Timeline

It is the oldest datable mention of the god who became Mithra in Iran and Mitra in the Rig Veda. Indo-Aryan gods appear here in a treaty between two kingdoms of the Near East, centuries before either the Avesta or the Vedas were written down.

Mitra's name means "contract" or "covenant", and in both traditions he guards oaths. A treaty is where one would expect to find him.

Threads Mithra

The verse (2 Kings 17:6, repeated at 18:11) became the root of later traditions about the lost tribes. In the nineteenth century the Jews of Bukhara told Joseph Wolff that Bukhara was the Habor of Kings and Balkh was Halah.

Scholars place both names in northern Mesopotamia, where the Habor is the Khabur, a tributary of the Euphrates.

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Persian and Muslim traditions later tied the exile to Balkh. They said the city was founded when Nebuchadnezzar settled exiled Jews there, that Jeremiah fled to it and that Ezekiel was buried there.

Arab geographers knew a Gate of the Jews at Balkh, and the community lasted until Genghis Khan sacked the city in 1220.

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Threads Balkh

After Babylon fell, the exiles of Judah were allowed to return home, an act the Hebrew Bible credits to Cyrus (Ezra 1). His tomb still stands at Pasargadae.

In 1970 the Soviet Tibetologist B. I. Kuznetsov argued that the palace where the Bon founder Shenrab was born, Bar po so brgyad, was Pasargadae itself. The theory has not won acceptance, but it shows how far west the Bonpo homeland of Tazig has been sought.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads Tazig and Bon

The proposal has company. Bon's own histories say its teachings came from Tazig in the west. Helmut Hoffmann wrote that Bon grew into a system "certainly under the influence of Buddhism and probably also under the influence of Persian and Manichaean teachings", and Giuseppe Tucci found Zoroastrian influence in it. Iranian-speaking Saka were living in the Pamirs, on the plateau's western edge, by the second century BCE.

The migration itself has not yet been found in the archaeological record. The Iranian strand in Bon is well argued; its date and route are still open.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads Tazig and Bon

A marker for the wider world: the classical Greece whose language Alexander would carry to Bactria a century later, where Greek inscriptions and a Greek city, Ai Khanoum, would stand on the Oxus.

He says the Persians worship sun, moon, earth, fire, water and winds, and that they learned to worship a goddess they call Mitra, a confusion that has puzzled readers ever since, since Mithra is male.

Some lists date Herodotus to 350 BCE; he died around 425.

Threads Mithra

Livy gives 390; the Greek historian Polybius' reckoning points to 387 or 386. The memory of it shaped Roman fear of northern peoples for centuries.

The story comes from the memoirs of Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, preserved by Arrian and Strabo. Alexander called them boasters and let them go as friends.

Darius fled east and was killed by his own satrap Bessus in 330. Alexander spent the next years fighting through Bactria and Sogdiana, the Iranian lands of Central Asia that later appear throughout this timeline.

Plutarch lists the writers who told the story and the ones, among them Ptolemy and Aristobulus, who called it invention. It is legend, set at a real point in the campaign.

It was the furthest city he founded in Central Asia. The Saka he fought there were part of the great Iranian-speaking nomad world of the steppe, whose later migrations brought them into Bactria and India.

The war in Sogdiana and Bactria took two years. Alexander ended it by marrying Roxana, daughter of a Bactrian noble.

Plutarch says the young Chandragupta Maurya saw Alexander and later remarked that he could have conquered India. Within a few years of Alexander's death, Chandragupta had built the Mauryan empire in the vacuum his campaign left behind.

Around 305 he made peace with Seleucus, who gave up the lands west of the Indus for five hundred war elephants, and the Greek envoy Megasthenes lived at his court and wrote the first Greek account of India.

It was the first era in the region to run continuously from a fixed point, and Syriac writers kept using it for a thousand years. Thomas the Presbyter dates the battle against the "Tayyaye of Mhmt" to the year 945 of this era, which is 634 CE.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

The edict also names Antiochus II, Antigonus Gonatas, Magas of Cyrene and an Alexander, probably of Epirus. It is one of the few places where India's history and the Hellenistic world's can be dated against each other.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

The personalists were no fringe group. When Xuanzang travelled through India in the seventh century, their largest branch, the Sammitiyas, was the most numerous of the non-Mahayana schools.

The Okar Research chronology proposes that they survived in the Bon lands of Central Asia and, meeting Manichaeism there, fed into Dzogchen. The intuition behind it is that Dzogchen, like the personalists, speaks of something that abides through every change, the nature of mind. The historical path from one to the other has not been traced; most historians of Dzogchen look to Indian tantra, Chinese Chan and Bon itself.

Essay: The Nine Ways of Bon

Some of the survivors crossed into Asia Minor and settled as the Galatians. Celtic power in the Balkans broke up in the following decades.

In his thirteenth rock edict Ashoka records his remorse for the suffering at Kalinga and declares that the only conquest he now values is conquest by the Dharma. He sent Buddhist missions beyond India, and Buddhism began to grow from a regional movement into a world religion.

At Kandahar in Afghanistan he set up an edict in Greek and Aramaic, for the Greek and Iranian subjects of the far northwest.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

The Graeco-Bactrian kingdom lasted until nomad invasions around 130 BCE. Its capital was Bactra, the later Balkh.

Threads Balkh

Under Mithradates I, in the second century BCE, the Parthians took Media and Mesopotamia and became the great power of Iran. Their kings bore names built on Mithra.

Antiochus made peace. Polybius records the argument. Within a century the warning came true.

Under the Han the routes later called the Silk Road were opened, and Buddhism entered China in the first century CE.

The passages survive in Diogenes Laertius, who cites the lost Magicus attributed to Aristotle and the historian Sotion. Some lists credit the earlier Timaeus; the surviving evidence does not show it.

The Pamirs were the high crossroads between Bactria, the Tarim basin and the Himalaya.

This is the tradition's own chronology, not a historical date. Berzin sets out the account: the brahmins of Shambhala were divided and lax in their scriptures, many would accept the new religion when its leaders threatened invasion, and the remedy was the Kalachakra initiation, which made the king the first Kalki, "holder of the caste".

The tantra itself was written in the eleventh century.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

His name means "given by Mithra". He was the first Parthian ruler to call himself "great king".

Threads Mithra

The Milindapanha, "the questions of Milinda", records his debates with the monk Nagasena. In one of them Nagasena uses the hen and the egg to show that the round of rebirth has no first point, the same image a monk would put to Rashid al-Din at a Mongol court fourteen centuries later.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

When the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian reached Bactria around 128 BCE he found a settled country, which he called Daxia, under the rule of the Yuezhi nomads. Their descendants founded the Kushan empire.

Threads Balkh

Kuznetsov pointed to the Saka on traditional Tibetan maps of Shambhala, placed north of Bactria.

The Tibetan royal era counts its years from this date, which is why Tibetan new year greetings give the year as more than two thousand. Bon tradition credits the early kings' protection to the Bonpo priests, bards and riddlers.

Essay: The Nine Ways of Bon

Threads Tazig and Bon

Their coins mixed Greek gods with Indian ones. Later Saka satraps ruled western India from Ujjain for centuries, and the Saka language survived in the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan.

It is the first mention of Mithraic worship in a Roman context. The Mithraic mysteries proper, with their underground temples and seven grades, appear across the empire from the late first century CE.

Threads Mithra

They include the Cakkavatti-sihanada Sutta (DN 26), which foretells a future age when a righteous wheel-turning king will rule and the Buddha Metteyya, Maitreya, will arise. The expectation of a coming Buddha is centuries older than Islam.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha

The work ran from the late first century BCE to the reign of Nero. Some lists date it to 200 BCE or to the second century CE; the main temple belongs between those dates.

Pliny adds that Tiridates, a magus, initiated Nero into magian banquets. The scene shows Iranian royal religion meeting Rome a generation before the Roman mysteries of Mithras spread.

Threads Mithra

Armageddon is Har Megiddo, the hill of Megiddo, a battlefield since the fifteenth century BCE. The white horse returns in the stories of Kalki and in the Kalachakra's last king.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The last battle

The Rabatak inscription, found in Afghanistan in 1993, records his reign in Bactrian, an Iranian language written in Greek letters. Buddhist tradition remembers him as a great patron of the Dharma, and Kushan rule carried Buddhism north and east toward the Tarim basin and China.

Threads Iranian light in Buddhism

The Roman cult had seven grades of initiation and centred on the image of Mithras slaying the bull. How much it owed to Iranian Mithra is still argued.

Threads Mithra

Older estimates put it between 200 BCE and 200 CE; Patrick Olivelle dates it to the second or third century CE. It divides humanity by the three gunas and counts the mlecchas, foreigners, among those of darkness, the classification the Kalachakra later turned on Islam.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

A marker for the wider world: on the other side of the globe from the Kushans and Sasanians, the first villages of the Pueblo peoples were taking shape.

The Cologne Mani Codex, a tiny Greek parchment book identified in 1969, tells of his childhood among the baptists and of the visions of his heavenly Twin, at twelve and again at twenty-four, which called him to found a new religion.

Threads The church of Mani

The Sasanians made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state. Their empire was the Iran the Arabs conquered, and its fall sent the last royal family east toward China.

Shapur gave him letters of protection, and Manichaean missionaries went west into the Roman empire and east toward Central Asia. Mani presented himself as the last in a line of apostles that included the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus.

Threads The church of Mani

It was in Shapur's reign that Mani preached at court, presenting himself as heir to the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus.

The Okar Research list dates it from 300; most archaeologists begin it around 200.

Kucha was a centre of mainstream, non-Mahayana Buddhism and the home of the great translator Kumarajiva, who reached China in 401.

The first part is well attested. Mani himself sailed to the Indus valley around 240. He sent his disciple Mar Ammo east through Khurasan to Merv, and Manichaean texts say the mission reached the borders of the Kushans, where a spirit guarding the Oxus barred Mar Ammo's way until Mani appeared to him in a vision. Mar Ammo made Parthian the language of eastern Manichaeism.

For Tibet itself the clear evidence comes later. In the late eighth century a treatise attributed to the emperor Trisong Detsen attacked Mani by name, which shows that his teaching had reached the Tibetan court.

Threads The church of Mani Iranian light in Buddhism

The Okar Research chronology, following a modern Nazorean-Manichaean source, calls the Mandaeans an apostate branch of an older order. Mandaean tradition and historians of the Mandaeans do not.

The high priest Kartir, in his inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, boasts of having struck at Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Christians, baptists and the zandiks, the Manichaeans. His word for Buddhist monks, shaman, comes from the same Indian word as the later Arabic name for Buddhists, al-Sumaniyya.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads The church of Mani

Coptic Manichaean texts from Medinet Madi tell of the persecution and of Innaios' standing at court. The Okar Research chronology dates his headship 291 to 303.

Threads The church of Mani

The rescript, sent to the proconsul of Africa, survives in a late Roman law collection. Its date is argued between 297 and 302.

Threads The church of Mani

The dedication calls him Deus Sol Invictus Mithras, fautor imperii sui. Four years later Constantine won at the Milvian Bridge, and the empire turned toward Christianity.

Threads Mithra

The two steps are often run together. Constantine legalised and patronised the church; it was the Edict of Thessalonica under Theodosius that made Christianity the official religion of the empire.

He considered himself under the protection of Helios and Mithras. After him no emperor stood for the old religions.

Threads Mithra

Over the next thousand years more than four hundred decorated caves followed. One of them, Cave 17, was sealed around the year 1000 with tens of thousands of manuscripts inside.

He was a Gupta, not a Kushan, as some lists have it. His reign is counted among the high points of classical Indian culture.

Sulpicius Severus traces the movement's teaching to a Mark of Memphis, who brought Gnostic ideas to Spain. The Okar Research chronology reads this as Mani's teaching spreading in Spain, Portugal and Galicia.

The charge had grounds his accusers could point to. The Priscillianists treasured apocryphal books, above all the Acts of Thomas, which the Manichaeans also read and revered. Priscillian denied being a Manichaean, and many historians see in him an ascetic Christian whose reading put him in danger.

Threads The church of Mani

Mithraic worship lingered for a time in remote places, in the Alps and the Vosges, before it disappeared.

Threads Mithra

Leo's sermons describe Manichaeans keeping Sunday as a fast. The persecution drove the religion underground in the West.

Threads The church of Mani

The persecution ended with his death, and his successors turned to Buddhism on a grand scale. The caves at Yungang were begun in 460 partly in atonement.

The colossal Buddhas there were carved to stand for the emperors, an early Chinese joining of Buddhist and royal imagery.

The Okar Research list gives Qabala 200 BCE to 400 CE and Barda 400 to 600. The move is usually placed in the 460s, under the Albanian king Vache II or his successor.

His movement did not die with him. Later revolts in Iran, among them the Khurramites who followed Babak in the ninth century, were seen by their enemies as Mazdak's heirs.

The Liber Pontificalis records it. In the East, the religion was still spreading along the Silk Road.

Threads The church of Mani

Sergius of Reshaina, who died in 536, translated Galen and Aristotle into Syriac; Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian, led the Arabic translations of the ninth century.

His army grew past fifty thousand before it was crushed. It is one of the clearest proofs that the idea of a coming Buddha could be turned into a war long before Islam.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha The last battle

The system spread slowly; Bede's use of it in the eighth century made it the standard in the West.

Mike Baillie of Queen's University Belfast traced the event in the growth rings of Irish bog oaks and timbers from Siberia to the Americas. Volcanic eruptions in 536 and around 540 are now the leading explanation.

Within a decade the Turks, allied with Sasanian Iran, destroyed the Hephthalites and took Sogdiana. The Turks became masters of the Silk Road from Mongolia to the Oxus.

It is often said that a council of 530 abolished a Christian belief in reincarnation by a narrow vote. The council was in 553, and what it condemned was Origenist speculation, not an accepted doctrine of rebirth.

In the last of those periods, the sutra says, Shakyamuni's teaching loses its power and the world fills with strife. Japan later dated the start of the final age, mappo, to 1052.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha

Sogdiana became the centre of Manichaeism in the East, and Chinese sources later knew the faith through Sogdian teachers.

Threads The church of Mani

Muslim tradition tells of a Christian monk, Bahira, who recognised the boy as a future prophet on a caravan journey to Syria. Later polemic, Christian and modern, turned the story into a claim that the monk taught him, which the sources do not support.

Their khagans tolerated the religions of their subjects, Buddhist, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Christian alike.

The Sui history describes a country ruled by a queen who lived in a nine-storeyed building, with men serving as soldiers and labourers. It was absorbed into the Tibetan empire in the next century.

The Okar Research list dates the Turkic assault to 580. The wars between Iran and the Turks weakened both before the Arabs came.

When Xuanzang came through in 630 he met him, and found the Nava Vihara at Balkh still the greatest monastery of the region.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Balkh

Its second article tells the people to revere the Three Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.

They killed the guards before soldiers killed them, and more than a thousand families were caught up in the investigation. Two more men claimed to be Maitreya in 613.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha The last battle

He preached privately for some years and publicly from about 613. The same year, half a world away, the white-clad Maitreya rebels died at the Sui palace gate.

The Tang court was open to foreign religions. Zoroastrians, Nestorian Christians, Manichaeans and Buddhists all had places of worship in Chang'an.

The Kalachakra counts the same era from 624. Its "year of the barbarians" was taken by Tibetan scholars as 624, so that 403 years later gave 1027, the start of the Tibetan calendar's cycles.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

624 is also the year the Kalachakra gives for the founding of the foreign religion. The tradition that "a Muslim invasion weakened Shambhala" in 624 comes from later Kalachakra commentary, not from history.

The Albanian chronicler Movses tells of the invasion. The invaders withdrew after civil war broke out among the Turks.

Within twenty years his successors had conquered Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran.

Tayyaye, the Syriac word for Arabs, comes from the name of one tribe, the Banu Tayy. Through Persian Tazig it became the Tibetan stag gzig and the Kalachakra's tayin. If Mhmt is Muhammad, this is one of the earliest mentions of him outside Muslim sources.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads The name of the Tayy

Nahavand is sometimes misdated to 624. The war took fifteen years, and the eastern provinces, Khurasan and Bactria, held out longest.

Tibetan tradition credits her, with the Nepali princess Bhrikuti, with bringing Buddhism to Lhasa. She died in Tibet in 680.

Bon tradition remembers Zhang-zhung as the country through which its teachings came from Tazig, in the far west. Zhang-zhung had its own language, and Bonpo texts still give titles in it.

Essay: The Nine Ways of Bon

Threads Tazig and Bon

Tibet certainly knew Mani. A treatise attributed to the emperor Trisong Detsen, the Criteria of the Authentic Scriptures, attacks him as a heretic who stitched a religion together from every system, and Giuseppe Tucci judged a direct connection between Manichaeism and some Tibetan cosmological ideas highly likely. The parallels are suggestive. Manichaeism has five light elements; Vajrayana has five Buddha families, each tied to an element and a colour of light. Chinese Manichaeans, for their part, adopted the language of five buddhas.

Vajrayana's texts and rites come from Indian tantric Buddhism of the sixth and seventh centuries, and that remains the main line of descent. A Manichaean contribution to how Tibet received them has been proposed by serious scholars and is possible; it has not been shown in detail.

Threads Tazig and Bon Iranian light in Buddhism

The general Pei Xingjian used the expedition as cover to capture a Western Turkic rebel and stopped in Tokharistan. Narseh fought the Arabs there for years and died in Chang'an. The royal family of Iran ended its days in China, not Tibet.

Essay: Iranians in the Tibetan Empire

The book was burned again in 1281 under Kublai Khan. A copy of the Manichaean-influenced version survived in the Dunhuang library cave.

Tibet lost them in 692 and took Khotan back in 790. Khotan's language was Iranian, and its Buddhist monks later fled to Tibet.

Essay: Iranians in the Tibetan Empire

Behind the claim stands an older and well-known thesis. Sylvain Levi, Charles Eliot and Jean Przyluski argued that Amitabha, the Buddha of "infinite light", took shape in the Iranian borderlands. As Amitayus, "infinite life", he recalls Zurvan, infinite time, and his paradise the luminous abode of Ahura Mazda. Kushan Gandhara, where Buddhism lived among Iranian peoples, produced early images of him.

Manichaeism was itself a religion of light from the same Iranian world, and in Central Asia and China its followers called Mani a Buddha of Light. Whether Manichaeism added to the Pure Land as well as borrowing from it is not settled; the Iranian roots of its light imagery are the stronger part of the case.

Threads Iranian light in Buddhism

In 695 she added Cishi, a name of Maitreya, to her imperial title. The expectation she drew on was older than her reign and older than Islam. The Great Cloud Sutra had been in Chinese since the early fifth century, rebels had risen in the name of a new Buddha in 515, and men claiming to be Maitreya had marched on the Sui palace in 610 and 613.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha

The Two Principles are light and darkness, the heart of Mani's teaching. Chinese Manichaeism later called Mani "the Buddha of Light".

Threads The church of Mani

After her death the ministers blamed the foreign monks and expelled them to Gandhara. Berzin writes that many settled in the mountains of Baltistan.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

The settlement in Sindh became a precedent for Muslim rule over Hindus and Buddhists in India.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

For two centuries Tibet dealt with the Arabs as allies, enemies and trading partners. The Tibetan name for them, stag gzig, came from the Banu Tayy.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads The name of the Tayy Tibet and Islam

Atil stood on both banks of the river with the king's palace on an island, a meeting place of Muslim, Jewish, Christian and pagan merchants.

He had served the Umayyad administration before becoming a monk. Fifty years later, in Baghdad, the Nestorian patriarch Timothy I debated the caliph al-Mahdi in a far gentler tone, praising Muhammad as one who "walked in the path of the prophets".

They became the Tang dynasty's indispensable allies against the An Lushan rebellion, and the only state ever to make Manichaeism its official religion.

His mother was a granddaughter of the last Sasanian king, and by tradition the Sasanian house had married into both the Byzantine and the Turkic royal lines.

Little Bolu was a Tibetan ally on Tibet's road to the west. Its sister kingdom, Great Bolu, is Baltistan, whose people later became Tibetan-speaking Muslims.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

Threads Tibet and Islam

The battle marked the western limit of Tang power. The Chinese name for the Arabs in these years was Dashi, from Persian Tazi, which goes back to the Banu Tayy.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads The name of the Tayy

The combination lasted more than a thousand years, until the Meiji government separated the two by decree in 1868.

The usual identification is the Swat valley in northern Pakistan, argued by Sylvain Levi and Giuseppe Tucci from its Tibetan and Chinese names. Others have drawn the map wider. John Myrdhin Reynolds takes Oddiyana as a larger region reaching into Afghanistan and as far as Zhang-zhung; Herbert Guenther proposed Sogdiana; Alexis Sanderson placed it near Kashmir.

On the wider reading, a tradition that puts Oddiyana's teachers in the old Buddhist country of Balkh sits close to the scholars' map.

Threads Tazig and Bon

The Tibetan empire was now at its height, from the Pamirs to the edge of China. In 762 the emperor Trisong Detsen had turned to Buddhism.

Manichaean texts were translated into Uighur Turkish, and the faith flourished in the Uighur lands until the khaganate fell in 840 and in the Uighur kingdom of Qocho, near Turfan, long after.

Threads The church of Mani

Donald Lopez describes Dzogchen as drawing on Chinese Chan, Indian Buddhism, Daoism, tantric Shaivism and native religion, and as known for strikingly antinomian language.

Essay: The Nine Ways of Bon

Threads Tazig and Bon

The Barmakid viziers, descended from the Buddhist abbots of the Nava Vihara at Balkh, sponsored Indian learning in Baghdad. Berzin reads one of Manjushri Yashas' predictions as a reference to this simplification of Indian astronomy.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra Balkh

Samye was built with the help of the Indian abbot Shantarakshita, and tradition adds Padmasambhava. It was also the place where the Tibetan court later decided between Indian and Chinese Buddhism.

Berzin suggests that masters from these monasteries, with their astronomy and their contact with Kashmiri tantra, are a likely source of the Kalachakra's own background.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

Many of the Tibetan documents later found in the Dunhuang library cave date from these decades.

Ibn al-Nadim records the dispute. The Okar Research chronology names a Miqlasite leader, Yazdanbakht, criticised by the Mihrites for his dreams.

It is the clearest sign that Manichaeism reached imperial Tibet, and historians read it as evidence of a serious attempt to introduce the religion to the Tibetans in the decades when the Tibetan court was choosing its Buddhism.

Threads The church of Mani Iranian light in Buddhism

Tang records describe the Manichaeans as eating once a day, in the evening, drinking water, and avoiding meat and milk.

Threads The church of Mani

The rebellion is real. From 806 to 809 Rafi' ibn al-Layth held Samarqand against the caliph, with Arab, Iranian and Turkic support. Taking the name of the Sabians was a known course for religious minorities under the Abbasids: Ibn al-Nadim tells how the pagans of Harran adopted it to escape the threats of al-Ma'mun.

The particular story of the Manichaeans and Mani's image comes from a modern chronology that names no early source, but it fits the pattern of those years.

Threads The church of Mani

Al-Azraqi records that the throne was displayed between Safa and Marwa during the pilgrimage of 817 with a silver plaque: "This is the throne of so-and-so son of so-and-so, king of Tibet. He became a Muslim and sent this throne as a gift to the Ka'ba." A year later it was melted into coin to pay for the defence of Mecca.

Berzin writes that in the same campaign the Kabul Shah converted and a gold statue from a Kabul monastery was sent to Mecca.

Essay: The Tribe in the Tantra

Threads The name of the Tayy Tibet and Islam

In Turfan they founded the kingdom of Qocho, where Manichaeism and Buddhism lived side by side. German expeditions recovered its Manichaean manuscripts in the early twentieth century.

Later Buddhist histories cast Langdarma as a persecutor of Buddhism. The collapse left Tibet without a central power for four centuries.

Zoroastrianism and Christianity were swept away in the same decrees. Manichaeism survived in China underground, in the south.

Threads The church of Mani

The date is disputed. The Khazar Correspondence places the conversion under King Bulan, often dated to the 740s; al-Mas'udi places it in the reign of Harun al-Rashid. In 861 Constantine-Cyril visited the Khazar court to argue for Christianity.

John Newman suggested the Uighur kingdom centred on Qocho, Buddhist and Manichaean, which flourished from about 850 to 1250, the centuries in which the Kalachakra appeared. Edwin Bernbaum pointed to the Tarim basin, whose size, ring of mountains and eastward-flowing river match the Tibetan descriptions. Alexandra David-Neel associated Shambhala with Balkh.

The Tibetan commentaries treat Shambhala as reached through initiation and inner practice. The readings need not exclude each other; the tradition itself says the kingdom is both real and hidden.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

Hindu Shahi kings soon retook the region, and its monasteries recovered. The pattern of raids and recovery is the background Berzin gives for the Kalachakra's fear of the "barbarians".

It was the height of the Pueblo world before drought and migration in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pueblo villages later grew up along the Rio Grande, where many stand today.

Central Asia's role as the road between Indian and Chinese Buddhism faded with the dynasty.

Ibn al-Nadim tells both stories. He adds that in his own day he knew barely five Manichaeans in Baghdad.

Threads The church of Mani

The Bogomils were later linked, by their enemies and by some historians, with the Cathars of the West. The Okar Research list puts the Cathars in 910, too early; the Cathars appear in the twelfth century.

The Qarakhanids went on to conquer Bukhara in 999 and Buddhist Khotan around 1006.

The Khazar state, whose rulers had adopted Judaism, did not recover.

Berzin notes that the Kalachakra teachings appeared openly in India at about this time, in visions granted to two masters seeking Shambhala.

He says he knew only a handful of Manichaeans left in Baghdad. His chapter on India includes one of the earliest Arabic descriptions of the Buddha.

Rong Xinjiang has argued that the news of its fall moved the monks of Dunhuang to seal their library cave, which stayed hidden until 1900.

Essay: Iranians in the Tibetan Empire

Berzin reads the Kalachakra's invaders as the Ismailis these frontier Buddhists feared, and its war as shaped by the Ghaznavid campaigns. Mahmud's bilingual coins of 1027 and 1028 translate "messenger of God" into Sanskrit as avatara.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

The Bon canon of the nine ways and the lives of Shenrab, the gZer mig and later the gZi brjid, which place the Bon homeland in Tazig and call it Shambhala, belong to the centuries that followed.

Essay: The Nine Ways of Bon

Threads The name of the Tayy Tazig and Bon

Berzin suggests the Kalachakra's second layer, in which the invaders take Delhi before marching on Shambhala, absorbed the memory of these campaigns.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

Newman dates it from the year it gives for its own calendar and from the citations of Naropa, who died around 1040. It names Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and the Mahdi among the teachers of the foreign religion, and calls its god ar-Rahman.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra The name of the Tayy

Tibetan almanacs still number their cycles from this year; the seventeenth began in 1987. Tradition also says the Kalachakra reached Tibet from Kashmir in 1027.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

He wrote that the Indians "totally differ from us in religion" and then spent hundreds of pages on what they believed.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Berzin links the end of the pilgrim traffic to the Ghaznavid destruction of the monasteries of Gandhara and northwestern India between 1008 and 1021.

Tibetan Buddhist teachers served at its court. The Mongols destroyed it in 1227.

That year Fujiwara no Yorimichi turned his villa at Uji into the temple of Byodo-in. The Pure Land movements and Nichiren grew from the same sense of an age in decline.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The coming Buddha

The real victors were not Christian, and their court seems to have been largely Buddhist. The legend of Prester John kept Latin hopes fixed on Central Asia for a century.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

The Uighur script came from the Sogdian, which came from Aramaic. The Mongolian script still written in Inner Mongolia is a descendant of the letters of the Sogdian merchants.

Their enemies called the Cathars "Manichaeans" for their dualism. Whether any line of descent ran from Mani's church to them is doubtful; the label was older polemic.

The city's Jewish community, which dated itself to the exiles of Assyria and Babylon, ended with it, and its records with it, the Jews of Bukhara later told Joseph Wolff.

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Threads Balkh

The Okar Research list calls it the death-blow of Catharism in the region. The last known Cathar perfect, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burned in 1321.

Hulegu and his heirs, the Ilkhans, patronised Buddhism in Iran. Buddhist monasteries appeared between the Caspian and the Black Sea, and Buddhists and Muslims debated at the Ilkhan's court.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

His vizier Rashid al-Din still put a life of the Buddha into his world history, written with the help of a Kashmiri monk, Kamalashri.

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Sufis from Iran followed, Mir Sayyid 'Ali Hamadani in the 1370s and 1380s and the Nurbakhshis around 1500, and Baltistan became a land of Tibetan-speaking Muslims.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

Threads Tibet and Islam

It is the only Manichaean statue known to survive in its own shrine. In southern China Mani's religion lived on by blending into Buddhism and popular religion, until Ming law banned the "religion of light" with the White Lotus and Maitreya societies.

Threads The church of Mani Iranian light in Buddhism

The founder of the Ming had himself risen from the Red Turban rebels, who drew on Maitreya and White Lotus expectation, and he knew the danger of such movements.

Threads The church of Mani The coming Buddha

The church had once had bishops from Syria to China. It survived as a small mountain community, the ancestor of today's Assyrian Church of the East.

Samarkand, once the heart of Sogdiana, was rebuilt with the skill of the artisans he took from the cities he conquered.

The order survives today almost only in Baltistan, where its mosques and khanqahs were built in the Tibetan style, some with the Bon swastika in their beams.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

Threads Tibet and Islam

It was not the village's first brush with history. The Umayyad caliph Sulayman camped at Dabiq while his armies besieged Constantinople, and died there in 717.

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads The last battle

He is often called the first African to cross what is now the United States.

Two centuries later Joseph Wolff heard a version of the same story in Afghanistan, with Afghana as a nephew of Asaph who built Solomon's temple.

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Tibetans called them Kache, "Kashmiris", and the name came to mean any Tibetan Muslim. In the eighteenth century one of them, the merchant Khache Phalu, wrote a book of verse advice that every Tibetan knew.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

Threads Tibet and Islam

His encyclopaedia, translated as The Treasury of Knowledge, includes an account of the kings of Shambhala and the dates of their reigns.

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

He records that the Jews of Bukhara called their city the Habor of Kings and Balkh the Halah, and that the Jews of Balkh and Samarkand said Turkestan was the land of Nod, "on the east of Eden".

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Threads Balkh

Buddhist images were taken out of shrines and many temples were destroyed in the years that followed.

Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot carried much of it to London and Paris in 1907 and 1908. The Old Tibetan Annals and the earliest Tibetan histories come from this cave.

For the first time in a thousand years scholars could read the Manichaeans in their own words, not only through their enemies.

Threads The church of Mani

Estimates of the dead range from about 150,000 to 300,000. The survivors fled to Iraq and Syria.

This is the tradition's chronology of the hidden kingdom, as Jamgon Kongtrul set it out, not an event anyone could witness.

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra

Fifteen years later the Nag Hammadi codices were found further up the Nile. They are Gnostic, not Manichaean, though the two are often confused.

Threads The church of Mani

They are often listed with the Manichaean finds. They are Gnostic writings, many of them older than Mani, and separate from his church.

A Tibetan Muslim community still lives in Kashmir. In China, Tibetan Muslims are counted officially as Tibetans, unlike the Hui.

Essay: The Muslims of Little Tibet

Threads Tibet and Islam

It tells of his youth among the baptists and his visions of the Twin, and it settled old arguments about where Mani came from.

Threads The church of Mani

A community that traced itself to the exiles of Assyria and Babylon, and once had a Gate of the Jews at Balkh, ended with him.

Essay: The Jews of Balkh

Threads Balkh

He is pictured mounted, with a spear, at the head of his army. "The Lord of the Gods," the tantra says, "joined with the twelve lords shall go to destroy the barbarians."

Essay: The Last Battle

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra The last battle

The commentaries identify Krinmati with the Mahdi. The Kalachakra itself, and its great commentary, rank the inner reading of the war above the outer one: "the battle with the lord of the non-Indic invaders is definitely inside the body".

Essay: The Kingdom at the End of Time

Threads Shambhala and the Kalachakra The last battle