[Buddha-l] Bangladesh Muslim lovefest

[Dan Lusthaus]

Artur,

No one is forbidding comparisons of any kind. But when you compare a 
situation overflowing with an abundance of information, much of it from the 
muslim side itself (let's keep in mind, the British revisionism of which 
Eaton is a part, accepts that the 19th c British historians whom they accuse 
of prejudiced historical reporting were using the actual Persian records; 
the revisionist implication is that those historians were motivated to 
present a skewered picture, hence their use the materials is tainted. One 
presumes bad motives. But the more effective way to overturn the 19th c 
scholarship, if it was indeed fatally tainted by cherry-picking from the 
muslim sources, would be to fill in all the vindicating lacuna. That they 
haven't done. They've just use the imputation of tainted motives to create 
an open space into which they've created their own revisionist version based 
on a different agenda.)

More to the immediate point, the Verardi passage basically says, we have 
little data to go on. You want to fill the lacuna with speculations about 
nasty Buddhists. In the Muslim case, there are no such lacunae -- on the 
contrary, an abundance of evidence -- literary, chronicle, archeological, 
etc. Comparing evidence to non-evidence is apples and oranges.

That the motives of the Buddhists, including Asoka before and after his 
epiphany for dharma, and those of the Muslim invaders are incommensurate is 
evidenced by comparing Asoka in his sternest moment with Attar's gentle 
version of Mahmud's incursions. Again, apples and oranges.

Let me put this more bluntly. Do you have a shred of evidence that Buddhists 
trampled "tribals"? One shred? Or do you just presume it?

Are you aware of how Buddhists dealt with opposing deities and those who 
worshipped them, for instance, in Japan? They didn't wipe them out (although 
Japanese Buddhism had plenty of violence, warrior monks, etc., as we've 
discussed on this list on prior occasions). They would come to a village 
that venerated some lake or hill kamis, and then perform a "conversion" 
ceremony on the kami, effectively bringing it into the Buddhist pantheon; 
the locals could continue to venerate and give offerings to the local deity, 
and still be counted as good Buddhists. They co-opted rather than 
vanquished. That is the opposite of iconoclastic conquering. What makes you 
think that Indian Buddhists before and after Asoka's time weren't doing the 
same in India? Indian Buddhism certainly absorbed a lot of non-Buddhist 
deities...

Dan