[Buddha-l] Rice & Dragons

[Dan Lusthaus]

Artur,

> When one reads you, one forms the impression that the early Islamists
> must have had some special problem with the Buddhists - they must have
> hated them so much that they would kind of have to exterminate them on
> sight.
>
> The question is: why? Ideology? Some other deep concerns?

Artur, as we all know, "why" questions have multiple facets. Those prone to 
economic reductionism would try to focus primarily on competition for trade 
routes; reductionists favoring machismo pride, or conceive of making 
political bones by going out and conquering some neighbors will recite the 
military adventures, with their spoils and jockeying for power back home and 
among rivals; those focused exclusively on ideology will see monotheistic 
intolerance of otherness at play; and so on.

We can flip the question around -- having the advantage of nearly 1500 years 
of history to provide data, trends, overviews, and, in the case, final 
conclusions -- and simply note that where Buddhists use to be and flourished 
that Islam successfully established itself, Buddhism is no more. Now, the 
question would be "why", and this would be equally multifaceted. So let's 
look at specific cases, events, things that actually happened, one by one, 
if necessary, and see what actually DID happen, rather than speculate and, 
as someone else is trying to do, avoid and undermine the facts by impugning 
questionable motives to those seeking to offer the facts.

In the two messages containing links, several types of information were 
being offered, as well as some background on the types of scholarship and 
availability of materials that exist for this material.

I hinted at, but did not go into detail, on the fact that online sources, 
such Wikipedia, are being monitored by people who are expunging materials 
and information that might reflect badly on Islam. I use the word 
"expunging" because even a year or two ago that information WAS available on 
Wikipedia and elsewhere, for instance in the entries on

> Were the Buddhists as such the object of the Islamic aggression, or,
> rather, some political entities, that may have been ruled by the
> Buddhists?
>
> Why singling them out?

The first answer, to paraphrase sir Hillary, is because they were there. The 
Jains who had also ventured out the northwest passages were also utterly 
decimated. In fact, one way -- indirect but very illuminative -- for 
answering these sorts of questions is to look at how Jains in India 
weathered Islam and remade themselves to accomodate Islam rulers and spare 
themselves the fate they saw befall the Buddhists. In Paul Dundee's book on 
the Jains, he doesn't dwell on this, but he does provide important 
information, since this powerfully transformed the nature of Jainism, almost 
eliminating its severe ascetic practices in favor of a laity devoted to 
scrupulously honest and reliable business and service. It is not until 
modern times that Jains began to look back and try to recover their 
forgotten past -- in theory and practice. The decimation of Buddhism (yes, 
some tiny pockets out of the glaring mainstream managed to survive here and 
there, but pretending that Buddhism survived in India is like pretending the 
Aztecs survived in Mexico).

But I find it curious that in response to your questions about Buddhists in 
Central Asia, I primarily provided some materials documenting their presence 
in various places in central and western asia (far from exhaustive or 
comprehensive, but things readily documentable with online sources), 
mentioned Java (since it had been mentioned by others), but the responses to 
my posting tended to demand discussion (and presume I had provided some 
theory or story) of the demise of Buddhism in India, which was mentioned in 
passing, but was NOT what I discussed. I gave one Indian example, Vallabhi, 
which was a thriving monastic center for Jains and Buddhists, that was 
decimated in the 8th c by an invading Muslim army. I mentioned it because, 
while apologetics for why it happened are advanced by some, no one denies it 
happened (unlike the whitewash about Nalanda that ignores the Tibetan eye 
witness accounts). And, it shows that when it came to killing defenseless 
monastics, Jains were the same as Buddhists to Muslims at that time. The 
EARLY date is also signifcant. Even if that only happened once (which it 
didn't -- as I also documented), that would be something significant to 
think about.

> Nothing of the sort with the polytheistic Hindus.

That's simply not true. Read Eaton carefully, especially his later works. He 
has charts of the multitudes of documented destructions of Hindu temples, 
which, although he is a "minimizer," as I noted previously, he grows to 
acknowledge more and more over time. Rest assured when the decimations took 
place the local populace did come out with picnic baskets and lunch to 
leisurely watch the proceedings. They defended their sacred places, and paid 
for that (the sort of inconvenient facts downplayed in statistical charts).

Again, one size doesn't fit all, so one needs to look at history event by 
event. There are good time, bad times, accomodations, decimations, 
tolerance, and ethnic cleansings. Not all at the same time in the same 
place, but over the course. The closer and more thoroughly one looks at 
specific situations, the more complex and multifaceted they become. For 
instance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moplah_Rebellion

(and for an example of a truncated Wikipedia entry, note where the timeline 
ends in this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappila_riots )


> Thanks for the links. Although, to tell you the truth, they aren't new
> to me, I have already been there. And I can recognize them for what
> they in reality are. Richard Eaton’s works convince me better. Hard
> facts do convince me, as a rule.

Are you referring to the links from Encyclopaedia Iranica? You would be the 
first person to consider that a Hindutva enterprise!

I sent a variety of types of links, with some comments about the types of 
scholarship involved. I consider most of the Wikipedia entries strategically 
expurgated, and hinted at that. I did NOT include really flaky extremist 
views on either side, such as
http://www.islamandbuddhism.com/
http://www.islamawareness.net/Buddhism/
(and there are similar sites typically citing the same "facts" all over the 
web, in many languages)

contrast this with:
http://www.islambuddhism.com/

One side wants to accomodate, the other to fully delegitimize and eliminate. 
Just a few marginal crazies? Are there any Zen centers in Riyadh?

> <<Harshavardhana died in about 647 AD. After his death there was
> disorder in Northern India.

Of course, vulnerabilities of various sorts (which included political 
instablities and infighting between Indic states and clans) play a role. 
Indian defenses against invaders, going back to Alexander and maybe earlier, 
largely depended on the invaders coming from a long distance, so that by the 
time they arrived to invade India, their supply lines and support systems 
were too stretched and thin, which Indians could exploit (cf, Russia against 
Napolean or Germany). Hence the initial Muslim forrays into India were not 
to conquer, but quick incisive strikes, like at Vallabhi, for booty and/or 
decimation. So Indians could continue to bicker, thinking they could pull 
together long enough to repel invaders. Once the Muslims consolidated the 
northwest, and controlled the trade routes, that "natural" defense no longer 
worked. By the time Indians awoke to the new reality, Muslims controlled 
many parts of India, and Buddhists were no more.

Sankara did nothing to eliminate Buddhism (except swipe some ideas from 
it),.In fact, most major Hindu schools have tried to take credit for 
Buddhism's demise. This is not new, and is even more pronounced now than 
some years ago, though the claims are quite old. The Nyaiyikas claim that 
the arguments in their text Atmatattvaviveka shut the Buddhists up once and 
for all; Kashmir Shaivites claim Abhinavagupta's philosophy defeated the 
Buddhists; and on and on. The argument that Bhakti killed Buddhism is 
another species of the same idea -- ignoring the major currents of bhakti in 
Buddhist tantra, stotra, etc. etc. All that tells us is that Hindus were 
glad those thorn-in-their-sides Buddhists were gone, and explains partly why 
they didn't do more to defend the Buddhists. Religious alliances shifted in 
places -- one can sometimes see it directly in the surviving architecture, 
as in some of the surviving temple ruins at Nagarjunakonda, where Jain 
iconography sits atop Buddhist iconography on pillars and stones, both 
eventually topped by Vaishnavite carvings, a kind of historical totem pole.

> And, in this context, I’d like to ask: what did it mean to be a
> Buddhist in early medieval India? Were local monasteries involved in
> performing the rites of passage for lay followers? If not – who was?
> Was the loss of contact with the monastery as a merit-field a dramatic
> experience? To the extent, that the lay followers would want to defend
> their monasteries from the depredations of the dharma enemies, Hindus
> or Muslims?

All interesting questions. Generally, fortune telling was largely the 
provenance of Jains; Buddhists could conduct their own funerals. Marriages 
were family/clan affairs, as were birth ceremonies (many of the "great" 
Buddhists were not born Buddhists, so they had "Indic" childhoods). But 
local customs varied greatly. Buddhism had centralized in "universities", 
with massive libraries, and had coddled up to the ruling classes. When the 
libraries and universities were destroyed (by guess who), and the ruling 
classes overturned or replaced with rulers unsympathetic to Buddhism, 
Buddhism's strength in centralization became a lethal weakness. That too, 
however, is only a partial explanation.

Dan