Hellenistic Narratives and Buddhist Visual Programmes

Hellenistic Narratives and Buddhist Visual Programmes

Principle investigator (PI): Dr. Georgios T. Halkias
End date: 2021 Dec
Fund source: UGC fund
Research Output:
“Yavanayāna: Scepticism as Soteriology in Aristocle’s Passage.” In Buddhism and Skepticism: Historical, Philosophical, and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Oren Hanner. Hamburg Buddhist Studies Series 13, University of Hamburg, 83-108.
Link: https://www.academia.edu/44944145/Yavanayāna_Buddhist_Soteriology_in_the_Aristocles_Passage 

Abstract:

A long-lasting effect of Alexander’s campaigns was the creation of a cosmopolitan milieu that brought together the achievements of classical Greece, Macedonia and the countries of the Near East, India and Central Asia. Most of the settlements implanted by Alexander the III and maintained by his Hellenistic successors served not only as trading posts and military garrisons but as vital cultural centers in the region. The co-habitation and intermarriages between Greeks with non-Greeks fostered unexpected fusions and stimulating adaptations of cultural phenomena and created new trends in art, religion, philosophy and other fields of knowledge. Traces of their close interactions can be discerned in the Hellenistic narratives in the Buddhist art of Gandhāra further enriched by Roman traders in the Kuṣāṇa empire, spreading with Buddhism across the Silk Routes to Dunhuang, and beyond.