ตั๊กม้อเป็นชาวเปอร์เซีย อิหร่าน เคยเป็นพุทธ? และพระอิหร่านผู้นำพุทธศาสนาเข้าแผ่นดินจีนยุคสามก๊ก
Summary
Iran was once Buddhist ground, and the oldest surviving record of Bodhidharma — the founder of Zen at Shaolin — calls him a Persian.
Those who carried Buddhism into China include Prince An Shigao of Parthia, who gave up his throne to translate the ānāpānasati texts for the Chinese, and Kang Senghui of Sogdian descent, who invoked the relics before Sun Quan.
The epithet Biyanhu, used of Bodhidharma in Zen for over a thousand years, records both the colour of his eyes and his ancestry.
Key points
The religion of the Aryans returned to the land of the Aryans
This is the episode that closes the Iran series, and a route Thai audiences rarely hear about.
An epithet preserved the evidence by accident
A name passed down for a thousand years turns out to record ancestry, which is sturdier than a later legend.
The first translators were not Indian
An Shigao was Parthian and Kang Senghui Sogdian, which changes the picture of how Buddhism travelled.
The Three Kingdoms period was not only war
The era Thai readers know through fiction is exactly when Buddhism entered China.