’ang China, a Buddhist monk is shown helping a devotee go over to the other world, hopefully one of the heavens, with the instrument—the silk yarn—to climb up to heaven ready at hand. In yet another instance from T’ang China, an inventory dated 673 AD from a tomb contained a will which was addressed to the Buddha. The man who had drawn up this will explained that ‘he had had an image of the Buddha and two of bodhisattvas made, and that he had recited the Ullambana Sutra. He planned to spend the merits he accrued from these efforts in the other world along with the numerous silver coins, silks and specifically named female and male slaves who were his personal property!’ Some inventories of merits obtained from tombs were drawn up by the relatives of the dead. A woman listed the merits of her mother-in-law to include the payments she had made to monks to recite sutras as well as her donations to monks in silk. From another inventory obtained from a tomb, a woman listed among the many merits of her dead father-in-law the sutras he had recited, the silk banners he had made and the silk clothes he had donated. This extremely long list recorded the many things done to try to buy him back from death during the year he had been ill. In the 9th century AD, a monastery in Ch'ang-an preserved six pieces of clothing that belonged to the former empress Wu Tse-t'ien (684-705 AD), including a shawl of golden weaved tapestry with a dragon pattern, a jacket and an embroidered shirt.

On the one hand, it is likely that devotees gave their best belongings to the Buddha On the other hand, items used by the deceased persons were considered polluted, which prevented others, at least those in the same social standing, from using them again. Donating these beautiful silks to Buddhist institutions served two purposes. It brought merit to the dead and helped them in their reincarnations. The items became usable wealth after being purified in a religious institution which was powerful enough to overcome the pollution of death.

Buddhists in the T’ang period China gradually believed that the currency they needed in the other world was the merit they had accumulated. Though they could buy merit with silk, changing them to a foreign currency had to be through an agency or medium—Buddhist institutions and rituals. A devotee could donate silks and silk clothing to a monk or monastery to have sutras recited, to have a statue carved or to have a stupa built to store relics for his benediction.

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According to the Tripitaka, The Tantric teacher, Amoghavajra, received numerous yards of all kinds of silk from the emperor in such great quantity that they piled up like a hill and Buddhist sources report that he never kept these for himself. Amoghavajra was probably the most favoured Buddhist monk in the T’ang court next to Hsuan-tsang. This Tantric teacher from a Brahman family in north India and brought up in Central Asia (his father was Indian and mother was from Suguda in Eastern Persia), often received hundreds of bolts of silks, dozens of embroidered silk banners and other silk items such as beddings, for his performance of Tantric rituals. In the year 746 AD, as a reward for his successful prayer for rain, the emperor granted him two hundred bobs of silk as well as a purple silk robe. Emperor Hsuan-tsung personally placed the robe on his shoulders.

When the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien visited India between 399 and 414 AD, he observed the wide use of silk banners in Buddhist rituals. For example, silk banners were hung in the Buddha's garden near Sravasti and were used in a parade of the Buddha's image in Pataliputra. A century after Fa-hsien’s visit to India, the pilgrims Sung-Yiin and Hui-sheng saw ‘several tens of thousands of silk banners hung over’ a stupa in Uzuntati, Central Asia. Assuredly in the 7th century AD, when Hsuan-tsang visited India, the use of silk banners in Buddhist rituals practice was still in vogue. Sanskrit texts from Gupta period show that silk banners were also used in non-Buddhist rituals and on secular occasions in India.

During the 7th century AD or later, the killing of the silk worm for extracting silk became a religious dilemma for Sino Buddhists. In the days of the Buddha and the period immediately following, the use of silk was not in vogue among the monks and devotees in Buddhism. The clothes of the monks at that time were made of cotton, the most easily available material in India. It was from the Gupta period 320-550 AD, that silks became fairly common in India, and Indian monks accepted them without much dispute. The Chinese traveler I-ching described the silks used by the monks of the five parts of India as 'rough silks' (shih-chüan), meaning that these silks were made from broken cocoons, which set free Indian monks from the guilt of killing worms. Silk textiles made from broken cocoons at holy centers such as Benares were highly priced textiles for Vaishnavite Hindus and Jains.

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During the 7th century AD the people of Kapisa (Afghanistan) were so eager to acquire Chinese silk that they even traded their precious relics, the parietal bone and some minor relics, for silk. Though Chinese silks were treasured, the ruler was willing to donate them for religious purposes. A Kapisa king once gave five bolts of 'pure silk brocade' to Hsuan-tsang. Chinese pilgrims, though disputing about whether monks should wear silks, were well aware of the demand for Chinese silks

and unhesitatingly considered silks carried to India the best gifts to the Buddha or the currency paid to monasteries.

Among the treasures found in the stupa of the historical Fa-men monastery in Fa-men, Shaanxi, China; there are a few pieces of purple silk with golden embroidery in which are wrapped finger bones of Sakyamuni (honorific for Gautam Buddha), the founder of Buddhism. Relic-worship ceremony was a repetition of funeral rites for the Buddha or other Buddhist deities. Relics in the Fa-men monastery were frequently taken out for worship by the monks and emperors.

In 1987 excavations at Fa-men revealed stele inscribed with records of such ceremonies and donations. According to one of the inscriptions, after performing a rite of bathing the relics in the year 649 AD, the monk, Hui-kung, donated 3000 bolts of silk to the relics in the year 656 AD. An inscription of 874 AD recorded all the donations made by generations of emperors, empresses, princes and others who were qualified to do so. Archaeologists actually found more than seven hundred pieces of the silk clothes listed in the inscription, though most of them were carbonized beyond recovery. An inscription dated to 741 AD from another site of

Figure 2: Fa‐men Temple

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relics, the Ch'ing-shan monastery, states that the relics were covered with exquisite silks. Even though the excavated silk items from the Fa-men monastery are quite large in quantity, they obviously do not represent all the donations. Most of them probably were used to cover the cost of building and maintaining the stupas, or they simply became the property of the monastery under the name of the Buddha. Clearly, ‘this association of silk with Buddhism, as a material expression of the religious function of relics in the life and death cycle, brought silk textiles and clothes into Buddhist institutions, including those beyond the border of T'ang China’.

While worshipping the parietal bone of the Buddha in Nagarahara (near Jalalabad , Afghanistan), Hsuan-tsang donated fifty gold coins, one thousand silver coins, four silk banners, two pieces of brocade and two sets of ritual robes. He then sprayed flowers, for which he presumably had to pay.

A disciple of the Chinese pilgrim, Hui-ning, travelled to Canton from India with the new text on relic worship. On his way back to India to resume the pilgrimage, the disciple carried a few hundred bolts of plain silk for his teacher in Kalinga. When he reached the Mahabodhi monastery in Bodha Gaya, I-ching made a ritual

robe of the same measurements as the Tathagata statue in Bodh Gaya from the silk donated to him by the monks and lay devotees of Shantung, China. He also presented tens of thousands of gauze silk canopies to the monastery in honour of his friend, the Vinaya teacher, Hsuan from P'u-chou.

In the early period of the T’ang Dynasty, Tai-tsung frequently sent envoys to the Mahabodhi monastery in Bodha Gaya with donations of ritual silk robes. This tradition continued into the eleventh century, when two Chinese monks donated a gold

embroidered kasaya—a Buddhist ritual silk robe—to spread over the throne of the

Figure 3: Mahabodhi Temple Bodh Gaya

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Buddha in Mahabodhi on behalf of the Sung emperor.

Even after they went back to China, Chinese Buddhist teachers sent silks to India through Indian monks. In his career which spanned the regimes of two T’ang emperors, Hsuan-tsang received more than ten thousand pieces of silk ranging from plain silk to damask and brocade, plus a few hundred pieces of clothes and ritual robes. But he never accumulated anything for himself. Except for spending on building stupas and making images, he gave these silks to the poor and 'foreign Brahman guests', i.e. Indian guests. Many Indian Buddhist monks resided in T'ang China. Numerous records tell of emperors who rewarded these monks with silks or silk ritual robes for their religious services, translations and preaching activities. For example, Parabhagramitra (called Po-lo-p'o-ka-lo-mi-to-lo in Chinese), a monk from central India, received many bolts of silk from the court during his career in China, including a ritual robe made in the palace workshop.

Evidently, all these historical facts mentioned so far, demonstrate the affiliation between Silk and Buddhist Relics, and the significance of this association in Buddhist eschatology.

 

SILK AS A DIPLOMATIC TOOL IN BUDDHIST CHINA, THE DIMENSION OF SEMIOTIC VIRTUOSITY AND SUMPTUARY RULES IN SINO BUDDHISM

Rulers in various parts of the world have for both domestic and diplomatic purposes, tried to impress their subjects and neighbours with rare goods; in case of the Chinese, it was silk. In addition to reserving high quality silk for their own use, the Han rulers of China also gifted such silks to foreigners for diplomatic purposes. From the 2nd century BC, China engaged in a prolonged warfare with a nomadic group, the Hsiung-nu, along the northwest border. The Hsiung-nu was a loose confederacy of nomadic tribes. The shan-yu, head of the Hsiung-nu confederacy, relied on luxury goods such as silk from a settled society like the Chinese to retain the loyalty of the tribal chiefs and on constant warfare to maintain the solidarity of the whole confederacy.

In respect of silk, especially in ancient China, the most obvious trait was its restriction throughout history either by price or by law to the elite. Thus, when

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T'ang China effectively monopolized and regulated the production and transaction of silk, restrictions on exquisite silks were implemented through the law. The purpose was essentially political. In China a set of statutes for clothing to distinguish their bureaucratic echelons and ecclesiastical hierarchy was enacted thus consolidating political order; here silk can be said to be a medium of expressing semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages – exquisite silks can only be worn by the aristocracy and not commoners! Your clothes strictly define your social status by statute!

The government in Han China forbade merchants from wearing chin (polychrome patterned silk), embroidered silk and other fine textiles. Since various Chinese governments used a large quantity of silk as gifts to foreigners for political reasons or in exchange for desirable foreign goods, they also tried to control its export. An edict of 714 AD forbade the sale to foreigners of the most exquisite silk products: polychrome patterned silks, damasks, gauzes, crepes, embroideries and other fine silk. When T'ang China built a bureaucratic system on the ruins of a disintegrated polity and the remains of a decadent aristocracy, it reorganized the old custom of regulating the clothes worn by different social groups into a system which helped to distinguish the new bureaucratic echelon; naturally silk clothes were reserved for the Royalty and aristocracy.

The Buddhist Pali vinaya and Sanskrit Pratimoksa Sutras stipulate certain conditions under which a monk could receive donations of clothing. The Pratimoksa Sutras are much lengthier and elaborate on clothing than the vinayas, because society and textile products in the early centuries AD, when the Sanskrit texts were compiled, were much more complex than during the time of the Buddha and later, when the Pali monastic rules were formed. The traveler I-ching in the 8th century AD observed that four different schools of Buddhism distinguished themselves through different ways of wearing their under-garments and belts. Some Chinese pilgrims who went to India with clothes that were not in fashion were so embarrassed that they tore them up and discarded them as rags.

In the year 648 AD Emperor T 'ai-tsung gave an audience to two famous monks. Both wore fine ritual robes which they had inherited from their teachers, who, in turn, had received them from Emperor Liang Wu-ti (503-550 AD). The emperor discerned faults in the robes and showed the monks an exquisite robe made in his

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palace workshop. Both monks expressed, by composing poems, their desire to have the robe as a gift. But the emperor gave them only fifty bolts of silk each and saved the robe for Hsuan-tsang. Hsuan-tsang received an additional precious ritual robe in 656 AD for his prayers for the empress who had a difficult childbirth. Hsuan-tsang described the robe as 'superb apparel with golden thread'. From the mid-T’ang period, purple robes were established as the highest badge of honour that monks could receive. Many outstanding Buddhist monks received purple robes from the court. In the Pao-ying monastery of Ch'ang-an, a famous portrait of the Maitreya shows him wearing a purple Kasaya.

Clearly, there was an unambiguous association between the use of silk garments and the body, person and personality of the user in Sino-Buddhism. Sino-Buddhist monks used to wear scarce fine cotton cloth in preference to silk which was widely available in China, because of their Buddhist vinaya rules forbidding silk as it involves death of the silk worm in its manufacture. It was I-ching, the Chinese traveler and Buddhist scholar who persuaded his fellow Chinese monks to accept silk. He argued that since Indian monks used silks, Chinese monks need not confine themselves to the very scarce fine cotton cloth when silk was easily available. I-ching argued that only deliberately killing silk worms would create one's karma—the negative score for one's future lives. “Even a layman should not witness the killing of silk worms” But, he argued, “if a donor takes the silk to you with good intention, you should just happily accept it and wear it to protect your body in order to nurture merit”.

The Pratimoksa Sutras of Mahasamghikas ruled that no monk should own rugs made of sheep's wool mixed with silk while that of Mulasarvastivadins ruled that a monk should not own a rug made of silk. These rules were probably intended to prohibit individual monks from owning expensive property rather than to oppose the use of silk. However, neither sect had reservations about silk garments! Since the monks could not wear fancy clothes, they had to sell them through financial institutions attached to the monastery. No wonder the sumptuary laws could not stop commoners from acquiring and even wearing fancy silk clothes in ancient China. Further, as silk fabrics served as a token of Buddhist devotion, commoners were endowed with the right of purchasing the finest weaves for religious purpose. The popularity of silk strengthened their desire to obtain fine silks, and they thus

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legitimately released silks to a large market outside the small circle of upper social groups in China.

It seems that there were no sumptuary laws regulating clothing according to official or social status in ancient and early medieval India. Actually it was impossible to have this kind of law issued by any Indian monarch because the so-called law code, the dharma, was never enacted by any Indian ruler but compiled and interpreted by various schools of Brahmans according to prevailing customary laws. While monarchs were supposed to follow and enforce dharma, it was the Brahmanical or Hindu social system that enforced all the regulations prescribed by the dharmas. The Arthasastra and its commentaries were more like manuals containing knowledge of how to rule for kings and their ministers than dharmas. Neither the Arthasastra nor the dharmas could cover the practices of the whole society, as the Buddhists and Jains had monastic rules and guidelines for their laity. In dharma literature, there were regulations about how one should wear which kind of garment on ceremonial occasions, but there were no references about which material should be worn by different kinds of people. The Arthsastra contains references about the production of textiles and their provenances, for the purpose of taxation, but it gives no advice on who should wear what. In South India silks were freely used by whoever could afford them, even at the time when classical Tamil works, such as Shilappadikaram and Manime kalai, were collected. Shilappadikaram (The ankle bracelet) was written at the end of the third ancient Tamil literary epoch, the Sangam period 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD and Manime kalai was written by the Tamil Buddhist poet Seethalai Saathanar and is the only extant Tamil Buddhist literary text from the Sangam period. 

BUDDHISM AS A DRIVER OF THE SILK TRADE

Silk trade developed with the spread of Buddhism from India to China. As payment for Chinese silks India sent precious stones and other jewels as well as incense and spices to China from the early centuries AD. A combination of these luxuries gained a sacred status in Buddhist rituals and eventually crystallized in the Buddhist concept, the sapta-ratna (Seven Treasures).

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Silk trade benefitted the Kushanas. Cities prospered from the domestic and inter-cultural trade under the rule of the Kushanas. The values of traders were inevitably involved in the theological developments of Buddhism. Numerous votive inscriptions dated to the Kushana period contain statements that benefactors expected their donations to win them merit which would bring welfare to themselves and to their loved ones. The rise of these commercial values among Buddhists paralleled the institutionalization of Buddhist monasteries. Urban prosperity brought great wealth into Buddhist monasteries. Traders, artisans, and other urban dwellers, as always, donated handsomely to monasteries and thus facilitated the expansion of Buddhist institutions.

Kharosthi documents dated to the late third or the early 4th century AD from Central Asia reveal that silk fabric and garments were used as payment in transactions. The price of a woman was forty-one bolts of silk. A Buddhist monastery listed fines in bolts of silk for monks who broke its rules. As a monastery was a station for pilgrims and traders, it is not surprising that the monastery and monks preserved silk as their property. Chinese documents from Turfan also record the practice of using bolts of silk as money.

The silk industry, from sericulture to weaving, was well established in India during the Gupta era. The wealth of the well-known Mandasor silk weaving guild testifies to the prosperity of the trade. In the early seventh century when Hsuan-tsang visited India, he listed silk as one of the most popular materials for clothing in the country.

As Buddhist activities in both T’ang China and post-Gupta India evolved around relic-worship and translations, and as pilgrimages were undertaken for commercial purposes, the silk trade and the pilgrimage trade in Buddhist relics intertwined and formed the core of Sino-lndian cultural exchanges. In short, silk became sacred when used for religious purposes, especially for relic worship. The relics of the Buddha gained in commercial value when there was a market demand for them. Buddhist relics played a special role in the silk trade, and the silk trade played a special role in the development of Buddhism.

In ancient India, the domestic market for silk was quite large. Consumers ranged from the most sacred and elitist personnel to those of low social status, there were

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no sumptuary rules or royal orders forbidding the wearing of silks in India by commoners as was the case in China. Silk was considered appropriate enough for clothing deities. The goddess Lakshmi is described as wearing a white silk scarf in the Harsa Carita (The chronicles of King Harshvardhana). Kings and royal members enjoyed wearing silk, as is evident from the textiles which formed part of the rich dowry and wedding decorations for Rajyasri, the sister of King Harsa. But servants, especially female servants, and low status persons like dancers could also wear silk. Agrawala in his work “Deeds of Harsha” identified the costumes of both a sun god and a dancer as the costly Persian silk stavaraka.

SUMMARY

Ancient Sino-Indian connections involved on one hand the spiritual force of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent which provided much welcomed eschatological relief to the Chinese people in contrast to the very rigid and rational morality based Confucianism which was prevalent in China; on the other hand silk from China became a symbol of eschatological expression due to its regular use in Buddhist relic worship. The routine involvement of silk in relic worship also helped in the transition of this material from being a restricted item into becoming a commodity for the general Chinese people.

The Sino-Indian Buddhist spiritual connection ensured that silk got included in the Buddhist concept of seven treasures, sapta ratna – which heightened the spiritual importance of this material and boosted its trade. Stressing once again, in China, the religious dimension of silk ensured that despite sumptuary and royal injunctions silk would find its way, eventually into the hands of commoners for religious as well as personal use. In ancient Asia, Buddhist proselytizing and pilgrimages continued to promote silk transactions and thus silk trade.

REFERENCES

1. G. Lubec et al, Nature, 4th March 1993 2. Xinru Liu, Silk and Religion, Oxford University Press, 1996 3. Tripitaka v. 53, 504a

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4. Fa-hsien (edited biography of Fa-hsien, ed Chang hsun), 1985 5. Yang, Hsuan-chih, 266 6. Hsuan-Tsang, 382 7. Leggett, 1949, The Story of Silk (New York: Lifetime Editions), 101 8. Bayly, CA, 1986, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and

Indian Society. 1700-1930’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. A. Appadurai. Cambridge University Press, pp. 285-321.

9. Tripitaka v. 54. 212c 10. Hui-li & Yen-Tsung. Ta-ts'u-en-ssu San-tsang-fa-shih Chuan (Biography of

Hsuan-tsang), eds Sun Yu-t'ang & Hsieh Fang (Beijing: Chung-hua-shu-chu, 1983).

11. Tuan, Ch'eng-shih, Yu-yang Tsa-tsu (Miscellaneous information), ed. Fang Nan-sheng (Beijing: Chung-hua Shu-chu. 1981)

12. Turfan v. 2. 62-3 13. Turfan v. 6, 402, Ast. 4 14. Turfan v. 6, 500, Ast. 201 15. Hou, Jo-ping, 1989. 'Fa-men-ssu Ti-kung Fa-hsien-te Chih-t'i chih T'a Ming'

(Inscription on the chaitya stupa found in the cell of Fa-men Monastery), Wen-po, vol. 33. no. 6, pp. 88-9.

16. WANG Ts'ang-hsi, 1989, 'Fa-men-ssu Kung-wu-chang Shih-i' (Interpretation of the problems in the inscription of the inventory of donations in the Fa-men Monastery), Wen-po, vol. 33. no. 4, pp. 30-3.

17. Lo. Ch'ang-an. 1987, 'A Great Number of Rare Relics Were Unearthed in Famen Temple", Wen-po, vol. 19. no. 4, pp. 3-4.

18. Ta-T'ang Hsi-yu-ch'iu-fa-kao-seng-chuan, 77, 154 19. Tripitaka v. 50, 439c-440c 20. Hsu Kao-seng-chuan, v. 3 21. Tripitaka v. 50. 294b 22. Cunningham, Alexander. 1892, Mahabodhi (London: H.W. Allen). 23. Chou Ta-fu, 1957, 'Kai-cheng Fa-kuo Han-hsueh-chia Sha-wan tui Yin-tu

ch'u-i'u Han-wen-pei te Wu-shih' (A criticism on the interpretation by the French sinologist Chavannes about the Chinese inscriptions excavated in India), Li-shih Yen-chiou, 1957. no. 6.

24. Prebish, Charles S., 1975, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, Pennsylvania State University Press.

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25. Moti Chandra, Costumes, Textiles, Cosmetics and Coiffure in Ancient and Medieval India, Delhi, 1973,pp 53

26. Burrow. Thomas, 1940, A Translation of Kharoshthi Documents from Chinese Turkestan (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1940).