Spread of Indian Culture Abroad: Temples, Texts and Monks

The correct answer is B, Suryavarman II, dedicated to Vishnu. The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the national flag of Cambodia. Option A is wrong because Jayavarman VII, who ruled later, built Angkor Thom with the Bayon at its centre and was a Mahayana Buddhist, which is why the faces on the Bayon are Buddhist. Option C is wrong because Rajendra Chola I was an Indian ruler whose fleet raided Srivijaya; he built the Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple in the Tamil country, not in Cambodia. Option D is wrong because Kaundinya belongs to the founding legend of the earlier kingdom of Funan and built nothing of this kind.

The correct answer is A, the Sailendra dynasty and Buddhism. Borobudur was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Sailendra rulers of Java as a Buddhist monument in the form of a stepped pyramid whose galleries carry carved panels of the life and teaching of the Buddha, with seated Buddha images in open stupas on the upper terraces. Option B is wrong because Majapahit was a later Hindu-Buddhist empire of Java and Islam came to the islands centuries after Borobudur was built. Option C is wrong on religion, since Jainism did not travel to South-East Asia in this way, although the dynasty named is correct. Option D is wrong because the Palas ruled in Bengal and Bihar and were patrons of Nalanda and Vikramashila; the Hindu monument of Java is Prambanan, built chiefly for Shiva.

The correct answer is B, Thailand. The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya. Option A is wrong because the Javanese version is the Kakawin Ramayana, which is performed in wayang kulit shadow theatre. Option C is wrong because the Cambodian version is called the Reamker, carved and painted in the Khmer temples. Option D is wrong because the Burmese version is known as the Yama Zatdaw. All four countries have a Ramayana of their own, which is itself the point of such a question, so the names must be matched carefully rather than guessed.

The correct answer is B. Ashoka sent his son Mahendra, known in the Pali chronicles as Mahinda, to Sri Lanka, where the king of the island received the teaching, and afterwards the nun Sanghamitra came with a branch of the Bodhi tree, which was planted at Anuradhapura. The story is told in the Pali chronicles Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa. Option A is wrong because Bodhidharma is linked with China, where his school became Chan and in Japan Zen, and Bodhisena with the Todaiji temple at Nara in Japan. Option C is wrong because Shantarakshita and Padmasambhava established Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century, a thousand years after Ashoka. Option D is wrong because Faxian and Xuanzang were Chinese pilgrims who came to India to study, not Indian missionaries sent abroad. The mission to Sri Lanka is the one Ashoka sent that is remembered by name, and the Bodhi tree at Anuradhapura is pointed to as its living proof.

The correct answer is B, Afghanistan. The two giant Buddhas were carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan valley, on the branch of the Silk Route that carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia, and they were destroyed in 2001; the valley remains on the World Heritage list for the surviving caves and paintings. Option A is wrong, and is the usual trap, because Pakistan holds the Gandhara sites of Taxila and Takht-i-Bahi and the museum sculptures of that school, but not the Bamiyan figures. Option C is wrong because Uzbekistan has the Buddhist remains of Termez and the great Islamic monuments of Samarkand and Bukhara. Option D is wrong because Iran lay on the route but is associated with the Zoroastrian and later Islamic tradition rather than with carvings of this kind.

The correct answer is A, Vietnam. The kingdom of Champa held the central coast of what is now Vietnam for many centuries, used Sanskrit in its inscriptions and built brick temples to Shiva, of which the group at My Son is the largest and is a World Heritage site. Option B is wrong because Laos is associated with Theravada Buddhism, the town of Luang Prabang and the Lao Ramayana, Phra Lak Phra Ram. Option C is wrong because Malaysia's early Indianised remains lie in Kedah and the Bujang valley, which are smaller shrines rather than a temple city. Option D is wrong because the Philippines shows Indian influence mainly through words, as in the Laguna copperplate inscription of the tenth century, and has no temple complex of this kind. Champa and the Cham people are the names to remember with Vietnam.

The correct answer is B, Bodhidharma, remembered in tradition as a prince of the Pallava country in south India who travelled to China and taught a path resting on meditation rather than on scripture; the school he founded is Chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese, and legend attaches him to the Shaolin monastery. Option A is wrong because Atisha went from Vikramashila to Tibet in the eleventh century and reformed monastic learning there. Option C is wrong because Kumarajiva, who came from Kucha in Central Asia, was the great translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese but is not the founder of the meditation school. Option D is wrong because Silabhadra was the teacher at Nalanda under whom the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied, and he remained in India. The pair to hold is Bodhidharma with China and Bodhisena with Japan.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka, the Kushan ruler who called the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir and under whose empire, stretching from the Gangetic plain into Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura styles of sculpture travelled up the trade routes to Khotan, Kucha and Dunhuang. Option A is wrong because Ashoka called the third council at Pataliputra and sent the missions abroad. Option B is wrong because Kalashoka of the Shishunaga line called the second council at Vaishali. Option D is wrong because Ajatashatru of Magadha was the ruler at the time of the first council, held at Rajagriha soon after the Buddha's death. The sequence of councils, with the ruler and the place of each, is asked so often that it should be memorised as a single table.

The correct answer is A, the Panchatantra, the collection of animal fables used to teach statecraft to young princes. It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe. Option B is wrong because the Arthashastra, the treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, was not transmitted west in this way and was rediscovered in India only in the twentieth century. Option C is wrong because the Natyashastra of Bharata is the treatise on drama, dance and music and stayed within the Indian tradition. Option D is wrong because the Ashtadhyayi of Panini is the grammar of Sanskrit, a technical work with no such career abroad.

The correct answer is B, Ayutthaya, the capital of the Thai kingdom for some four centuries and now a World Heritage site of ruined temples and Buddha images. The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama. Option A is wrong because Sukhothai was the earlier Thai capital, famous for the walking Buddha image and for the first Thai script, but its name is Sanskrit for the dawn of happiness rather than a form of Ayodhya. Option C is wrong because Chiang Mai was the capital of the northern Lanna kingdom. Option D is wrong because Nakhon Pathom is an ancient Buddhist centre with a great stupa, and its name means the first city, not Ayodhya.

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of the country of his time. Option A is wrong because Faxian came in the reign of Chandragupta II of the Gupta line, two centuries earlier, and his account is of monasteries and towns rather than of study at Nalanda. Option C is wrong because Yijing came later still and wrote mainly about monastic discipline and the sea route. Option D is wrong because Song Yun came as an envoy in the Huna period and left only a brief notice. Pairing each pilgrim with the Indian ruler of his visit is the quickest way to answer such questions.