[Buddha-l] Nalanda photos

[Dan Lusthaus]

Artur,

> "I can't check the accuracy of his paraphrase until examining the book."
>
> Exactly. A good policy, to examine original texts.

Which is why I said it.


> "The Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj, in his chronicle the
> Tabaqat-I-Nasiri, reported that thousands of monks were burned alive and
> thousands beheaded as Khilji tried his best to uproot Buddhism the burning
> of the library continued for several months."
>
> Thousands are definitely not sufficient. It's to be expected that in the
> next version of this Wikipedia article the numbers of killed and burnt
> alive will run into tens of thousands

Perhaps with children sarcastic paraphrase is an effective way of dismissing 
or neutralizing something. Among adults who check texts for accuracy, this 
sort of avoidance doesn't work. If the majority of monks at Nalanda were 
killed, how many monks do you think inhabited the place at the time? What do 
your texts tell you the monastic population was at the time?

Inventing a fantasy of future number inflation is the kind of straw man 
tactic Richard has been trying to pretend is already running loose in this 
discussion.

> "Bakhtiyar Khilji asked: "Is there a Qur'an in this library?" and when he
> was told no, he ordered that the place be torched".
>
> Quoted and re-quoted zillions of times.

Because it is another version of the story. We have been entertaining a 
number of different versions from different sources. Franz and I (and 
apparently others) have said that the Tabaqat-I-Nasiri version should be 
considered the most reliable in the absence of more compelling evidence. 
That doesn't mean everything he wrote is absolutely true, but it does show 
what Indian muslims at the time considered a plausible account of the facts 
they were familiar with (see my comments in a previous example for the sort 
of inference one would be warranted in making). This alternate version is 
not from the Tabaqat-I-Nasiri, and no one said it was.

>Paraphrases of paraphrases, without
> any agenda, of course.

Sarcasm, again.

>Also at Daniel Pipes' "Middle East Forum":

You are right, it seems to be there too, but not written by him; on a blog 
labeled as only the opinion of the poster (not Pipes), not of the site 
itself. But in smear campaigns and guilt by association innuendos such 
details mean little.

Conjuring that association is the same dismissive tactic as Richard's -- so 
now everyone can see how conditioned reflexes work. Thank you both (along 
with James) for continuing to illustrate for our benefit how that works. The 
more you guys do it, the more transparent it becomes.

> http://in.answers.yahoo.com<http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091220043852AAoXuN1>

The link appears to be broken.

What an interesting series of avoidances and denials; this all started with 
the Nirvana Sutra having a fellow brag that he killed Brahmins for 
slandering Mahayana. Instead of dealing with that, attention avoided the 
issue by diverting toward suicide, and that ellided into Nalanda. Once the 
facts of the massacre were established, the same tired tactics for throwing 
up diversionary smoke screens appear. How predictable, boring, and sad.

So much for ethical Buddhists.

Dan