The Oldest Road Home

Globalism, the Axial Age, and What Nations Lose When They Close Their Doors

I. The World Has Always Moved

There is a myth embedded in the current wave of nationalist politics, one that its proponents rarely examine too closely: the myth of the self-sufficient civilization, the sovereign people who once thrived in proud isolation, whose identity was formed in the absence of outside influence, and who can return to that pristine condition by simply closing the gate. It is a compelling story. It is also, as history demonstrates with almost tedious consistency, a lie.

Human beings have been crossing boundaries since before the concept of a boundary existed. The movement of goods, people, languages, and — most consequentially — ideas across the face of the earth is not a modern aberration engineered by elites. It is the oldest and most persistent feature of our species. We are, at the cellular level, a mixing people. Our civilizations have never been otherwise.

The Silk Road and the Axial Age stand as the two most instructive examples of what that mixing can produce — and they are not as separate as they might first appear. Together they offer a kind of master argument for the indispensability of cross-cultural encounter, one that the present moment urgently needs to hear.

II. The Axial Age: When the World Thought Together

Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, something unprecedented happened across Eurasia. In China, Confucius and Laozi were laying the foundations of ethical and cosmological thought that would shape half of humanity for the next two and a half millennia. In India, the sages of the Upanishads were probing the nature of Atman and Brahman, while Siddhartha Gautama was discovering, under the Bodhi tree, a path of liberation that would eventually become the first truly global missionary religion. In Persia, Zoroaster was articulating a moral cosmology of light and darkness whose influence would echo through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for centuries to come. In the Greek world, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were establishing the framework of rational inquiry and ethical discourse that still animates Western philosophy. In the Levant, the Hebrew prophets were transforming a tribal covenant religion into a universal moral monotheism.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who coined the term “Axial Age” in 1949, was struck above all by the simultaneity of these developments. Without any apparent direct communication between them, human beings at opposite ends of the known world seemed to be asking the same questions at the same time: What is the nature of reality? What constitutes the good life? How should human beings treat one another? What lies beyond the cycle of suffering and grasping? The answers differed. The urgency of the inquiry did not.

Scholars have proposed various explanations for this convergence. Robert Bellah pointed to the role of increasing social complexity and urbanization; the emergence of larger political units and specialized intellectual classes created the conditions for abstract ethical reflection. Others have emphasized the role of iron technology and expanded agricultural productivity, which created the material surplus necessary to support a class of thinkers who were not full-time farmers or warriors. Still others have noted that the Axial period was not, in fact, as isolated as Jaspers suggested — that trade networks and diplomatic contacts across Eurasia were more robust even then than we often imagine. The simultaneity may reflect, at least in part, the earliest stirrings of precisely the cross-cultural fertilization that the Silk Road would later make so dramatically visible.

What is not in dispute is the result. The Axial Age produced the spiritual and philosophical inheritance that virtually every human being on earth still lives within. Whether one practices Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Taoism — or draws on the secular ethical traditions descended from Greek philosophy — one is living in a world shaped by a period when human consciousness made a collective leap. And that leap was made possible, in large part, by the conditions of encounter, instability, and cross-pollination that attended the collapse of older, more parochial certainties.

III. The Silk Road: An Intellectual Superhighway Disguised as a Trade Route

The network of overland and maritime routes that the nineteenth-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen called the “Silk Road” stretched from the Han dynasty capitals of China westward through Central Asia, Persia, and the Levant, branching into the Mediterranean world and southward into the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. It functioned continuously for roughly fifteen centuries, from the opening of Han dynasty trade around 130 BCE until the Ottoman closure of overland routes in 1453 CE redirected European commerce toward the sea.

The name, as so often happens with names, is misleading. Silk was important — valued as a symbol of civilization, used in religious ritual and diplomatic exchange, coveted as luxury goods — but it was one commodity among dozens. What moved along those routes included spices, metals, glassware, ceramics, horses, paper, gunpowder, and agricultural techniques. The compass reached the Arab world from China; papermaking technology traveled from China through the Islamic world to medieval Europe, enabling the spread of learning on a scale previously impossible. Mathematical concepts developed in India were carried westward, eventually giving European science the numerical system it still uses.

But the most consequential cargo was invisible. It was ideas, and above all, religions.

Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Islam all spread along the Silk Road’s network of routes, carried by merchants, monks, and missionaries who often traveled together, stayed in the same caravanserais, ate at the same tables, and talked through the night. The cities of the road — Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, Taxila, Dunhuang — were not merely commercial hubs. They were cosmopolitan centers of intellectual and spiritual ferment, places where a Gandharan monk fluent in Greek might encounter a Stoic philosopher who had heard of Buddhist meditation, where Nestorian Christian missionaries rubbed shoulders with Zoroastrian priests and nascent Islamic scholars.

The consequences of these encounters were not superficial. Buddhism was transformed by its passage through the Greek-inflected culture of Gandhara, where the first anthropomorphic images of the Buddha appeared, reflecting Hellenistic artistic conventions. The Mahayana movement — with its bodhisattva ideal, its devotional warmth, its willingness to open the path of liberation to all beings rather than a monastic elite — emerged in precisely this environment, in communities where multiple cosmological vocabularies were in constant dialogue. The trikaya doctrine, which opens up metaphysical territory that early Buddhism had deliberately left foreclosed, may owe something to Zoroastrian and proto-Christian ideas about incarnation and the mediation of the divine. The Perfection of Wisdom literature, the oldest Mahayana scriptures, was composed in Gandhari and preserved in the caves of Dunhuang, in a culture where bilingual Greek-Kharoshthi inscriptions were entirely commonplace.

None of this represents contamination. It represents vitality. Traditions that engage with other traditions do not lose themselves; they discover new dimensions of themselves. The history of religion on the Silk Road is, as the Smithsonian Institution has described it, a remarkable illustration of how beliefs and civilizations tend to reflect a broad pattern of synthesis rather than clash — provided the conditions for genuine encounter exist.

IV. What Globalism Actually Means

The word “globalism” has been weaponized in recent years, transformed by nationalist rhetoric into a kind of cipher for the dissolution of national identity, the suppression of local culture, the triumph of faceless transnational capital over the communities of real human beings. There is a legitimate critique buried in that anxiety. Unconstrained global capital markets can and do devastate local economies. Supply chains optimized for efficiency rather than resilience can leave populations exposed when they break down. The globalization of the past several decades has produced real winners and real losers, and the losers have had legitimate grievances.

But this is not what the Silk Road was. And it is not what the deeper argument for the sharing of goods, services, and ideas actually rests on. The case for globalism — in its most serious form — is not a case for corporate monoculture or the erosion of local identity. It is a case for the irreplaceable value of encounter, exchange, and mutual recognition across difference. It is a case rooted in the observable fact that the most creative, most generative, most spiritually and intellectually fertile periods in human history have consistently been periods of intensified contact between different traditions.

The Axial sages were not isolated geniuses. They emerged from conditions of cultural complexity, social upheaval, and cross-cultural stimulus. The Silk Road’s great religious syntheses were not accidents. They were the natural product of communities in which diverse ways of understanding the world were in genuine, sustained conversation. The Islamic Golden Age — that extraordinary flowering of science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and art between the eighth and thirteenth centuries — was built on exactly this foundation: the systematic translation and synthesis of Greek, Persian, Indian, and earlier Mesopotamian knowledge, pursued in a culture that understood, at least for a time, that wisdom does not belong to any single people.

Medieval Europe rediscovered Aristotle not through direct transmission but through Arabic translations and commentaries. The Renaissance was fertilized by Byzantine scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople. The Scientific Revolution built on Arab mathematics and Persian astronomy. There is no example in history of a civilization that achieved greatness in genuine isolation. Isolation produces stagnation. It is encounter and conversation that produces transformation.

V. The Chaos of Closing

We are living through one of the more alarming reversals in modern history. After decades during which the world appeared, however imperfectly and unevenly, to be moving toward greater interdependence and cooperation, the dominant political energy in many of the world’s most powerful nations is now directed toward withdrawal. Tariffs, walls, the re-nationalization of supply chains, the rejection of international institutions, the cultivation of suspicion toward outsiders, the valorization of cultural purity — these are the defining features of our current political moment in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable a generation ago.

The consequences are already visible and are likely to deepen. Economically, the disruption of supply chains and the re-imposition of trade barriers impoverish the very populations they purport to protect, raising prices on goods, reducing access to markets, and eliminating the efficiencies that make modern standards of living possible for ordinary people. The nations that lead in the development of new technologies — in artificial intelligence, clean energy, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing — will be those with the most open access to global talent, global capital, and global ideas. Withdrawal is a strategy for irrelevance.

But the damage runs deeper than the economic. There is a spiritual and moral dimension to the closure of nations that rarely makes it into the policy debates, and it matters enormously. When we close ourselves off from genuine encounter with the other — when we reduce the foreigner to a threat, the immigrant to an invader, the foreign culture to a contaminant — we do not protect our identity. We impoverish it. We cut ourselves off from the very sources of renewal that all healthy traditions require.

The ethical frameworks that are now in such visible collapse — the commitment to truth, to the common good, to the dignity of the stranger, to the legitimacy of institutions that constrain raw power — are not the inventions of any single culture. They are the accumulated inheritance of the Axial Age, refined and extended across millennia of exactly the kind of cross-cultural encounter that nationalism now seeks to foreclose. When we tear down the conditions that made that inheritance possible, we should not be surprised to find its fruits disappearing.

There is a painful irony at the heart of today’s cultural nationalism. Its adherents invoke the greatness of their respective civilizations — American, European, Chinese, Indian, Russian — while pursuing policies that systematically undermine the conditions under which those civilizations actually became great. No civilization has ever been the sole author of its own greatness. The acknowledgment of that fact is not weakness. It is historical literacy.

VI. A New Axial Age, or Its Opposite?

Some thoughtful observers have argued that we may be living through a second Axial Age — a period of civilizational transformation comparable in scope and depth to the original, driven by the collapse of old certainties, the inadequacy of inherited frameworks, and the pressing need for new moral and spiritual orientations adequate to our unprecedented situation. The conditions are certainly suggestive. Traditional religious institutions are in broad decline across the developed world. The scientific worldview, for all its extraordinary power, has not filled the meaning-vacuum its predecessor cosmologies once occupied. The ecological crisis confronts us with questions about the relationship between humanity and the living world that our existing ethical frameworks are ill-equipped to address. The development of artificial intelligence raises fundamental questions about consciousness, agency, and the nature of mind that Buddhist and other contemplative traditions may be uniquely positioned to illuminate.

If something like a second Axial Age is possible — if the current period of crisis and dissolution could prove, as the original did, to be not an ending but a labor pain — it will require exactly what the original required: genuine conversation across difference. It will require Buddhist practitioners and Christian contemplatives and Jewish scholars and secular philosophers and indigenous wisdom keepers and climate scientists to actually talk to one another, to take one another seriously, to allow the encounter to be genuinely transformative rather than merely politely multiculturalist. That kind of encounter does not happen when nations close their borders and declare their own traditions sufficient. It happens in the caravanserai.

The alternative — the trajectory we appear to be on if current political trends continue — is not a return to some pristine national wholeness. It is a deepening of the fragmentation, the mutual incomprehension, the ethical impoverishment, and the civilizational stagnation that have historically characterized periods of closure. History does not offer a single example of a great idea, a great art form, a great religion, or a great scientific discovery that was born in isolation. Every one of them was born at a crossing.

VII. The Road Is Still There

Somewhere in the limestone caves of Dunhuang, sealed for a thousand years against the desert air, the oldest printed book in the world — a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra — survived its long wait for rediscovery. It had been carried there along the Silk Road from India, through the linguistic and cultural crucible of Gandhara, transformed in its passage, enriched by encounter with Greek aesthetics and Central Asian cosmology, and finally preserved in a Chinese desert by a community of monks who understood that wisdom, to remain living, must be transmitted. It cannot be hoarded. It cannot be fortified. It travels, or it dies.

The road those monks knew — the ancient network of human encounter that carried silk and spices and the Dharma and the alphabet and the zero and the compass and countless forgotten songs and remedies and cosmologies from one end of the known world to the other — did not survive because it was protected by walls. It survived because generation after generation of human beings found, in the encounter with the stranger, something that could not be found at home: the mirror that shows you what you could not see without it, the question that your own tradition has not yet learned to ask, the answer that was waiting on the other side of the mountain.

The road is still there. The only question is whether we are still willing to walk it.

Nichiryu Mark Herrick is a dharma teacher in the Nichiren Buddhist tradition and the founding teacher of Myōkan-ji Temple of Sublime Contemplation and the Two Buddhas Meditation Community in Piedmont, California. He is the author of Dharmakaya and God: A Buddhist’s Journey Through Comparative Mysticism and The Living Sound: An Introduction to the Odaimoku, among other works. He writes regularly at twobuddhas.org.