On 1 September 1783, the 24-gun man o’ war HMS Crocodile arrived in Madras. A Porcupine-class warship late of the British defeat in America, its most precious asset was the appropriately prickly Sir William Jones. Averse to fools and sullen in company, the Welshman had gone to India to take up a judgeship, make his fortune and bring his prodigious learning to weigh on the mysteries of the East. The Treaty of Paris was to be signed only two days later, bringing an end to the American Revolutionary War and recognising the sovereignty of the thirteen colonies. Smarting from their defeat in the West the British were beginning to strut in the East. At Westminster, appeasement of George III would scupper a bill to reform the East India Company. Its architect—the greatest mind ever to grace Parliament—was Edmund Burke. In his speech in the Commons in December that year he remarked on India’s “antient prosperity” and that she had been “cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods”.

Jones, bound for Calcutta, the seat of Company power and the site of tawdry English goings-on, was to shun ‘society’ and instead commit himself to the rigorous study of Sanskrit, India’s classical language par excellence. In the moment that defined his life he realised that “the Sanscrit” bore an uncanny affinity with Europe’s ancient tongues, but that it was “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either”, immortal words that would usher in the age of the Orientalists and the study of linguistics. Like the Latin and Greek with which it shared a common source, as Jones discovered, Sanskrit in ancient times was also the vehicle for the transmission of a high culture carried westward on the monsoon wind and eastward by its sheer appeal. But without a name India’s ancient influence has languished in scholarly obscurity. India historian William Dalrymple has now woven its disparate threads into The Golden Road, a thoroughgoing account of an area neglected by popular history. The author, who has a “trickle of Bengali blood”, is a direct descendant of Viscount Stair, and of other Scots who appear in the pages of Indian history. His great-great-great-great grandfather, Hew Dalrymple, 3rd Baronet, voted against Burke’s bill.

Sir William Jones
(1746 – 1794)

The book opens with the thrilling rediscovery of the 5th century AD Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, their exquisite frescoes and the religion informing them: Buddhism. Dalrymple tells the riches to rags story of the Buddha—a Sanskrit title meaning “awakened [literally from sleep]”—conferred by posterity on the 5th century BC figure of Siddhartha Gautama, a Hindu of the Kshatriya (warrior) caste who forsook earthly pleasure for spiritual gain, wandering until alighting upon his Middle Path and gaining root access to his mind, to use an idiom of our day. In an idiom of his, he awoke from the dream of maya, the illusion in which the Hindus believe we spend our lives floundering. But his divine cause required a terrestrial champion: some 250 years after the Buddha’s death, or parinirvana, the Emperor Ashoka did for the Dharma what Constantine would do for Christianity 600 years later and make of a local cult a world religion.

We learn of the charming aniconic art of early Buddhism, in which the founder himself was not depicted but only the evidence of his presence, footprints, a parasol. This accords with the Buddha’s own epithet for himself, Tathagata, meaning who has arrived and gone—or—who has not arrived and not gone, due to the different permutations into which the Sanskrit nominal compound can be decomposed. This paradoxical negation of every affirmation is at the heart of the later Buddhist traditions which flourish to this day from the Tibetan Plateau to the Japanese archipelago and is also the basis for the doctrine of ‘emptiness’, or shunyata in Sanskrit, which, as the book explains, the Arabs rendered as sifr, and which became zephirum in Latin. We know this word in English as ‘zero’—the number which revolutionised science but was born of religion. The proudly barbaric Taliban inadvertently created a tribute to the Tathagata when they destroyed one of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. Their artistic vandalism left in its wake an aniconic intaglio that could itself have been the handiwork of early Buddhism. Truly, they know not what they do. ‘Kandahar’, now the name of Afghanistan’s second city, may be a corruption of the Sanskrit Gandhara, a region straddling modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and whose sublime Buddhist art testifies to the marriage of Graeco-Romano-Egyptian sculpture with Indian culture. Forgotten genius Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy denigrates as bereft of spirituality its austere and “foppish” toga-clad Buddha made in the image of Apollo. Yet he was a prince before he was a pauper.

Adi Shankara with Disciples, by Raja Ravi Varma (c. 1904)

The stream cannot rise above its source and in time Buddhism would return to Hindu waters and so mingle with them that the Buddha would emerge as an avatar of Vishnu and in his stead would rise a brahmanical St Augustine, Adi Shankara (8th c. AD), who sought to preserve the atman, soul/self (and a cognate of the Latin animus), against the Buddhist denial of its existence. The world can be divided into people for whom this point, that we ‘hallucinate’ a self, rings intuitively true and others who are baffled by it, or, much worse, dismissive of it. Shankara tells us the soul wears a body as bodies wear clothes. The Buddha tells us, like our own Hume after him, that the self is the mirage we behold in the desert of sensory experience. Sophists beware: the use of the first person plural dependent genitive pronoun ‘our’ is no more proof of a soul than the toddler’s refrain ‘mine’ is proof of ownership. Buddhism is commonly construed as nihilism, under which charge it was ousted from its homeland and its founder was forgotten. That accusation survives to this day but the Buddha professes to teach only this: the nature of suffering and the end of suffering. Everything else is innovation and imputation. As for nihilism—that is a Western religion.

And what about the West? All roads, the instant one being no exception, lead to Rome. After the fall of the Ptolemies and the Roman conquest of Egypt, India was brought into Rome’s trade network, though its links with the West “long pre-dated the Romans”: evidence of Indian voyaging westward begins in the seventh millennium BC and cuneiform tablets attest to its diaspora in Mespotamia. Dalrymple details the discovery of a papyrus recording a loan contract that proves, literally, that one man’s trash is another’s treasure: it was found in an ancient Egyptian rubbish dump in what was once the town of Oxyrhynchus, some 160km southwest of Cairo and a place of renown to biblical scholars. It suggests that the India trade could have filled as much as one-third of Rome’s coffers. Other yields of this ‘dump’ include pieces of the Gospel of Thomas and the earliest papyrus of the Gospel of Matthew. The loan contract/customs assessment reveals the astonishing value of a single cargo from India. It included four tons of ivory worth seven million sesterces “at a time when a soldier in the Roman army would have earned about 800 sesterces annually”. The total value stood at 131 talents—enough to buy 2,400 acres of the best Egyptian farmland. The import tax on the cargo was two million sesterces. Factoring in other data, we can surmise that the “Roman authorities were creaming off no less than 270 million [sesterces]”, which “surpassed those of entire subject countries”. Lollia Paulina, wife in passing of the hated Caligula, wore a mind-boggling 40 million sesterces’ worth of “Indian emeralds and pearls”. She even “carried the receipts” to prove their worth.

Martyrdom of Saint Thomas by Rubens, 1636–1638, in the National Gallery Prague

Egypt was the hub of the Indo-Roman trade and the evidence suggests that it was Indians, rather than the Romano-Egyptians, who dominated it as sailors, merchants and agents. It is no surprise, then, that we learn some scholars think that the Buddhist monks of Alexandria and the Red Sea may have imparted to the Jewish Essenes the concept of Satan, via Mara, the demon who tries to thwart the Buddha’s awakening. Anthony the Great, patriarch of Christian monastics, may also have taken his cue from the bhikkhus in his flight to the desert. The claim too that the apostle Thomas was martyred in India, whither he had been sent by the risen Christ, is well-known to all Indians and has been made since around 250 AD.

This is all to say nothing of the rest of Dalrymple’s breathless study, including an examination of the great university at Nalanda and the story of China’s only empress, the crazed Wu Zetian, upon whom corrupt brahmins would confer divinity but who brought India and China as close as the tiger and dragon have ever come. That this occurred gives us a small measure of solace as the two countries reprise their ancient enmity in modern times. Whether examining art or architecture, flora or fauna, Dalrymple has a gift for description which makes this book, like his others, a light read of a heavy subject. Indians will be appalled to learn, however, that their beloved naan is actually a Central Asian invention.

In sum we learn that between East and West it was not the so-called Silk Road of the Chinese that bore the traffic of antiquity’s riches but the route from Rome to the Malabar coast. In Asia, from Afghanistan to Japan and from Tibet to Indonesia, Indian influence is hidden in plain sight. The greatest Hindu temple in the world is at Angkor Wat in Cambodia (from Sanskrit Kambojadesha); the greatest Buddhist temple is at Borobudur in Java (from Yavadvipa in Sanskrit) and the most populous Buddhist country in the world is, of course, China (yes, ‘China’ is also a Sanskrit word). I myself saw a group of Koreans circumambulate and venerate what are reputed to be relics of the Buddha at the National Museum in Delhi; the proud Japanese, custodians of the Zen (via Chinese Chán; from Sanskrit dhyana), preserve a medieval Indian script for rendering the language of the gods. The sacred architecture of South East Asia is based on India’s and their languages too have Indic bases; their scripts are imitative of the Dravidian types in South India and their kings traced their lineages northward, adopted Indian myths and sanctified their rivers as spiritual tributaries of India’s own sacred waters.

But history, in her insouciance, has left us no more than the accounts of two Chinese Buddhist pilgrims (albeit great ones) and some Greco-Roman disjecta membra with which to write the story of ancient India. The subcontinent’s deficit in recorded happenings proves why “East is East, and West is West”: the ancient Hindus, for whom the affairs of the soul were more pressing than those of men, tended a spiritual patrimony for their successors. The heirs of the Enlightenment, who know better, abjured tradition and trade now only in ‘facts’. Yet an inert assemblage of facts does not meaning make, as recent years have impressed upon us. The philosophes, Hume notwithstanding, held an irrational faith in rationalism and failed to understand that we are not in the world but of the world—something no one need tell the naked and ash-laden devotees of Shiva who descend from their Himalayan eyries this week for the Maha Kumbh Mela festival, the biggest gathering of people on Earth, nor the Jesuits, the Trappists, the Carthusians, the Sufis or the Kabbalists. The Buddha’s awakening is more commonly known as his ‘Enlightenment’ in English, so called by the Orientalists because in its nobility of aim it resembled to them their native search for truth. These two enlightenments—from within and without—are perhaps both necessary, as shunyata attests, to consummate the higher knowledge which it seems to be our purpose to attain—and may bear out Kipling’s self-rejoinder that there is “neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed … When two strong men stand face to face”.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 496pp, £30.