The Silk Road Empire That Imagined Hercules as Buddha’s Guardian

The Kushan Empire blended Greek and Indian art styles

Buddha‘s sermon at Deer Park, Sarnath, from the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian. Source: Wikimedia

In 2008, during my first trip to Washington, D.C., I had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Asian Art. There’s a gallery on Buddhist iconography. One of the panels titled “The First Sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath” shows the Buddha seated beneath a tree, surrounded by devotees. He wears a robe, which looks like a toga. Some of the people around the Buddha are dressed in distinctive Greek attire.

This panel is unique. It is one of the earliest depictions of Buddha in human form. The style is Gandhara art, which dates back to the second and third centuries and incorporates Indian and Greco-Roman elements.

Reliefs of Gandhara art can be found worldwide. I’ve seen them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Indian Museum. The patrons of this artwork were the Kushans. They were one of the five ruling clans of the Yuezhi, a nomadic people whose origins can be traced to China's Gansu province.

The Kushans ruled over a multiethnic empire in Central Asia, where cultural interactions brought together Eastern and Western art traditions. Their goal of making Buddhism appealing to the masses resulted in the religion becoming a global faith. They also played a…