The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

by William Dalrymple

initially may have been separate from the religious world, and hymns, associated with Brahmanical Vedic fire sacrifices. Sometimes these first devotional images were

Jnana and Bhakti were separate at first?

Shipping routes that cut across political and topographical boundaries were always more important than the slow-moving caravan trails, and the overland trade routes always carried much less trade than the sea roads: ships, after all, could carry vastly larger cargoes – often amounting to several hundred tons – and travel much more quickly than donkeys or camels. They could also sail around wars, instability and ambushes.

Why ships better than overland caravans More volume faster avoid tariffs avoid ambushes and political instability but had pirates and storms

Just as the collapse of the Mediterranean classical world and the sack of Rome by the Goths in the fifth century ce provoked questions to which Christianity seemed to provide the answer, so the break-up of Han China provided an entry point for Buddhism.21

Good analogy

Aware of the headlong decline of Buddhism in India, where a resurgent Hinduism was now enjoying a major revival at the expense of the Buddhists, these monks were apparently seeking to turn China into a sacred Buddhist realm in its place, and thus transform it into a new centre of the Buddhist world.68

Buddhists wanted China as a home; India had stopped being so hospitable

For, as always, where trade led, ideas and the arts followed.

More than money

Some aspects of Indian civilisation made almost no impression on South-east Asia. The caste hierarchy, for example, never crystallised in the region in the way it did in India, and ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes completely failed to take root. Most South-east Asians also rejected vegetarianism and retained a particular fondness for pork.

SE Asia took Hinduism but rejected Caste, vegetarianism, and ban on women priests

The threat of a long siege followed by bloody conquest was balanced by bribery of the city’s elite and the offer of generous concessions to the city’s mainly Muslim population.

Dual incentives

the possession of knowledge is not weakened when shared with others but made more fruitful and more enduring;

Similar to the invocation of the Isha Upanishad