Religious Influences Reflected in Turkic Culture and Manuscript Sources: The Cases of Buddhism and Christianity

Research Article

Abstract

The article examines how Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were manifested in the culture and manuscript tradition of the Turkic peoples in Central Asia and Eastern Turkestan. The relevance of the study lies in the need to reconsider the religious history of the Turks, which has long been viewed mainly through the prism of traditional steppe beliefs or later Islamisation. Drawing on written, epigraphic and archaeological sources, as well as multilingual manuscript materials in Sogdian, Syriac, Middle Persian, Uyghur and Turkic, the study reconstructs the main channels through which new religious doctrines penetrated the Turkic milieu via Sogdian colonies, the Turfan oasis and Nestorian missions. It also traces the changing attitude of the Turkic elite towards Buddhism, from the patronage of Muqan and Taspar qaghans to Bilge qaghan’s refusal to build temples on the advice of Tonyukuk, and considers the adoption of Manichaeism by the Uyghur Qaghanate in 762. The analysis shows that Buddhism and Christianity never became fully dominant religions among the Turks; instead, they coexisted with archaic steppe beliefs and contributed to the formation of a multi-layered spiritual space. In nomadic regions these teachings did not take deep root, but they left a significant imprint on cultural practices, written tradition and symbolic representations. Attention is also paid to the linguistic and cultural codes preserved in manuscript texts, which reflect not only dogmatic ideas, but also social relations, political ideology and mechanisms of cultural communication in the early medieval Turkic world. The article argues that Buddhist and Christian texts functioned as important instruments of multilingualism and cultural mediation, while the nomadic way of life itself acted as a “conservator” of archaic beliefs. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the Turkic cultural space was religiously open, flexible and internally diverse, and that Buddhism and Christianity became an integral component of the spiritual and cultural development of Turkic civilisation without destroying its traditional foundations.