[Buddha-l] Nalanda's library destruction

[Richard Hayes]

On May 14, 2013, at 0:20, Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> wrote:

> But - isn't Verardi to be classified as one of those "revisionist" historians?

There was an interesting program on CBC radio's Ideas on historical revisionism. One historian made the point that every good historian is a revisionist in that the study of history, like any scientific enterprise, is aimed at arriving at a more accurate understanding than has been conveyed by the "standard" story borne by a tradition. Research nearly always results in revisions. 

Buddhist studies has certainly had its share of revisionists. Gregory Schopen's work has certainly altered the way almost everyone looks at the history of Buddhism in India. Dan Lusthaus, Bruce Hall, Jay Garfield, Ethan Mills and a few others have bucked a rather long-standing tradition of portraying the Yogacāra phase of Vasubandhu's career as promoting subjective idealism.

Nearly all good historical revisions end up showing that the real story of an epoch was considerably more complex than traditional narratives allow for. Good research is an antidote to simplistic and polemical narratives. 

When I first started studying Indian Buddhism in the 1960s, I had teachers whose account of the demise of Buddhism in India was not very nuanced. The standard narrative was that Buddhism was alive and well, then the Muslims rushed in and destroyed it. One of my mentors, the late A.K. Warder, talked in those terms, although he was a bit more careful in writing. Over the decades I have seen a tendency of historians to produce more subtle and interesting accounts of the dynamics of the relations between Buddhists, "Hindus" and various waves of Muslims in South Asia. To characterize those more subtle accounts as politically motivated revisionism and "whitewashing" seems reckless and uncharitable.

Richard Hayes