Audio: Silk Road Buddhism

This Dharma talk was offered at Gaia Forest’s first working meditation weekend, October 2026. In this talk I trace some of Buddhism’s historical journey along the Silk Road — from Gandhāran Buddha images with Greek aesthetics, through the Chinese practice of géyì (matching concepts across traditions), to the Yogācāra understanding of mind and its surprising convergences with Stoic philosophy, predictive-processing cognitive science, and the Christian contemplative tradition.

Silk Road Dharma · Gaia Forest · English · Talk

Note this recording ends at the close of the talk itself; the discussion that followed is not included.

Transcript

Good morning, dear friends, and a very warm welcome. What a great joy it feels to me to be in this space together — not only in the context of our first official working bee here at Gaia Forest, or working meditation weekend, but also the first time that we’re welcoming our beloved Dorrigo Sangha also into this space here at Gaia Forest.

Beginning in this way with a brief chant in Pali feels very appropriate to me, in that one of the threads I hear in our conversation — and something we’ve touched on already this weekend — is this feeling of a crossroads, or a melting pot, of Buddhadharma in our time and place. I know from connecting with the Armidale Sangha that there are many threads of Buddhadharma present in that Sangha: those practising with Theravāda teaching heritage, those practising with Zen lineage influence, those practising in a Vajrayāna context — also Tibetan Buddhism — also influence from what we might call a post-Theravāda context, the insight tradition in the West. And even in our practice, or in our professional life also, finding ourselves at meeting points between cognitive science, even psychology, psychotherapy, and mapping in our own practice and understanding — our study, perhaps — this meeting of very, very different, not just vocabularies, but also different intentions, even different ways of understanding self in the world. But amongst contrast, maybe also finding a lot of confluence and compatibility.

From my own side, this has also been something I’ve very often — I wouldn’t say discovered, more had pointed out to me by skilful teachers. The ones I appreciate most, of the ones who have encouraged — Thich Nhat Hanh among them — encouraged a kind of synthetic approach rather than a schismatic approach, recognising that there’s a real importance in authenticity of lineage and transmission, but that also each of us is in some way like a Silk Road traveller in the Dharma. I’ll come back to why this phrase seems to make sense to me.

But just to rewind a little: seated on our altar is a statue of the Buddha, a gift from the dear nuns at Mountain Spring Monastery, Clear View Hamlet — I believe that’s the name for the nuns’ side. In some ways this image is a kind of embodiment of what I’ll be talking about briefly — in the sense that actually, in the moment, or moments, after what we would call the Axial Age, when there was a huge ground-shift in civilisation in the Mediterranean region — what we know as kind of the main roots of our own culture, in Babylon, Egypt, Greece, the Celtic world — experienced an enormous upheaval, a shift from tribal and agrarian to cosmopolitan and metropolitan kinds of existence. A tension between city-states, a time of great uncertainty, that also gave birth to many of our most important spiritual traditions. That period of time stretches right across the origins of Buddhism, also of Christianity, and even leads us, though at a later date, to Islam. A kind of upturning of the status quo, and a beginning of deep questioning and an effort to understand the place of self in the world.

Very interestingly, around this same time is also the period of alphabetisation — a time when language and idea that had, up until that point, been oral, began to be written down, and grammar — especially subject and object — worked its way into our minds in a structural way that perhaps had not been the case before. Of course, we cannot know this for sure, but processes that had been going on since much earlier, in the late Palaeolithic — even the process of art and painting, the creation of image and idea, expression of feeling into artefact — led eventually to this amazing change that we are still living in to this day. It’s a change that lies right at the heart of some of what we are experiencing as disconnection. In some important way, maybe the question we are asking is: how does our grammar of subject and object — how has it contributed not just to our worldview, but actually to the world we are now living in? How have we created a world predicated on a subject-object split? Even that word itself, “subject” and “object,” also links us back to that upper Palaeolithic transition, even before the period I’m talking about, of great upheaval, the rise of cities and states: object is that which is thrown at; the subject is that which is under the throne. Right back to that first act of an ancestral human being taking up an object — a tool — and projecting it into the world. A kind of maybe unfortunate but very apt metaphor: to strike, maybe to kill, to survive. So how much influence has this split had on our way of being, and what is playing out in the world — something I think we can explore a little.

The fascinating thing about this period that gave rise to the artwork — which, interestingly enough, this is not a very typical Vietnamese Buddha image. Maybe someone can tell me what you notice about that Buddha image — is there something that makes it not Vietnamese, or Chan, or Zen? Those who’ve spent time in the Chinese tradition will maybe be familiar with a more typical image of the Buddha — the long earlobes, the robes. Maybe it’s a little subtle unless you’ve seen literally hundreds and hundreds of Buddha images in different temples and from different cultures — but actually, this Buddha looks Western. It doesn’t look Chinese, or North Vietnamese, or Lao, or Thai, or Cambodian, or Burmese, even Sri Lankan or Indian.

The fascinating thing is that this type of iconography, and in fact all iconography of images of the Buddha, once upon a time looked more like this than they do now in the rest of Asia. The reason for this is that, actually, in the centuries just after the life of the Buddha, Buddhism was in a process of travelling along the Silk Road, connecting North India — the home of the Buddha during his lifetime, where he taught in the Māgadhī language, which was later translated into Pali and eventually transmitted to Sri Lanka, to Burma. Between roughly the second century before the common era, almost right up until the tenth century of the common era, Buddhism was slowly making its way along trade routes right through Gandhāra — the Peshawar Valley, Kandahar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bactria, which was the Greek kingdom, colony, aftermath of Alexander the Great’s — well, he lived until thirty-three, so it was an extremely rapid and stellar, but brief, career, in which he conquered as far as the Indus and left behind Greek culture in what is now modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the Apollonian style of iconography: the draping of robes like a toga, the tight curled hair, this kind of facial features, but even actually what is called the contrapposto posture, which you see in Michelangelo’s David, where the weight is given to one hip rather than the other. You can’t see it in a seated Buddha, but if you’re familiar with the image of the previous Buddha — one of the previous incarnations of the Buddha — that you see at Swayambhū, there’s a beautiful basalt statue of this Buddha, and if you squint it could be a Greek statue in the Acropolis. There’s very little to tell the two apart — all the way to Kashmir, to Khotan, Kucha, and on to Dunhuang, the famous caves in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, gateway to China itself.

So in this period there was this amazing intermixing and meeting of philosophies, from the far, the near, the middle, the east and the west — an amazing kind of crossroads on the Silk Road. Traders acting as translators, sages travelling from India up into Central Asia. Xuanzang — who gave rise to, I guess it’s my generation rather than yours, but, you know, the TV show Monkey Magic — the story of Xuanzang, a famous monk and translator who travelled to India; Journey to the West is the name of the thirty-volume telling of that story. An incredible period of intermixing, and a period of not just translation, but also juxtaposition. There were many different languages in which there was curiosity about these teachings, and they needed to be translated, but there were already existing ideas, indigenous ideas and ways of understanding, that were meeting these new ways of thinking and seeing. We have records of Greek philosophers meeting what they called the gymnosophists — which translates roughly as “the naked philosophers” — Jaina monks in Pakistan and present-day India, taking those ideas back to Greece. We also have the meeting between Taoist understanding — the teachings of Laozi — and Buddhist understanding arriving in China. They actually came up with a beautiful term in Chinese, géyì, which is the word for the noticing that they were matching ideas in these two traditions: that when you are contemplating something like emptiness — śūnyatā in Sanskrit and Pali — there is already a word, wú, in the Chinese, which is the underlying unmanifest that gives rise to yin and yang in the Taoist understanding. What we practise in the empty moment between out-breath and in-breath is a manifestation of wú in our experience, which can then give rise to an upward movement — a yang movement — and also a downward movement — a yin movement. So there was a pre-existing term, not pretending that they are identical, but noticing similarity, and harvesting the fruit of that friction between two different, somehow contrasting but also similar, ideas. Not just translation, but also new understanding coming from juxtaposition.

In some important way I feel like we are also kind of Silk Road travellers, as I mentioned, because we are at a time when we have a pre-existing cultural bedrock with, in many ways, very complete and beautiful and liberating understandings — for example the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in fact the Catholic tradition, the Catholic contemplative tradition especially, is what has offered us many of our English terms for Buddhist practice. For example, we might say “yoga” more broadly, yogic practices, or for example “meditation” — this is not a Pali or Sanskrit term, nor a Chinese term; it’s a Latin word meaning tending to the centre, the medium, moving to the medium — not the average, but the centre, the midpoint. We also have “contemplation” — this word that, as I understand it, also has an echo of the word “temple,” and is a sense of connecting to the divine — also borrowed from the Catholic contemplative tradition.

So we are at this kind of crossroads culturally, in terms of language as well, and also we are the inheritors, heirs to what is kind of the re-flowering, if you like, in Europe, in the Enlightenment era, of philosophy and exploration, eventually science. We have the contributions of people like Newton, and then even maybe an extreme in the form of Descartes — someone who took the subject-object dichotomy to such an extreme that he could look out of his window and convince himself that what he was seeing may as well have been automata wearing hats and coats, that only his thinking mind warranted the name of being. A kind of extreme, and there are all kinds of other repercussions for the Western-science-based, or Western-philosophical, kind of bedrock. Newton also did something similar, arriving at very, very powerful equations for understanding the world in terms of inert objects that only move when they are struck by another — an amazing idea that allowed him to calculate the trajectories of the planets, but actually it’s very different from the idea of continual, unmanifest upwelling of change from the unmanifest, which you find in Taoist understanding, and eventually also in the Yogācāra understanding, which is kind of the philosophy underpinning the Zen Buddhist tradition — Chan, Zen, and Plum Village. We’ll come back to that, because this idea that change is constant is a very interesting one that we really struggle to understand in terms of the subject-object split. If we are stuck in the idea of inert objects outside, that need to be moved and manipulated — the way our language works — it’s very difficult to deal with change and development, because here’s this object out there, and here, inside, that actually is not staying the same, that is continually shifting and changing.

So we can maybe even imagine the same process going on cognitively for a philosopher, a practitioner in those times, and for an artist producing an image — transitioning from the aniconic phase of Buddhist art, where there was no image on the altar. There was at most a wheel, an image of a footprint, an empty chair, or a stupa — and if you’ve been to Ellora or Ajanta, there are certain of those rock-cut monasteries, these caves hewn into the cliff, where the focus is not an image of a Buddha but a stupa, a chaitya, an image of the awakened mind itself — ancient enough to predate the idea that, “oh, we could make a statue of the Buddha” — and yes, why this Buddha looks slightly Greek.

So, here we are at a crossroads — maybe we can say almost like Silicon Road Buddhism, because we’re also now getting influence, and we can meet many more teachers than it would ever have been possible to walk to meet in North India — you just had luck, or not, to be in the neighbourhood of a teacher willing to teach you, and hopefully it was safe to walk there and get back home. But here we are, we can Google and find a recording, or read a book, from a huge array — Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Vietnamese, the list goes on — and yet, even now, contemporary Western teachers are also at that crossroads, that meeting place, bringing in the language of contemporary psychology, mindfulness-based therapies, all different kinds of things. A beautiful opportunity, but also sometimes maybe a muddle. What to make of all these different ways to practise, all these different invitations — if we’re coming even from a Christian tradition, we maybe have an intuition that there is something very precious here that is not foreign, in the sense that the early desert fathers also followed a path of contemplation, of reflection, of silence, of connection to nature. The Irish Catholic tradition is full of the most beautiful nature-based poetry from ascetics living in that time, connecting to place — not speaking about Babylon and Bethlehem, but speaking about their own hills, valleys, mountains, rivers, their home. So there seems to be something very precious there that spans the labelling we have for different traditions, different schools, different teachers and teachings.

So, keeping this géyì idea — this word from the Chinese about matching concepts, or fruitful juxtaposition — there’s one really interesting one I wanted to share, and it relates especially to the Yogācāra — apologies, I’m quite a fan of etymology, so we’ll have little digressions into word origins from time to time, because while translation is very useful, it’s also really good to learn what the original meaning of a word was, and maybe sometimes just borrow it, accepting that we don’t have a translation. Meditation is a really good example of this from the Latin. As I’ll come back to, the word that’s often translated as “meditation,” bhāvana, has more to do with becoming. It relates to a cultivation or a training, a preparation of the ground and a provision of necessary nutrients, in a sense, for an arising that is more spontaneous, more organic.

So “yoga” — union — from the Pali and Sanskrit for yoke: that which you need in order to get two oxen to do the same job and harness their power, rather than them going in opposite directions, grazing in their favourite corner of the paddock. The yoke unites them so that something can be done. So there’s this sense, in yoga, of harnessing energy for a purpose — the purpose here, freedom. Paradoxically, the yoke seems to be limiting, but the recognition is that, like a river that has been split into many channels — when our energy is dispersed into lots of different directions, that river, even in its full spate, doesn’t have the power to carry logs, to remove obstacles — but when it’s in one channel, harnessed, it can do enormous — well, tragically enormous — damage also, as we have seen. But if it’s skilfully guided into a wholesome and appropriate channel, then great work can be done. Work, nonetheless. So this is also where we get this idea of tapas — yogic heat, a kind of energy of needing to do something, but there’s friction there. Fruitful friction, again. Chara — so Yogācāra, the way of the yogi, or the practices of the yogi. This school is also sometimes called the Mind-Only school, and this is kind of where it meets a little bit of — we wouldn’t say friction, but a bit of a wall — with a lot of Western scientific, and also Western philosophical, understanding. Because where it meets that wall is in the idea, coming originally from Plato, of idealism: that there is a truly existent world out there, separate from ourselves. Plato has that beautiful image of the cave — who knows the story of Plato’s cave? Imagining that our experience of the world is like we’re all seated, actually chained, in a cave facing the wall. Behind us there’s a fire lit, and people making shapes and sounds, and all we can see is the shadows projected on the wall, and hear the echo of their voices. In order to really experience the real world, we have to unchain ourselves and make our way towards the light — make our way upwards, outwards.

So already there’s a radical idea there, because most of our Western science is telling us that what we see and perceive in the world is real — “this is the real world.” Newton made up calculus in order to predict exactly what this real world was going to do. But here’s the idea that not only is there another world that is somehow veiled from our everyday perception, that we can understand more deeply through contemplation, through meditation — the Yogācāra goes one step further and says that actually even that other, veiled, world is somehow beyond our direct cognition and understanding — that our understanding of it is still caught in grammar, until we are able to see very differently. And this “seeing” is actually how the Chinese translate vipaśyanā — so it’s a process of śamatha, vipaśyanā: calm abiding and insight meditation, translated simply as stopping and seeing. Stopping what? The constant running of the narrative mind that grips onto a self-existent object, from its own side, and sees it as different from the world.

So I think I would like to stop there, and give us some time just to digest that together, and maybe offer some reflections from our own side — how this is landing, or has landed in the past. Maybe there are some ideas that are not new for us there, maybe some ideas that are new and would benefit from clarification together. So I will pause, and invite questions or reflections — any part of this, either the historical perspective, perhaps, or perhaps we have some way in our own life and practice where those crossroads have been interesting — maybe a Zen practice meeting a Theravāda practice environment, or maybe there’s something about this vocabulary from the Yogācāra — this store consciousness, the watering of seeds, and the arising of reaction or response — and how, maybe the interesting thing is how stopping, śamatha, calm abiding, and seeing relates to this process of becoming, this bhāvana, this cultivation. So please feel free to share, to ask.