Rashid al-Din: Buddhism in Iran and the Mongol Silk Roads

Buddhism was not entirely a newcomer to Iran when it first arrived at the doorsteps of the Iranian world under the Mongol auspices in the mid-thirteenth century. Eastern Iran was a center of Buddhist activity and learning, mainly in the second and third centuries C.E. In the centuries following the seventh-century expansion of Islam into the Persian speaking world, Muslims continued to encounter Buddhism, mainly through the abundant Buddhist artifacts and ruins that dotted the eastern parts of Iran and Khurasan, or through the contributions of Buddhist scholars to the Arabic translation of Sanskrit medical treatises in the cosmopolitan intellectual scene...