In the centuries after the collapse of monastic Buddhism in India, Buddhist sites were either abandoned and left empty or were reoccupied by other religious orders. It is hard to say what happened to the bulk of the sangha in India. The decade between Mohammed of Ghori’s first push into the Gangetic Plain in 1192 GE and the desecration of Buddhist monasteries in Bihar in c. 1202 GE is quick by historical standards, but would have given the sangha ample time to escape. While some holdouts may have died in Indo-Muslim attacks on the great monasteries, for the most part, the sangha knew the attacks were coming and fled well before the Indo-Muslim armies reached their gates. Without viharas and libraries, the tradition of scholastic Buddhism, as well as some of its Indian practitioners, moved to the Himalayas, China, and Southeast Asia. Other members of the sangha may have reverted to secular life. Still others may have adopted the life of wandering ascetics.
Without property or royal association, the Central Asian Turks and later Indo-Muslim states would not have targeted Tantric Buddhist ascetics. Buddhist ascetics could continue living in the margins of villages, or even within the ruins of Buddhist viharas and pilgrimage centers. After the destruction of monastic Buddhism, the long-term tension in the sangha between the individual and the group, between monasticism and asceticism, was resolved once and for all. There was no longer a definable Buddhist group to which ascetics could belong, even if they wanted to. Without monasteries of their own, Buddhist ascetics lived in a world populated by Hindu and Jain ascetics, surrounded by Hindu and Jain temples and Islamic mosques. Any desire for group affiliation, however small, could be met only by affiliation with the surviving, non-Buddhist religious sects. In this context, Buddhist ascetics were rapidly absorbed into the larger religious milieu of medieval India. By the fifteenth century GE, the traces of Buddhism survived only in the practices of Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and others, Buddhist texts and inscriptions, and the ruins of Buddhist monasteries and pilgrimage centers.
World History
