The common historical identity of Fana and Nirvana in the literature of Sufis and Buddhists of the Great Khorasan

There have been many discussions among the historians of religions about the influence of the concepts of Fana and Nirvana, which, despite being fruitful, have been inconclusive and have not led to a definite conclusion. This disagreement seems to have been originated from purely theological interpretations outside the historical framework. In the meantime, there has been a hidden and perhaps unintentional tendency to highlight the semantic differences between the two concepts of Fana and Nirvana, especially by Iranian scholars,  who have used the interpretation of Sufi death and Fana in their virtual meanings. This article is an attempt to show the Buddhist-Sufi religious interactions based on historical evidences and clues and the issue of corpse in Sufi narrations as well as the use of common symbols in Buddhist literature and Persian mystical texts in the common geographical space of the Great Khorasan. Such an investigation has been neglected in the field of interdisciplinary research. The research method in this paper was historical research based on library sources.