Vajrayana, Mahayana, and Theravada are the most practiced forms of Buddhism today but there were a lot of changes within the Mahayaha practice when the expansion of Buddhism crossed the Silk Road.

The Silk Road and its travelers -- Religion and trade in ancient Eurasia -- Buddhism and the Silk Road -- A refuge of heretics : Nestorians and Manicheans on the Silk Road -- The Islamization of the ...

"In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to ...

Mahāyāna is the name of one of the two primary branches of Buddhism. The word is formulated from the Sanskrit “mahā,” meaning great or large, and “yāna,” meaning vehicle. Taken together, the term can ...

Editor’s Note: Sumnima Udas is CNN’s presenter of ‘The Silk Road: Past, Present, Future’, an epic journey from east to west along the ancient trade route, exploring how traditional culture, arts, and ...

Under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a curious entanglement of economic investments and Buddhist diplomacy has been carried out in countries like Sri Lanka. This may at first appear an odd ...

The history of the Silk Road, a vast network of ancient and medieval trade routes connecting Beijing and Hangzhou with Constantinople and Cairo, has mostly been focused on its endpoints: China and the ...

This story appears in the June 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. The human skeletons were piled up like signposts in the sand. For Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk traveling the Silk Road in A.D.

In spite of the name, the Silk Road was not a road, but actually an entire trade route network which was active from the 2nd Century A.D. until the mid-15th Century. It was an intricate web of land ...

Researchers are uncovering what they think is the metropolis of Marsmanda, an iron-making city that could rewrite the history of the famed trade route The Tugunbulak settlement was inhabited between ...