[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 09:49 +0200, Joy Vriens wrote:

> I am totally ignorant of the reasons why Buddhism left its homeland and 
> I don't doubt it that the advent of Islam didn't help, but I understood 
> that Buddhism has mainly itself to blame for the disappearence from its 
> homeland. 

One view is that the most important aspects of Buddhism in fact did not
disappear from its homeland at all but rather become incorporated in
Hinduism. So you could say that Buddhism disappeared because it was so
successful but had no need to insist on being identified as unique. 

There is quite a bit of evidence that Buddhism was sponsored largely by
merchants and that merchants found it to their economic advantage to be
Muslims after the Arabs set up shop in western India. So rather than
conversion by the sword, there was quite a lot of conversion by the cash
register and the tax man. When you realize that for a merchant the
values of Buddhism are hardly different at all from the values of Islam,
there is really no reason why one should stubbornly insist on being a
Buddhist. So I suspect a lot of Buddhists stopped being Buddhists
without a shred of persecution.

> Somehow its message became too subtle or complicated to appeal 
> to the masses and it was a religion based on renunciation right from the 
> start anyway.

Renunciation  is never much of a crowd pleaser.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico