Christopher I. Beckwith

A small (165 pages) but very big book with two entwined story lines:

The first is how the Buddhist monastic institute of learning (the vihara, as epitomised at Nalanda, India) was 'borrowed' by the Islamic world to become the institute we know today as the madrasa before inspiring the great early 'colleges' of Europe--a transmission so transparent when it's laid out before you that you will berate yourself for having missed it.

The second theme made me realise that I had absolutely no idea show more whatsoever why philosophy was required of all undergraduate students when I was an undergraduate student. (Professors should be retired when they don't explain to students why a subject they are teaching is critical to a modern education.) In short, "Beckwith traces how the recursive argument method [the foundation of all scientific thinking and a core feature of medieval science] was first developed by Buddhist scholars and was spread by them throughout ancient Central Asia." Yes, these chapters are slow reading and repetitive (because that is one of the requisite forms the recursive argument method employs in ensuring that an idea is subjected to rationale thought), but the struggle is worth the discovery. Any book whose ideas keep coming repeatedly to mind, which sends you to read and re-read its original sources, and which gives you truly mind-blowing insights into a topic you thought you knew something about, is a 5-star book, challenging as it is to read.

This amazing scholar, tucked away in Indiana (USA) at Indiana University has written some of the most startling and impressive works on Eurasian studies written in the last two centuries. If you are a serious student of Buddhism or Central Asian or Chinese history, you need to follow Beckwith. His books are not easy reading as they make assumptions as to readers' previous knowledge and are often repetitive in making their arguments, but they are as spell-binding as a 13th century navigator would have felt stumbling upon a 16th century map. show less

Beckwith's premise is compelling: The so-called "Silk Road" has been misunderstood as a line connecting the Mediterranean, South Asian and East Asian societies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Instead the Silk Road was the entire economic system of a region that was--on and off--a well-spring of culture in its own right. Throughout the book he makes the important distiction of referring to civilizations like the Romans, Persians and Chinese as "peripheral". Rather than casting these show more societies as the protagonists of history being bothered by pestiferous nomads from the Eurasian interior, he shows they existed in a symbiotic relationship with the steppe zone. Over and over you see the pattern wherein peripheral states seek to limit free trade on their frontiers, which causes the nomadic peoples to attempt to re-institute free trade (often through warfare), sometimes resulting in the peripheral state attempting a whole-sale subjugation of the steppe zone, usually having the effect of either instigating their own demise through conquest or else succeeding and causing the complete collapse of the Silk Road economy and a recession beck home.

Beckwith makes a very interesting comparison between steppe nomads (Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols, etc.) and Europeans during the Age of Exploration. He posits that trade was--in both instances--the driving motive. Europeans sought to trade in Asian ports and only used force and subjugation when the trading partner was unwilling. Beckwith's premise is interesting but not entirely persuasive. He seeks to frame this behavior as fundamentally benevolent and make European conquest look like an unfortunate but necessary result of "Oriental" intransigence.

Indeed, the further I read the more troubled I became with Beckwith's authorial presence in the text, which is odd considering his vitriolic tirade against post-modernism in historical scholarship. After lambasting the tendency of contemporary scholars to deconstruct perspective and seek out implicit meanings in texts, he ironically peppers his work with intrusions that need hardly be looked for. As examples, he never refers to a government as democratic without including passive-aggressive quotation marks, he considers fascism, communism, rock n' roll music and free verse poetry as together constituting a subversive conspiracy he monolithically term Modernism intended to undermine benevolent monarcho-aristocratic classicism. He frequently blames populism and demagoguery for societies ills and for destroying civilized norms that were built by an aristocratic society that, he says, always exercised a sense of personal responsibility in exercising the levers of power.

His treatment of the pre-modern world is exemplary, but as soon as he steps into talking about the Modern Era his writing literally begins to sound psychotic. He commits dozens of pages to discussions of how much he dislikes Modern Art's destruction of beauty. He hopes that someday there might be Art once more, but he's not optimistic. The connection between this diatribe and anything thematically relevant to the preceding 300 pages is tangential at best, but closer to non-existent. He explicitly says that the term "World War I" is a misnomer since the vast majority of fighting occurred in Western Europe, but he chooses to describe its causes, vicissitudes and consequences in a remedial level of detail that actually insults the reader.

Back to the positive angle, the book was immensely valuable in filling in a portion of themap that used to present a giant question mark. The migrations of peoples and their enthnolinguistic relationships are far clearer to me now. From this book I now see how this formerly mysterious region has actually periodically reseeded the "peripheral" world. The Greco-Roman period was dominated by Indo-European language speakers originating from Iran; the Middle Ages was the result of their displacement by groups emerging from Central Asia and the concomitant synthesis of their Germanic and Romantic cultures; Arab, Indian and Chinese scholarship mixed and fomented in the prosperous Central Asian steppe empires of the medieval period.

The story is ultimately tragic. First, the advent of long-distance open-sea trade routes and, second, the 18th Century partition of Central Eurasia between Russia and China put an end to self-sufficiency, self-determination and entrepreneurial spirit for what had until then always been a dynamic and important region of the world. That subjugation continues today with the Uighers and Tibetans of western China and countless, virtually nameless distinct peoples shrouded from global consciousness by the national designation "Russia". show less

As unlikely as it may seem given the country's modern image, Tibet was once an expansionistic empire, seeking from about the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth to expand in all directions. Beckwith deals, as the title says, with the Central Asian aspect of this, in what's now northwestern China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, easternmost Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Tibetan entanglements south of the Himalayas are completely ignored, the eastern flank, towards China Proper, is show more treated only cursorily, and internal Tibetan developments are dealt with only to the extent they impacted imperial designs in the north and west.

The book is a narrative history of military campaigns and diplomatic manoeuvres - there's hardly anything on how the conquered territories were ruled, on how the Tibetan armies were organized, or similar. And given the barrage of unfamiliar geographical names, the book is badly let down by the inadequate maps, which makes those campaigns hard to follow. The Internet isn't too much help here either, as many of the places concerned have different names in different languages and at different times, and the ones Beckwith chose back in the 1980s aren't necessarily the ones you're most likely to find on the Web today.

After five chapters of dry narrative, Beckwith rather incongruously rounds off with an Epilogue that seeks to argue that Tibet and Carolingian Francia were not backwards compared to Tang China, the Caliphate, and Byzantium. A worthy argument, perhaps, but seems like it'd better belong in another book entirely.

I thus found the book rather frustrating - but there, three and a half decades on, seems to be nothing else on offer on the subject. show less

This book describes the political history of Central Asia from the start of the Caucasian diaspora about 4 millenia ago in just 300 pages. Such a book can only be very concise. Unfortunately, what we get is a bewildering list of political leaders and their empires from Ireland to Japan. Key people like Attila and Chinggis Khan are covered in just a few pages. Little attention is given to other aspects that made Central Asia to what it was, e.g. the impact of geography, as does Peter Perdue show more in “China Marches West”. Also, relatively little attention is paid to the cultural exchange that took place and that was so important for the development of European and East-Asian culture.

Curiously the book ends with a two chapter rant against Modernism. The author considers Modernism the root of all modern evil in Central Asia. As a result we learn more about his dislike of Picasso than about the Persian poet Hafiz that he admires.

I find it disappointing to give this book only two stars. Mr. Beckwith is a man of great learning and of great passion for his subject. With better editing a much better book could have been produced. show less