The decline of Buddhism in India was not a singular event, with a singular cause; it was a centuries-long process that unfolded in a patchwork. The
2.Stupas in the form of mandalas were elaborated and perfected at contemporary Buddhist stupas at Borobudur in Java (c. ninth century ge) and later Angkor Wat in Cambodia (c. twelfth century ge).
Seeds of Buddhism’s decline began in the mid-first millennium CE, when the sangha began withdrawing into their monasteries and divorcing themselves from day-to-day interactions with the laity. Into this spiritual void stepped Hindu and Jain sects, who revamped their ritual practices and religious architecture to more closely resemble traditional Buddhist practices. In the South and West of India, Hindu and Jain sects increasingly earned the support of the political and economic elite. In the Western Ghats, the last major Buddhist temples were constructed at Ellora in the seventh and eighth centuries ce. Across South India, the sangha abandoned Buddhist sites, many of which were later reoccupied by Hindus and Jains. While some small Buddhist centers still persisted in South and West India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for the most part, both monastic and lay Buddhism had been eclipsed and replaced by Hinduism and Jainism by the end of the first millennium CE.
The history of Buddhism in Northwest India follows closely the patterns of the South and West. At Takht-I-Bahi, the last major constructions occurred in sixth and seventh centuries CE. By the late seventh and early eighth centuries, the Gurjara-Pratiharas actively supported Hindu sects. At the same time, the central Asian states to the north were increasingly adopting Islam, which was rapidly replacing Buddhism as the trade religion along the Silk Roads. In the eleventh century CE, Northwest India was subject to numerous attacks by the Ghaznavids, an Islamic state based in Afghanistan. In 1001 CE, Mahmud of Ghazni took the city of Peshawar in modern Pakistan and captured the Shahi King Jayapala. Rather than hold the territory, Mahmud of Ghazni looted the city, ransomed the king, and returned to Afghanistan, using the wealth to finance his campaigns against rival states in Central Asia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Mahmud and later Ghaznavid rulers continued raiding the Northwest, though after Mahmud, the raids became less regular and less destructive. During these raids, religious institutions, including Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage sites, were regularly sacked and looted. Considering the persistent threat of Ghaznavid raids and the lessening support of the local laity and regional rulers, it is not surprising that many Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage sites in the Northwest were abandoned in the late first millennium and early second millennium CE.
Unlike other portions of India, Buddhism and Buddhist monasticism persisted in central and northeastern India through the first few centuries of the second millennium CE. As discussed above, massive monasteries like Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Somapura continued to serve as centers of Buddhist scholasticism. Likewise, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, and other major pilgrimage sites in the Gangetic Plain continued to draw lay devotees and the viharas at the pilgrimage sites continued to be occupied by the sangha. In the early centuries of the second millennium, Hindu and Jain institutions in Central and Northeast India were increasingly drawing lay and royal support, but Buddhist institutions still retained their prominence and vitality. This changed with a new invasion from Central Asia into Northwest India by Muhammad Ghori of the Ghurid Dynasty in the late twelfth century GE. Unlike the earlier Ghaznavid raids, Muhammad Ghori sought to establish Ghurid suzerainty in North India.
The Ghurid campaigns in the Northwest began with an unsuccessful attack by Muhammad Ghori on Gujarat in 1178 GE. By 1181 GE, Ghori had established a fort in Peshawar, from which he conquered Lahore in 1186 GE. In 1192, Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan, who ruled over Delhi and Rajasthan. By 1193-1194 ge, Delhi was itself captured. From Delhi, Ghurid forces rapidly spread across the Gangetic Plain, reaching Bengal by 1202-1203 GE. Muhammad Ghori was assassinated in 1206 ge, and Ghurid control over North India shifted to Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first ruler of the Delhi Sultanate.
Temple Desecration and the Collapse of Monastic Buddhism in India
From the earliest raids by the Ghaznavids, through the later conquest by the Ghurids, the military campaigns in India included the desecration of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples. In Islamic histories written several centuries later, the invading Ghaznavids and Ghurids are sometimes described as leading a holy war in order to bring Islam to India. In these histories, Muslim kings are celebrated for smashing false idols, destroying temples, and converting Hindus to Islam. In the historiography of India, the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries are often depicted as a period when Islam was forcibly imposed on the native Hindu population. For British colonial historians, this depiction of Islamic despots served to illustrate the beneficence of British rule. Some postcolonial nationalist historians have used the presumed historical oppression of Hindus by Muslims to argue for a more Hindu, rather than secular, India. Buddhism has only a small place within these larger narratives of despotism, destruction, and desecration. In the British colonial and Hindu nationalist histories, the Muslim invaders are credited with destroying Buddhism—with this act serving as an example of Muslim depravity.
Recently, Richard Eaton has re-examined the history of temple desecration in India (Eaton 2000). He begins by noting that the accounts of temple desecration are typically found in eulogies of past kings written several centuries after their deaths. When looking at accounts and inscriptions dating from the period of conquest itself, Eaton finds that temple desecration was much less common than British colonial and Hindu nationalist historians claim.15 Rather than thousands of temples desecrated, relying only on historical accounts and inscriptions more-or-less contemporary with the events they describe, Eaton found only 80 examples of temple desecration between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries in India. More so, temple desecration was normally a political act intended to reduce the authority of a rival ruler rather than a religiously motivated action.
When such authority was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was associated with a royal temple—typically one that housed an image of a ruling dynasty’s state-deity, or rastra-devatd (usually Visnu or Siva)—that temple was normally looted, redefined, or destroyed, any of which would have had the effect of detaching a defeated raja from the most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy. Temples that were not so identified, or temples formerly so identified but abandoned by their royal patrons and thereby rendered politically irrelevant, were normally left unharmed. (Eaton 2000:293)
Rather than the wanton destruction of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples, Eaton sees a more surgical desecration of royal temples as part of a strategy of conquest. Further, the strategic use of temple desecration was not new to India. In the seventh century, a Pallava king looted a Ganesha image from a Chalukyan Royal Temple. In the eighth century, Bengalis destroyed a Vishnu image that served as the state deity in Kashmir. In the ninth century, a Pandyan king raided Sri Lanka, returning with a gold Buddha image. Using these, and other, examples, Eaton (2000:296) demonstrates that temple desecration was a common indigenous practice in India well before the arrival of the Ghaznavids and the Ghurids.16
In short, it is clear that temples had been the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and continued established patterns.
As argued in earlier chapters, the royal support and construction of temples had always been legitimations, attempts to legitimize ruling authority. Following Moore’s criteria, the endowment of massive temples served to associate rulers with the divine. The inverse of this process was temple desecration. If endowing a temple was a legitimation, the destruction of a temple was a delegitimation, an attempt to reduce the legitimacy of a rival king. Royal temples were not simply reflections of kingly power, but rather the construction and use of royal temples created and preserved kingly power. Likewise, the destruction of a royal temple was not simply a reflection of his defeat, but an action that helped ensure his defeat.
Eaton’s analysis of temple desecration is an important corrective to British colonial and postcolonial histories that portray Muslim states in India as focused on the imposition of Islamic hegemony by force. If nothing else, Eaton’s analysis explains how Hindus and Jains, and many of their temples, survived in India to the present day. What Eaton’s analysis does not do, however, is explain why Buddhism did not. While royal temples were destroyed, Hindu and Jain institutions focused on the laity were left unmolested. The same could have occurred with Buddhist institutions focused on the laity, had they existed. However, by the thirteenth century CE, Buddhist monasteries in the Gangetic Plain and northeastern India were prominently supported by local and regional kings, and their relations with the non-elite laity consisted of little more than serving as landlords. As argued by Eaton, “Detached from a Buddhist laity, these establishments had by this time become dependent on the patronage of local royal authorities, with whom they were identified” (Eaton 2000:297). Accordingly, Nalanda, Vikramasila, and Odantapuri were sacked in c. 1202 CE, during the initial Ghurid conquest of Bihar.
While Eaton sees the desecration of Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage sites as primarily due to their close affiliation with royal families, it is also likely that the monasteries were viewed simply as major landowners with no significant lay constituency. Those monasteries spared during the initial wave of conquest in the beginning of the thirteenth century still lost control over the monastic lands as Indo-Muslim states expanded outward from the Gangetic Plain in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Without the support of lay Buddhists to fall back on, these monasteries were utterly dependent on the revenue generated by their monastic lands. Thus, even those monasteries that were not destroyed in the initial wave, like Somapura in modern Bangladesh and Lalitagiri, Udayagiri, and Ratnagiri in Orissa, were abandoned by the sangha once they were unable to sustain themselves. Whether by violence or loss of revenue, Buddhist monasticism barely survived the thirteenth century in India, with only a few vestigial monasteries in South India surviving until the fifteenth century.
World History
