Home > Gandhara

300px Buddha's First Sermon at Sarnath, Kushan Period, ca. 3rd century Pakistan (ancient region of Gandhara)

Gandhāra is noted for the distinctive Gandhāra style of Buddhist art, a consequence of the Greco-Buddhist syncretism which fused Indian influences with Hellenistic influences during the centuries following Alexander the Great's conquest of Central Asia in 334 BCE. The Gandhāran style flourished beginning in the 1st century CE under the Kushan dynasty until the invasion of the White Huns in the 5th century.

The Gandharan Buddhist textsBuddhist texts The Gandhran Buddhist Texts are the earliest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, and indeed the earliest Indian manuscripts yet discovered. They are written in Ghndri using the Kharosthi script. The 1994 Afghan manuscripts In 1994 the Brit are both the earliest Buddhist textsBuddhist texts come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Buddhists place varying value on texts: attitudes range from worship of the text itself, to dismissal of texts as falsification of the ineffable truth. Texts can be divided up in a number of ways, ever discovered and the earliest Indian manuscripts ever discovered. Most are composed on birchbark and were found in labeled clay pots.

The area's language, GndhriAlternate meanings: see Gandhari Gndhri was a north-western prakrit spoken in Gndhra. Like all prakrits, it is thus descended from either Vedic Sanskrit or a closely related prior language. Gndhri has been found written in the Kharosthi script. Scholars b, was a collection of related PrakritPrakrit (Sanskrit prakrta "natural, usual, vulgar") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. The Prakrits were vernaculars, often used for ordinary speech, and may be contrasted with Sanskrit, which continued or "Middle Indo-Aryan" dialects. Gāndhāri was written right-to-left in the KharosthiThe Kharosthi script also known as the Gndhri script is an ancient alphabetic script used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest India to write the Gandhari and Sanskrit languages (the Gandhara kingdom was located along the present-day border betwe script, which was ultimately adapted from the Aramaic alphabet. At the time of its adoption, Gandhāra was controlled by the Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian empire, which used a similar script to write the related Iranian languages of the Empire. This alphabet also sets Gāndhāri apart as a unique set of dialects of the Middle Indo-Aryan period; Semitic scripts were not used to write Indian languages again until the arrival of Islam and subsequent adoption of the Persian-style Arabic alphabet for New Indo-Aryan languages like Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri. This unique writing system died out about the 4th century CE, though descendents of these distinct regional dialects are still spoken today.

Gandhāra is also thought to be the location of the mystical Lake Dhanakosha , birthplace of Padmasambhava, founder of Tibetan Buddhism. The bKa' brgyud (Kagyu) sect of Tibetan Buddhism identifies the lake with Andan Dheri stupa, located near the tiny village of Uchh near Chakdara in the lower Swat Valley . A spring was said to flow from the base of the stupa to form the lake. Archaeologists have found the stupa but no spring or lake can be identified.