News Snapshot:
Central Asian lords in tunics and boots, paying obeisance to Iranian, Greek, and Indian gods; stupas surrounded by image shrines, resounding to the chanting of verses in the now-extinct Gandhari language. The historical Buddha—who was active in just a small part of the Gangetic Plains—might not even have recognised the “Buddhism” being practised in the northwest of the subcontinent in the 1st-2nd century CE. But compared to our modern notion of a unitary “classical” India, which influenced the world, it was really from the highly diverse region of Gandhara that Buddhism, or to be precise Gandharan—not “Indian”— Buddhism, embarked on...
