Worship, Pilgrimage and Giving under the Kushans

Religious activity under the Kushans involved places as well as beliefs. People approached stupas containing relics, commissioned images, supported monasteries and honoured deities in shrines. From the first to third centuries CE, these practices took place across Bactria, Gandhara and northern India, where Buddhist communities lived alongside Jain and Brahmanical worshippers and traditions with Iranian roots.

The surviving buildings, containers, sculptures and inscriptions explain how devotion acquired a material setting. A relic placed within a monument, a figure installed by named donors or a painted panel mounted in a sanctuary could connect a religious community with a particular location. Giving supplied these places with buildings and furnishings while allowing patrons to take part in their sacred life.

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Relics and the purpose of a stupa

A stupa is a Buddhist monument associated with relics and sacred remembrance. Its solid mound or drum enclosed a deposit, while worshippers approached it from outside. Relics could include bodily remains or other objects held to carry a sacred connection. Enclosing them in a durable monument made the place a focus of devotion even when the deposit itself could no longer be seen.

A small reliquary now in the British Museum shows how a container was made for such a deposit. Dated to the second century and probably recovered from a stupa at Chahar Bagh in Afghanistan, it is a round box of steatite, a soft stone, with a fitted lid and a lotus-shaped knob. Its association with a coin of the Kushan ruler Vima Kadphises helps place it within this period. The container’s careful form contrasts with its eventual concealment: it was prepared to hold valued material inside a monument.

Existing sacred places also continued to attract investment. At Butkara in the Swat valley, a stupa founded before Kushan rule was repeatedly enlarged. Its history illustrates how a Buddhist centre could acquire new architectural layers as communities maintained and embellished a place already regarded as important. Religious patronage often worked through such additions, alongside the establishment of new monuments.

Walking, seeing and making offerings

Circumambulation means walking around a sacred object or building as an act of devotion. A stupa’s exterior and surrounding paths made this movement possible. The worshipper approached the monument, followed a circuit and paid attention to the sacred presence associated with it. Paths organized this movement around the monument and linked its physical form with an act of worship.

Sculpture could accompany that experience. Gandharan reliefs depicting episodes from the Buddha’s life were fitted to the drums of stupas, where successive scenes presented a sacred story around the monument. A relief of the Buddha’s birth, for example, shows his mother Maya grasping a tree branch while the child emerges from her side. The scene represents a miraculous birth in the Buddhist narrative, giving visitors an image through which to recall the Buddha’s life.

Water also had a place in ritual. A bronze vessel lid from first- or second-century Gandhara, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is associated by the museum with vessels used in ritual pouring. The curator relates early examples to relic veneration and later uses to the bathing of sacred images. Handling and pouring water gave the act of honouring a sacred presence a physical expression.

Monasteries as places of worship and support

At Fayaz Tepe, near ancient Termez in present-day Uzbekistan, a Buddhist establishment brought a temple, monastic accommodation and service spaces together, with a stupa outside the main building. Such a layout separated different activities while connecting them within one institution. Monastics needed rooms for residence and shared work, while worship required spaces for images and sacred monuments.

Paintings from Buddhist establishments in Bactria include donors wearing coats and boots. They placed supporters within the visual setting of the religion, sometimes approaching or accompanying sacred figures. Donations helped maintain an institution, but their representation also made the relationship between lay supporters and religious communities visible.

Visitors could travel to established sacred centres for worship, while teachers and images moved between them. These movements had different purposes: seeking a holy place, supporting a dedication and carrying religious instruction could overlap without being identical. Sarnath, near present-day Varanasi, was especially meaningful because Buddhist tradition located the Buddha’s first teaching there. Installing an image at that place connected a gift with a remembered episode of his life.

Installing an image and sharing its benefit

Image inscriptions show what a dedication involved. The monk Bala’s standing figure at Sarnath was made in Mathura and installed in year three of the Kanishka era. A substantial stone umbrella accompanied it. The umbrella translated a sign of honour and protection into a lasting architectural furnishing above a sacred figure. Bringing the monument into place required making, transporting and erecting its parts.

The inscriptions also named participants. Bala was identified as learned in the Tripitaka, the three collections of Buddhist teaching commonly described as monastic discipline, discourses and systematic analysis. The nun Buddhamitra appears within his network, while the governors Vanaspara and Kharapallana were associated with the Sarnath dedication. Religious learning and official support thus met in a concrete project.

At Mathura, a later inscription records an image given by the nun Dhanavati with her parents in year thirty-three of the Kushan era, during Huvishka’s reign. She was the sister’s daughter of Buddhamitra, who was identified as Bala’s pupil. Other Mathura dedications name female teachers and their pupils. These records show women helping create sacred furnishings and maintaining relationships of instruction, as well as participating in family gifts.

The religious purpose extended beyond remembering a donor’s name. Dedication formulas could share the benefit of a gift with parents and all living beings. Merit, the beneficial consequence associated with a good religious act, offered a reason to give that joined personal devotion with concern for others.

Jain and Brahmanical sacred images

Mathura’s workshops also supplied Jain worshippers. Jain Tirthankaras, revered teachers who had attained liberation, were represented standing or seated in meditation. Their stillness and, in many Kushan-period images, nudity expressed renunciation of possessions and bodily attachment. Groups of figures facing different directions allowed a sacred image to address viewers approaching from more than one side.

Brahmanical images made divine attributes equally important. Sculptures of Shiva and Vishnu drew attention to recognizable forms and objects: a trident associated with Shiva, or a wheel, mace and conch associated with Vishnu. Attributes helped worshippers identify a deity and recall the powers or stories connected with it.

In Bactria, a painted terracotta panel dated to about the third century shows a three-headed, four-armed deity identified by the Metropolitan Museum as Shiva, also associated with the Kushan divine name Oesho. An approaching worshipper occupies the same panel. Holes near its corners suggest that it was mounted within a sanctuary, possibly a family shrine. That possible domestic setting brings worship to a smaller scale than a monumental stupa or monastery: a sacred image could also organize devotion within an interior space.