C. 600-1400 CE
In about 631 CE, the Chinese Pilgrim Xuanzang entered Northwest India through the Khyber Pass. For the next decade he traveled throughout India, gaining instruction at several monasteries and collecting Buddhist texts (Rongxi 1997). The world that Xuanzang encountered was notably different from the world described by Faxian, two centuries earlier. Throughout his travels he found many smaller Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage sites abandoned, while larger monasteries had become politically powerful institutions with massive landholdings that provisioned thousands of cloistered monks, nuns, and novitiates. These Buddhist monasteries had become luxurious fortresses. Within the walls of their monasteries, the sangha practiced a scholastic form of Buddhism, divorced from the day-to-day concerns of the Buddhist laity. In the texts studied, however, were frequent examples of monks who abandoned the life of the monastery for a life on the forest. As in the previous period, to a large degree, these romantic visions of life in the forest were intended to allay the ascetic desires of monks living collectively in monasteries. But in some cases, it appears that some Buddhist monks actually did it—actually abandoned the large monasteries for an ascetic life in the peripheries of society. In the process, these newly ascetic monks may have created Tantric Buddhism.
With its more worldly focus, Tantric Buddhism allowed for more engagement with both the laity and the ascetics of rival religious orders. None of this is to suggest that Tantric Buddhism existed wholly outside the monasteries of the late first millennium GE. Just as previous forms of Buddhism had both monastic and lay versions, Tantric Buddhism came in both high and low forms. Tantric Buddhism was not simply a renunciation of monastic life, but rather another venue in which the tensions between the collective and ascetic desires of the sangha and the laity were played out. While the balance between the individual and the group was different from contemporary forms of scholastic Buddhism, a balance was struck nonetheless. More so, as Buddhist monasteries collapsed and scholastic Buddhism was abandoned in India in the beginning of the second millennium GE, the practitioners of Tantric Buddhism preserved Buddhist traditions in India, in practice if not in name.
This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first I discuss the centers of scholastic Buddhism and the origins of Tantric Buddhism in the seventh-tenth centuries. In the second part I examine the decline and collapse of Buddhism in most of India in the beginning of the second millennium GE. As discussed in Chapter 6, the decline of popular Buddhism in India had begun in the first millennium, as Hinduism and other religions began to win the allegiance of the laity. While the lack of lay supporters weakened the sangha in much of India, the final collapse of monastic Buddhism began in 1192 with the invasion of North India by Central Asian Turks.
World History
