Paths of Inner Cultivation Throughout History and Across Cultures

Across the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions, the human being is understood not only as a being who seeks answers to the question of how to live, but also as a being capable of cultivation. Over the centuries, different traditions have developed distinct ways of working with a person’s inner life: with attention, thought, emotions, desires, memory, the body, and ways of acting. In doing so, they have developed not only abstract teachings, but also disciplines, rituals, meditative and cultivation practices, and related written sources intended to transform a person’s relationship with themselves, others, the world, and—where relevant—the transcendent.

Daoist qingjing 清静 and zuowang 坐忘, Buddhist meditative disciplines, Hindu dhyāna and samādhi, Christian hesychia and apatheia, and Islamic, particularly Sufi, practices such as dhikr and muraqaba belong to very different historical, linguistic, and theological worlds. Similar forms of inner cultivation were also known in various African cultural traditions, although their predominantly oral transmission, later documentation, and unevenly preserved historical sources often make their practices more difficult to access through direct historical reconstruction. For this very reason, they cannot simply be understood as different names for the same experience. Comparing them can, however, reveal how different cultures understand restlessness, desire, attention, attachment, adverse states of human existence, inner silence, and the possibility of comprehending and transcending these states.

In such a comparison, it is important to distinguish between two levels. The first is comparative phenomenology: we can explore how different traditions describe particular forms of inner experience and which practices they use to attain or transcend them. The second is historical genealogy: we must ask whether actual historical connections existed between individual traditions or whether comparable ideas, concepts, and practices developed independently in different cultural settings.

Similarity is therefore not in itself evidence of mutual influence. If several traditions speak of inner silence, the mastery or transformation of desires, liberation from uncontrolled thoughts, or the cultivation of attention, this can provide an important basis for comparison. But similarity alone does not tell us whether a historical connection existed between these traditions. Different evidence is required to establish mutual influence: historical sources, textual parallels, translations, routes by which concepts and practices were transmitted, and information about contact between people and communities.

It is precisely at the intersection of comparative experience and the history of transmission that the Silk Road becomes particularly interesting. It was not a single road, but an extensive network of routes along which not only goods and people travelled, but also texts, concepts, languages, rituals, images, and ways of understanding the human being. Within this broader sphere, traditions from the Indian, Iranian, Central Asian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern worlds encountered and shaped one another, including the Zoroastrian tradition, Buddhism, various Christian traditions, Manichaeism, Islam and, later, various forms of Islamic Sufism, as well as Daoism.

The Silk Road is therefore not merely a geographical concept. It is also a space of encounter, translation, mutual influence, and transformation. When a particular idea moved from one cultural setting to another, it did not necessarily remain unchanged. Translation could involve interpretation, the adoption of a concept could entail placing it in a new context, and an encounter with another tradition could lead to a new understanding of an old concept. In some cases, such transmission can be traced quite precisely; elsewhere, only similarities remain for which a historical connection generally cannot be demonstrated.

We will therefore move gradually from a global overview of different approaches to inner human cultivation to specific historical settings in which these traditions encountered one another. Particular attention will be given to contacts among Indian, Iranian, Central Asian, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Daoist traditions, and to the question of how such encounters changed the meanings of concepts, practices, and understandings of the human being.

Only on this basis will it be possible to examine the relationship between Christianity and Daoism more closely—not as a search for a similarity assumed in advance, but as an exploration of two different levels of comparison. On one level, we can compare how different traditions understand and cultivate human inner life; on the other, we can investigate whether historical evidence of transmission, influence, or direct cultural contact exists for particular similarities. Distinguishing between these two levels prevents similarities from becoming evidence where history does not confirm them and ensures that historical connections are not overlooked where traces of them exist.

Historical examples of inner cultivation

Among the earliest historically documented traditions to develop systematic methods of working with human inner life are the Vedic traditions. Although their early texts were preserved for centuries primarily through oral transmission, later Vedic and post-Vedic literature already reveals a developed terminology for regulating the senses, attention, and mental activity. In the Upanishads, questions of knowledge, inner discipline, and the relationship between the human being and the foundation of reality are connected in ways that would later significantly influence the development of various yogic and meditative traditions.

Within Buddhism, these issues developed within a different conceptual framework. Early Buddhist teachings connect the cultivation of attention, concentration, and insight with an understanding of the arising and cessation of suffering. Different schools subsequently developed different systems of meditative practice, varying both in the methods used and in their understanding of the ultimate goal. Similarly, the Jain tradition developed distinctly systematic forms of disciplining the body, senses, speech, and desires.

In the Greco-Roman world, the question of inner training arose within philosophical practices. For the Stoics, working with impressions and judgements was especially important, since a person was not considered to be determined directly by an external event, but by their relationship to it. Platonic and later Neoplatonic traditions developed other forms of inner ascent and purification. These examples are important primarily because they show that systematic work with human inner life was not limited to religious institutions, but could also form part of philosophy as a way of life.

A different development can be traced in the Iranian world. The Zoroastrian tradition understood human action within an ethical and cosmic order in which thought, word, and deed are connected to human moral responsibility. Later Iranian religious movements, including Manichaeism, developed complex systems of physical and spiritual discipline. Their spread into Central Asia created one of the important historical contexts in which the Indian, Iranian, Buddhist, Christian, and Chinese worlds encountered one another.

In late antiquity, Christian monasticism developed its own methods for the systematic observation and regulation of inner life. One of the most highly developed early examples was formulated by Evagrij Pontski, who connected the analysis of inner thoughts with spiritual practice. In Praktikos and Antirrheticus, he treats mental impulses or thoughts (logismoi λογισμοί) as inner processes that can divert a person from their orientation towards God. His famous scheme of eight thoughts includes gluttony, sexual desire, greed, sadness, anger, spiritual weariness or listlessness (akedia ἀκηδία), vainglory, and pride.

For Evagrij Pontski, cultivation is therefore not limited to external discipline. A person must recognise the activity of individual thoughts, understand their nature, and learn not to consent to them. The ultimate goal is freedom from disturbance (apatheia ἀπάθεια), a state of inner stability that enables unobstructed prayer and contemplation. This establishes an important connection between the analysis of inner processes and practice: understanding the inner life is itself part of its transformation.

In the Islamic world, similar concerns developed within a different theological and anthropological framework. Sufi traditions in particular developed methods for training attention and awareness, among which the remembrance of God (dhikr ذِكْر) and vigilant inner attention (muraqaba مراقبة), connected with awareness of God’s presence, are especially important. Alongside these, various systems developed for working with the self or psyche (nafs نفس), desires, and inner states. Here too, this is not a single unified system, but a historically diverse range of practices belonging to different schools and periods.

For this very reason, Zuowang lun and Evagrij Pontski’s Praktikos are suitable for direct comparison. This is not because their teachings are similar, but because both texts make it possible to reconstruct a gradual path of inner transformation. In Sima Chengzhen, this path progresses from severing ties and attachments (duanyuan 斷緣), through gathering the heart-mind (shouxin 收心), simplifying activities (jianshi 簡事), and true observation (zhenguan 真觀), to great stable concentration (taiding泰定) and attaining the Dao (dedao 得道). In Evagrij Pontski, the process is structured differently: it begins with discerning mental impulses (logismoi λογισμοί), mastering them, and gradually attaining freedom from disturbance (apatheia ἀπάθεια), which opens the way to prayer and contemplation.

The comparison thus reveals not only two different methods of inner training, but also two different understandings of its ultimate horizon. In Sima Chengzhen, inner transformation forms part of the Daoist understanding of the human attainment of the Dao; dedao means merging with the flow of the Dao, rather than simply attaining a psychological state of peace. In Evagrij Pontski, inner transformation leads to prayer and contemplation of God and is therefore inseparable from the Christian understanding of the human being as oriented towards God. The difference between the two traditions thus lies not primarily in the fact that one seeks peace while the other does not, but in how inner transformation is understood ontologically and in the mode of being towards which it is intended to lead the human being.

It is precisely here that the limits of every superficial comparison become apparent. Similarities between particular cultivation practices or descriptions of inner states do not imply similarities between their underlying anthropological and ontological assumptions. Zuowang and apatheia can therefore be compared as historically distinct ways of working with human inner life, but their meaning cannot be determined independently of broader conceptions of the Dao, God, the human being, and the ultimate goal of cultivation.

The Silk Road as a space of transmission and exchange

Only on this basis does the question of the Silk Road arise. If a comparison of Sima Chengzhen’s Zuowang lun and Evagrij Pontski’s Praktikos shows that related problems of inner cultivation can be framed within different religious and ontological contexts, the history of transmission makes the next step possible: asking how such texts, concepts, and practices actually moved between different cultural settings.

In this respect, the Silk Road is important as a multilingual and multicultural space of transmission. This does not mean assuming that Daoist and Christian practices spread directly along the same routes or that similarities between them demonstrate mutual influence. What can be traced historically, however, are particular texts, their translations, and their movement through different linguistic environments. Such examples provide a considerably more precise insight into the processes of cultural transmission than merely comparing similar concepts or practices.

Evagrij Pontski’s Antirrheticus is a particularly important example. The text was translated into Syriac, and a Sogdian version was subsequently produced from the Syriac translation. Sogdian fragments have survived among manuscript materials from the Turfan collections and make it possible to trace directly one of the routes along which Christian literature on inner cultivation travelled from the Middle East towards Central Asia. (The Sogdian fragments have survived in various Turfan manuscript collections, including the Berlin Turfan Collection.)

Such a route is methodologically more significant than a general claim about the “influence of the Silk Road,” since it allows us to ask what happened to the text at each transition between languages and cultural settings. Translation is not necessarily merely the transfer of a text from one language to another; it can also involve terminological, conceptual, and interpretative adaptation.

Within this context, Turfan acquires particular significance, as manuscripts from different linguistic and religious traditions have been preserved there. The Turfan material does not represent a unified cultural corpus, but rather the material traces of a space where Chinese, Iranian, Turkic, Indian, and Christian cultural currents encountered one another. The Sogdian Christian fragments are therefore important not only as evidence of the presence of Christian literature in Central Asia, but also as evidence that particular intellectual and religious content could be transmitted through several successive linguistic environments.

Yet such a route does not imply a one-way cultural flow. On the contrary, it raises the question of whether transmission in the opposite direction can also be demonstrated, and what role translators, trading communities, monks, religious communities, and multilingual environments played in it.

In the case of Buddhist material, this possibility is particularly well documented. Sogdian manuscripts attest to the presence of Buddhist literature in Central Asia, while individual texts also make it possible to investigate the relationships between Sogdian and Chinese versions. The Christian example shows another direction: a text originating in a Greek and Egyptian Christian environment was translated into Syriac and then into Sogdian, thus appearing within the cultural sphere of the northern Silk Road.

The Chinese sphere, however, must be understood differently in such a discussion. Foreign traditions entering it did not arrive in a cultural vacuum, but in an environment that had already been shaped for centuries by various Chinese philosophical and religious traditions, including Daoism. Daoist concepts, ideas about the human being, the body, nature, and the cosmos, and various forms of inner and ritual cultivation formed part of the broader cultural environment in which foreign traditions were also translated and interpreted. It is therefore impossible simply to assume in every individual case that a particular Chinese element was Daoist in origin. Specific textual, terminological, and historical connections must be investigated.

It is precisely this distinction that raises an important question for further research. While some routes allow us to trace a sequence of translations directly—for example, from Greek through Syriac and Sogdian to Central Asia—it is often more difficult within the Chinese sphere to distinguish between the direct influence of a particular tradition and the broader cultural environment in which different traditions transformed one another. This also applies to the question of possible Daoist influence on foreign traditions entering China, as well as to the question of how Chinese traditions themselves changed following their arrival.

The Silk Road thus appears less as a single “route of influence” and more as a space of multidirectional transmission in which texts and concepts moved between different languages, religions, and cultural environments. Comparing different routes of transmission allows us to ask a more precise question: when can we speak of actual transmission, when of local transformation, and when merely of the parallel development of similar forms of inner cultivation?

This is crucial for comparing Daoism and Christianity. Before we can speak of possible historical contacts between them, we must first reconstruct the networks of intermediaries, translation environments, and cultural contacts through which individual traditions could have encountered one another. Turfan is one of the places where such a multilingual and multireligious history can be studied on the basis of preserved manuscript materials. Individual examples, however, do not yet allow broader conclusions about mutual influence. This opens an extensive field of research requiring systematic work with manuscript collections, philological comparison of texts in different languages, and historical reconstruction of their routes of transmission. Compared with some better-researched forms of intercultural transmission, this field remains relatively underexplored. Systematic research into these connections could significantly enrich our understanding of cultural contacts among the Chinese, Central Asian, and Christian worlds of the period.

Yuan Weiqi

P.S. (to be continued in Daoist Practices)