A History of Uyghur Buddhism: A Conversation with Johan Elverskog
In the past decades, the Uyghurs in China have become known as an oppressed ethnic and religious minority in their homeland, today’s Xinjiang. Islam and Islamophobia are central to that story, but visitors to Xinjiang and students of Uyghur history know that there is another, lesser-known, Buddhist history and culture of the Uyghurs, which remain visible in museums and grottoes in the oases of southern Xinjiang. Johan Elverskog’s A History of Uyghur Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2024) is the first English-language book-length study of that pre-Islamic history. The author uses the rich corpus of Uyghur-language texts, artwork, and material objects to demonstrate how the Buddhist Uyghur world came into being and thrived in the multi-confessional religious landscape of medieval Central Asia. The study is situated between the Buddhicisation and Islamisation of the Tarim Basin, offering probing insights into questions of conversion and agency, with an eye on the implications for the histories of China, Central Asia, the Mongol Empire, and Buddhism itself.
Sam Bass: This book has been a long time in the making. You published the reference catalogue Uygur Buddhist Literature in 1997 with Brepols and have returned to the subject more than 20 years later. Your work in the meantime has touched on medieval Uyghur–relevant regions and themes. How have works such as Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and The Buddha’s Footprint (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) shaped the questions you ask in A History of Uyghur Buddhism?
Johan Elverskog: Yes, it’s certainly been a while since that first book, and no doubt much has happened in the intervening quarter of a century. However, as you rightly point out, both those other works invariably revolved around the Uyghurs simply because they live in the proverbial crossroads of Eurasia. Yet, at the same time, neither one of those works dealt with the Uyghurs in any sustained or explicit way. Even so, many of the basic questions that shaped both those works also drive the intellectual framing of A History of Uyghur Buddhism.
The first is my interest not only in integrating Inner Asia into the broader narrative of Asian history, but also in using that integration to develop new historiographical frameworks for writing history. Of course, as such, my work has been inspired by the move away from national histories and towards transregional frameworks such as those on the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds. Thus, exploring the meeting of Buddhism and Islam from Iran to China provided such a framework, as did studying how Buddhists engaged with the natural world across Asia—from Afghanistan to Japan and Sri Lanka to Siberia. And, on account of their location in the middle of Eurasia, it is the same with the Uyghur involvement with the Dharma since they linked Central, South, and East Asia. Uyghur Buddhist history thus affords us a new perspective on how to think about Asian history beyond the conventional perspectives of China or India or what-have-you that still dominate the academic field of history.
And tied into this historiographical reorientation is the second major component of my work, which is the notion that religion matters. Of course, the secular academy—built on the edifice of secularisation, modernisation, and developmental theory—is in general unprepared to think about religion, and this is woefully true of historians. A 2009 survey by the American Historical Association, for example, revealed that only 3 per cent of professional historians focus on religion, which seems like a grievous dereliction of duty. In the case of Buddhism, for example, one can read whole libraries of books on Asian history and rarely see mention of the Dharma. The absurdity of this lapse should be obvious to historians: Buddhism is the only tradition that spread all over Asia in the premodern period and, in so doing, it came to dominate Asian economic, sociocultural, and political discourses for almost 2,000 years.
And it is this fact that is the third element that shapes all my work—namely, on account of this reality, one must ask: how has Buddhism shaped Asian history? These three issues were the central driving themes of both Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road and The Buddha’s Footprint, and it’s the same with A History of Uyghur Buddhism. The Uyghurs resided at the centre of Eurasia and linked multiple worlds: China and the West, the steppe and the sown, China and Tibet, as well as the Buddhist and Muslim worlds. As a result, my hope is that, by exploring the history of Uyghur Buddhism and its place in Asian history, we can understand both better.
SB: The book begins with a pre-script, an excerpt from imprisoned Uyghur author Perhät Tursun’s The Backstreets, in which the author intentionally stymies a Chinese bureaucrat and reflects that his existence as a Uyghur who exercises agency may be the bureaucrat’s ‘greatest source of frustration’. In the book, you neither dwell on the present situation of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang nor explicitly connect the history of Uyghur Buddhism to the current persecution of Turkic Muslims, but the inclusion of the pre-script shows that you were thinking about it. How is the history of Uyghur Buddhism relevant to contemporary Uyghurs and Xinjiang? Why should people concerned about what has been happening in Xinjiang read this book?
JE: I included that pre-script because the current situation was very much on my mind. Indeed, I went back to this topic—which I hadn’t worked on for more than 20 years—since I felt it was a moral imperative to do something in the context of the ongoing cultural genocide. And, although it may sound grandiose and ridiculous in relation to the horrors that the Uyghurs are now facing, I felt that writing such a book—and documenting this chapter of their history—was essential in thwarting to some degree the Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting machine of cultural destruction and historical obfuscation. As such, anyone concerned about the situation in Xinjiang and who wants a better understanding of the Uyghurs and their history would be well served in reading this book.
The question of whether it is relevant to contemporary Uyghurs and Xinjiang as a whole is more difficult to answer. Clearly, Muslims in northwest China have more pressing issues at hand. Moreover, some Uyghurs are ambivalent about this Buddhist past. One young Uyghur lamented to me years ago about how both the West’s and the Chinese State’s glorification of Uyghur Buddhist culture came at the expense of their Islamic history and current realities. And this tension is captured in the fact that, at the same time as the Chinese Communist Party is running internment camps, they have also recently refurbished the main history museum in Ürümqi with an emphasis on the China-driven multi-ethnic past. Of course, this is all part of a whole—as Orwell put it in 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ Thus, my answer to the question of the relevance of this work to contemporary Uyghurs would be that this is their history, and it must be preserved before everything is distorted and lost.
SB: You say that Uyghur Buddhism was ‘freewheeling’ in nature because it was relatively disconnected from political power in the Uyghur Empire. You make a comparison between the Buddhism of the Uyghur Empire and Buddhism in the modern West, where people are ‘free to do what they want with the tradition’. This idea is romantic but not in the way the Silk Road is usually romanticised, as a network of camel caravans creating premodern globalisation and forging connections between eastern and western Eurasia. Instead, your characterisation of Uyghur Buddhism reminds me of the anarchist histories of the late James C. Scott; there was a community of people who found a way to create and sustain a world of their own making, despite being surrounded by top-down, centralised states and ideologies. Then, it all changed because a powerful, centralising state engulfed them: the Mongol Empire. Contrary to popular ideas of religious tolerance in the Mongol Empire, you point out that its incorporation of Uyghurs stifled freewheeling Uyghur Buddhism, putting post–Mongol conquest Uyghur Buddhism on the path of the state-centred religious traditions of the Tibetan or Tangut empires. What are the implications of this narrative arc of Uyghur Buddhism for the study of Buddhism more generally? So much recent scholarship about Buddhism in Inner Asia tightly binds religion to political power; how do you see your conclusions about Uyghur Buddhism intervening in that scholarship?
JE: Thank you for making that connection with Jim Scott’s work, which was certainly in the background of my thinking. In fact, several years ago, I gave a talk titled ‘An Anarchist History of the Silk Road’ at a borderlands conference in Chiang Mai where Jim was the keynote speaker, and thus, while drinking whiskey, we talked about these issues. So, yes, you’re right that Uyghur Buddhism initially had this ‘romantic’ pirate element, which is really what makes it distinctive and interesting. And, as such, especially on account of the pervasive link between the Dharma and political power in recent scholarship, pointing this out is something like a riposte or a call for a reorientation.
In doing so, however, it is also important to keep in mind that this recent focus on Buddhism and politics is certainly not a problem. Rather, it was an important re-evaluation of the modern construction of Buddhism as being ‘apolitical’ and lacking ‘economic rationality’ that goes back to Max Weber and other scholars of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as noted above, all my work has been trying to dismantle this paradigm by putting Buddhism into Asian economic and political history. Nevertheless, as you rightly note, the Uyghurs’ attempt at a free-wheeling Dharma did not last. It eventually came to an end with their incorporation into the Mongol Great State, whereby the Dharma became deeply imbricated with imperial power. Thus, the counterpoint and transition between these two forms of Uyghur Buddhism give us something to think about regarding what Buddhism is or was or can be in relation to state power. And this is not only in terms of elucidating the history of medieval Inner Asia, but also regarding contemporary realities in countries such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and China.
SB: I was struck by some continuities between medieval Uyghur Buddhism and recent Uyghur Islamic practices. In Chapter 4, you describe the significance of the now-famous grottoes—for example, in Bezeklik—which were sites of pilgrimage. The way you describe the significance of patronage and visitation, which are legible to us through the artwork and graffiti, reminds me of Rian Thum’s description of Islamic shrine pilgrimage around the Tarim Basin. Is this a case of a Uyghur cultural or religious tradition that travelled from Manichaeism to Buddhism to Islam? Or does each religious tradition have pilgrimage rituals that end up looking similar in the context of the Tarim Basin and western China’s geography?
JE: The geography of the Tarim Basin and its limited ecology certainly play a role in the similarity between these practices. Moreover, as with all religious conversions, there were invariably all kinds of continuities and reinscriptions of sites and stories during the transition from Buddhism to Islam. Or, as with the act of confessing one’s sins, there was similarly a transmutation that happened when the Uyghurs abandoned Manichaeism in favour of Buddhism. In fact, several scholars, including Rian, have explored how Buddhist caves and stories were reformulated into Islamic ones, the most famous example being the Buddhist cave temples at Toyuq that became a Sufi shrine dedicated to the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Islamic hagiography. And while such transformations are certainly interesting and important to know, a more profound linkage regarding the history of Uyghur pilgrimage relates to your question above. Namely, just as Rian showed how Islamic pilgrimage became a vehicle for forging a Uyghur—or Altishari—identity, the same dynamic was clearly operating in the Buddhist case. Which again is interesting and important to recognise; however, the most crucial aspect to note is that both were also largely done outside any direct state-building project. This may help explain why Uyghur culture, history, and language have survived for more than a millennium and may even give us a glimmer of hope that they will continue to do so into the future.
