[Buddha-l] Nalanda's library destruction

[Dan Lusthaus]

Franz,

>I would prefer to see further evidence--as I am sure Dan would, as well.

Of course.

> Archeological evidence would be nice, especially if it suggested a 
> immediate decline in the condition of the university after 1193, rather 
> than a slow decline.

Archaeological remains, like texts, require interpretive techniques and 
careful investigation. They themselves don't "suggest" anything. Back in the 
90s some fuss was made that the entire library burning could not have 
happened, and certainly not at the end of the 12th c, since bricks 
supposedly from that period showed no sign of scorching. That has been 
debunked since, but it continues to empower the revisionists with hope that 
some exculpatory smoking gun will be found to be rid of this history once 
and for all.

>If we could find physical evidence that, in that attack, walls were thrown 
>down and book burning took place on the scale the Tabaqat-i Nasiri claims, 
>then we'd have a case closed situation.

Archaeology rarely works like that. Look at how every few years an entirely 
new theory of how the Mayans etc. and their contemporary tribes were wiped 
out. When certain social theories are big in academia, those theories are 
used to explain it; when plagues and mass disease theories became major 
concerns, those were the explanations; when ecological negligence was hot, 
that was the explanation; when climate change moved to center stage, that 
became the explanation. The "evidence" didn't change -- how it was 
interpreted and deployed for theoretical speculation was. Nonarchaeologists 
may think that because these are hard, material entities, they don't lie. 
They don't lie, or tell the truth. They are just raw interpretables.


> Lacking that, we might entertain the idea that its author exaggerated the 
> enormity of the destruction for one of various possible reasons.

This is another of the common strategies for dismissing attention to the 
countless accounts in Muslim sources of all stripes of their mass killings 
and destructions, which, as I mentioned, are usually accompanied with 
boasting. The revisionist arguments usually go something like: Oh, they are 
just too jubilant, trying to impress someone no doubt, so it can't 10,000 
killed, maybe more like 150 (and they were just a bunch of dumb cripples 
without enough sense to get out of the way); these sources are exaggerating. 
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

After you've encountered this alibi countless times, its hollowness becomes 
transparent. (Does that metaphor work?)

What the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri's account shows is that when he wrote it in the 
1200s for the sultan of Delhi, the fact that no one was left at Nalanda, and 
that the library had been destroyed, was not something that would have 
raised an eyebrow as to factual accuracy. That was no exaggeration, but a 
fait accompli.

> I suppose I should read Elverskog's book to see how he supports the 
> positions expressed in his first pages.

His earlier book, Our Great Qing, was a better work, but he unfortunately 
made a habit of repeating the weakest tactic of that work. He makes 
grandiose claims at the beginning that he will upend the prevailing ideas 
about the relations between the Qing court, the Mongols and the Tibetans, 
laying out what those prevalent theories are. He repeats the boast several 
times, but as the book progesses, he qualifies and cuts back on his boasts 
until, in the end, he has largely acceded to the prevailing ideas, with 
perhaps some slight additional background information and further 
perspective (his use of Mongolian sources). In other words, he hypes that he 
will overturn the mainstream view, but really doesn't. He approaches 
Buddhism and Islam... the same way, only here he only pretends that the 
sources support him. His use of what his sources say is selective and 
questionable.

Dan