Lonely boy and his scribbles

   History often pretends that empires weep. It tells us that rulers, broken by the blood they spill, turn their faces to heaven and beg forgiveness. It clutches onto kings who issue edicts of mercy and brands them as saints in crowns. Yet the truth is older, colder, and more intricate: rulers who master conquest must master mercy too — for no sword endures that cannot also mend. Ashoka Maurya — Chandragupta’s grandson, the inheritor of an empire spanning mountains, rivers, and deserts — was no gentle spirit in his youth. Kalinga bled under his ambitions, its fields strewn with bodies, its cities consumed by fire. It was only after the conquest was complete, after the screams had faded into ash, that the emperor gazed upon his work and recoiled. But contrary to popular belief, Ashoka did not vanish into the robes of a monk; he remained Chakravartin — the Universal Monarch — supreme lawgiver, military sovereign, keeper of order. His embrace of Dhamma was no abdication of power...

  There are deserts that bury time—and there are deserts that preserve it. In the shifting sands of the Gobi lies Dunhuang, a remote frontier town that once shimmered as a node of faith, trade, and transcontinental ambition. Its famed Mogao Caves —nestled in the arid silence of China’s edge—stand not only as repositories of Buddhist art but as vaults of civilizational sediment. Mural by mural, manuscript by manuscript, they whisper the dreams and doctrines of monks, merchants, pilgrims, and empires. Yet the most astonishing journey to Dunhuang in the 21st century does not involve camel caravans or imperial envoys—it begins at a keyboard. Through visionary efforts like the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) and Digital Dunhuang , a library once hidden in the bowels of Cave 17 is now a click away. Initiated in the late 1990s, the IDP is a collaborative effort involving institutions from across the globe—most notably the British Library, the National Library of China, the Dunhuang A...

  What the Jesuit Catholics achieved in Goa is a story of blood, power, and suppression—the might of a naval empire propelled by the zeal of a faith system that had already overhauled European culture itself. Gods ran—or rather, were taken away from—the Goan confines to make way for another God, one accompanied not by angels or saints, but by guns and cannons. If anything, it was a testament to the idea that the might of man was less a product of the deity he prayed to than of the violence he could unleash. However, when the same Portuguese ships sailed along the Malabar Coast, what they saw was not a land ripe for utter cleansing by the works of fallen angels, as they had perceived in other pagan territories. In Goa and elsewhere, all they saw were the dwellings of demonic forces in Hindu idols. But in Kerala, they encountered a different kind of world altogether—a land where an early memory of the Anointed One took root independently—while the Iberian world was still debating the...

        While the Bible and the early Churches reveled in prophecies of a Levantine tribe, they remained blind to the rise of an Arabian one in their temporal midst—one that would storm the world and strangle the spread of the Christian faith with an Abrahamic chain all the same. How do you fight heresy when you yourselves become heretics overnight? How do you enter the 'heathen lands' when you are branded the 'infidels'? How do you wage wars in the name of your God when that very God is now cloaked in a different tongue, praised with cries of 'Greatness,' and wielded to conquer your lands with a fervor and swiftness unknown to mankind? From the fall of Jerusalem in 638 to the loss of Alexandria, Antioch, and Carthage—pillars of early Christendom—the Islamic expansion dismantled not only the Eastern Roman Empire’s spiritual frontier, but its political one as well. For a religion that once sought to convert Rome and claim the soul of Caesar, this sudden reversal ...