Buddhism reached what is now southern Uzbekistan during the Kushan Empire (c. 30–375 CE), transmitted from India along the same trade routes that carried silk and spices.
Key Buddhist sites in Uzbekistan:
- Fayaz-Tepa (near Termez) — a 1st-century monastery with a prayer hall, dormitories, and Gandharan wall paintings showing Greek-Indian artistic fusion.
- Kara-Tepa — a cave monastery cut into hillside cliffs.
- Zurmala Stupa — a 15-metre brick pyramid near Termez, one of the oldest stupas outside India.
- Dalvarzin-Tepa — a Kushan city with Buddhist temple remains.
The Kushan king Kanishka I (r. c. 127–150 CE) was a great patron of Buddhism and convened the Fourth Buddhist Council. Under Kushan rule, the Gandhara art style (Greek naturalism merged with Buddhist iconography) flourished in northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan.
Buddhism declined in Central Asia during the: - Hephthalite (White Hun) invasions (5th–6th c.) — sporadic persecution. - Arab Islamic conquest (7th–8th c.) — final displacement. Monasteries were abandoned; monks migrated east toward China and Tibet.
By 800 CE Buddhism had effectively vanished from the region. The archaeological remains were buried and forgotten until Soviet excavations in the 1960s–1980s.
Uzbekistan in photos
A short visual companion to this entry — photographs from our Uzbekistan travel archive.
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