WAS YUNNAN GANDATRA? WAS YUNNAN AN INDIAN COUNTRY

The western historians generally agree that Myanmar was home by the beginning of the first millennium of the Christian era to disparate ethnic/territorial groups. Under the influence of Indian culture, including literacy and religion, settlements developed in the central zone, enclosed by brick walls and populated by iron-using agriculturalists known today (via Chinese references) as the Pyu, but who probably called themselves Tircul. According to Chinese sources the Pyu declined after they were attacked by Nanchao, in what is now the Chinese province of Yunnan, in the early 9th century AD. As G. H. Luce saw it, their fellow Tibeto-Burman speakers, the Burmans, then migrated westward from their agricultural base in the Kyaukse area to establish Bagan (Luce 1959a, 1959b, 1985). This explanation is not convincingly supported by the archaeological evidence. (Hudson (2004:p19) When the Nanzhao dynasty eventually fell it was more because of internal intrigue than external pressure. The whole royal family was wiped out in a power struggle in 902, and was replaced by a slightly more modest regime, still based at Dali. By then, Buddhism had a firm grip on local society and the kings of Dali emerged as committed patrons of the faith. The capital itself became an important center of Buddhist learning. The links with Burma were strong, and the new Burmese kingdom at Pagan most likely developed in the shadow of Dali’s influence. And via Burma there would have been ties as well to India, then divided into Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, on the eve of the Muslim invasions. The kings of Dali adopted the name Gandhara for their realm. It’s the same word as Kandahar in modern-day Afghanistan and remains the literary Burmese name for Yunnan. Gandhara was once an almost mythical Buddhist land, straddling the present Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier at the time of Alexander the Great, and was remembered long afterwards as a place of profound scholarship, governed by sages, peaceful and devout. The Dali kings even styled themselves as descendants of the great Indian Buddhist emperor Asoka, who had reigned in the third century BC, seeing themselves as part of a fraternity of Buddhist states, from middle India to Ceylon and on to Vietnam. Dali also associated itself with Mithila, the important commercial and religious center once home to the Buddha himself, the New York of the ancient Indian world, with ‘store-houses filled, and sixteen thousand dancing girls and treasure with wealth in plenty’. Other great Buddhist sites were also transposed, metaphorically, onto the surrounding landscape. A cave on the other side of Lake Dali became the famed Kukkutapada cave (the original is in north India) where the monk Maha Kasyapa is believed to be waiting in a trance for the coming of the next Buddha. Next to the cave is said to be a stupa with relics of Buddha’s great disciple Ananda as well as the Pippala cave where the First Council of Buddhism was held. In this way, Dali became a facsimile of the holy land. As with the later kings of Burma, the kings of Dali wanted an Indian pedigree, and claimed descent from that greatest of Indian emperors, Asoka. The Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote that the king of Gandhara styled himself maharaja.