Despite the ever-changing political and religious landscape of India in the first millennium GE, the patterns of worship of the laity were oddly stable. For the most part, the laity continued to worship in much the same way as they always had. The laity continued to frequent religious sites that provided them with processional paths that brought them into proximity of their gods. In Buddhism, this proximity was created through the iconic relics entombed within stupas. In early Hindu sects, this was accomplished through iconic images of the gods placed in the heart of Hindu temples. Rather than rival religious sects attempting to alter lay religious practice to new and different forms, it appears that rival religious sects altered their own practices, either conforming to the patterns of lay practice or shifting away from them. The Buddhist sangha, relying on their ever-increasing endowments of money and land, recreated Buddhism in a form distant from lay practice. Over the course of the first millennium, the sangha progressively abandoned the laity, segregating themselves within viharas centered on Buddha images. Early Hindus, in contrast, adopted the ritual and religious foci of early Buddhism, attracting the devotions of the laity. Whether Shaivite or Vaishnavite, early Hindus refashioned their temples to mimic the feel of Buddhist temples. In the case of Shaivites, this even included refashioning their ritual foci—linga—to more closely approximate a stupa. In the case of Vaishnavites, Buddhists were incorporated by subsuming the Buddha as one of several avatars of Vishnu. In either case, Hindus gained the devotions of lay Buddhists by refashioning themselves rather than refashioning the laity.
By the end of the first millennium GE, the monastically based sangha had separated themselves from day-to-day interactions with the laity, and smaller Buddhist monastic/pilgrimage sites were being abandoned or taken over by Hindus, Jains, or other sects. In the early centuries of the second millennium GE, even Buddhist monasteries began to fail, and by the mid-second millennium CE, only vestiges of Buddhism remained in the practices of rival religious orders. In the late first and early second millennium ce, the Buddhist sangha in India failed to adapt to the changing political, economic, and religious context. When faced with crisis, the monastically based sangha could no longer fall back on the support of the laity since the laity had long since switched their allegiances to rival religious orders. The degree to which vestiges of Buddhism remained in India was the result of a small number of Buddhist ascetics who had left the monasteries in the late first millennium CE and championed a new, highly syncretic, form of Buddhism—Tantric Buddhism.
World History
