Buddhism's Decline in India

on today's video we're going to discuss Buddhism's decline in India what were the reasons behind it and what are the lessons that we can take from that decline for us nowadays cuz I think there are some lessons to be learned I'm Doug Smith from the online Dharma Institute that's online Dharma org if you're new to this channel and interested in living a wiser and a kinder and a calmer life consider subscribing to the channel and click the bell down below if you want to receive notifications when they come out with new videos so this question of why Buddhism declined in India it's it's one that I think concerns a lot of us and I certainly read about people speculating about it talking about it in the popular press and in Buddhist circles and it's something that I think is to an extent not well understood and we all I think what the passions they grow up with but maybe in countries in Asia people do but here we certainly do hear about the general story that Buddhism was very healthy and thriving in India for the centuries after the Buddha's lifetime then there was this a terrible invasion from the Muslim horns out of the West that swept over India and destroyed Buddhism in India that is the story that we're often given that ends up with the destruction of Nalanda which is understood to be a survey University kind of place it was at least by modern standards a kind of university setting this destruction of Nalanda that sort of was the capstone that ended Buddhism's existence in india however that story that I've just told is largely fictional or at least extremely oversimplified in many respects enough so that we would have to say it's fiction so what I want to do today is to go through the real story even down to the present day some of our most eminent scholars of early Buddhism people like Peter Harvey and a Kay warder even the great Indian statesman a br and been car did write about the decline in India in the wind the ways that I've just mentioned and and so yeah what I think one has to be careful when coming at Buddhist history and reading about this particular period even when reading it in some very good other in some textbooks or books that are otherwise very good because these mistakes keep being made what is the reason for this these mistakes the reason is that the this mistake in history I've given is simple it's very simple it's very direct it's very easy to understand and repeat it also is very dramatic the the truth however is not more nuanced it's something that occurs over centuries over a long period of time and has three basic components that I'm going to go into in this video in order the first of these is going to be internal issues within Buddhism in India itself in many ways these are the most important the second is in is Buddhism's competition with hinduism as many of us will know hinduism arose out of brahmin ik i should say vedic brahmanism that was around during the buddha's own lifetime and there was of course continuing competition between buddhism and hinduism on the indian subcontinent for four centuries thereafter and the third component was islam the the the the influence of Islam during its time period in this in that area and in many ways the influence of Islam is the least important of the three however because it comes near the end it takes on an additional importance which may as we will understand become to understand may not be as important as we think it is and then finally in the fourth section I'll just sort of go through some of the lessons that we can learn and try to put things all together and as always with these videos I'll put links to the material that I'll be using in the show notes below the video in case you want to read more as I say much of this much of the his torkoal information that i get here is relatively cutting-edge in the sense that it's not even included in some of the best sort of textbook ii kinds of introductions to buddhism so if you want to read more again links down below so to begin with the the issues internal to buddhism itself in the indian subcontinent we should remember that buddhism arose as a kind of a mutual dependency between the monastic Sangha on the one hand and the lay community on the other that's the way the Buddhists set it up so that the monastic community had to depend upon the lay people for their support the monastics were not allowed to feed themselves they were not allowed to use money and so if they needed things like food or clothing or other things like medicine they had to had to beg for it from the lay community which meant that they've had to go out an alms round every day in order to get the food to eat and remain fed and this required them to remain in close contact with laypeople all the time and so during that contact the monastics would give Dharma talks to laypeople would inform them about the Dharma on how to live a good life on how to live in ethical life this kind of mutual dependency then really was the bedrock foundation of Buddhism in its beginnings it's also important to know that that the Buddha was not opposed to people making money to people having jobs that brought them wealth and so Buddhism became over its early centuries very popular among the urban merchant community in India so it was as things seen largely not entirely largely a religion a belief system that was maintained among the relatively up-and-coming wealthy urban community of traders who would many of them were traders along the Silk Road as we we'll know between China India and the West and that kind of silkroad atmosphere and money wealth then float in to the Buddhist circles as well and help support them however beginning in the third century of the Common Era which is kind of around where our story begins in this video the third century of the Common Era we're talking about perhaps you know six seven hundred years roughly speaking after the Buddha's lifetime at this point the critical trade routes in the north of India which which connected China and the West those trade routes in north northwest India began to dry up the trade the trade route seemed to have shifted somewhat for various reasons that don't really matter to us nevertheless what that meant was that Northwest India which was a large place of Buddhist learning and discipleship it's around the area of Gandhara where many of us will know that there was a great meeting of Greek intellectuals with Buddhist intellectuals this this area began to decline in in its economic power as well in the fourth century of the Common Era a little bit later Buddhism's impact in general in India began to decline somewhat because of the decline in urban areas urban areas seem to have gone through a period of of relative decline and since as we have just seen or as I've just said Buddhism at the time was particularly a powerful and influential within the urban communities when these urban communities began to begin to dissolve somewhat Buddhism's impact began to dissolve along with it however more importantly between the 3rd and 5th centuries of the Common Era the song of the Buddhist Sangha began to reduce their outreach to the laity in other words instead of having this very close contact with lay people that would have been on a daily basis perhaps what would begin to happen at this time was that monasteries Buddhist organizations monasteries sanghas began to receive donations larger donations of land and indeed of the labor of entire villages through a form or forms of taxation so that local powerful people perhaps Kings would donate land to the Buddhist Sangha and that the people who worked that land were required to then donate part of their crop part of the food that they that they gathered to the Sangha on a regular basis there was no longer this idea of monks going on alms round as historian Lars Fogel and has put it for the first time the Sangha could afford to be isolated that is the Sangha the Buddhist Sangha the monasteries became large land owners they didn't need to do outreach to the lake community they could remain isolated within those monasteries and indeed by the seventh century of the Common Era nalanda university which I mentioned before had 200 villages assigned to it and a network of regional monasteries that were set up to basically coordinate the the the goods coming in from those 200 villages to Nalanda University the upshot of this was that the Dharma became increasingly scholastic increasingly out of touch with lay concerns one example of this is the adoption of Sanskrit within Buddhist circles which again removed normal Dharma discourse from the ability of a layperson to understand it because mostly people at the time could not understand Sanskrit it was more of a literary kind of language and the laity then as one scholar puts it the laity then returned the favor by basically switching somewhat or at least shading their allegiance to other kinds of belief systems now a lot of this period was during the what's called the period of the Gupta Empire when the Gupta Empire broke down there was a period after say the seventh century of the Common Era where there was a great deal of instability within India and it was during this time that we have also the rise of tantric Buddhism otherwise known as Audrianna Buddhism I did an earlier video on that I'll put a link to it down below if you want to hear a history of that but basically what this form of Buddhism was was a heavily syncretic kind of belief in practice by syncretic I mean that it it melded ideas Buddhist ideas with ideas from Hinduism in particular Shaivite ideas or ideas around the worship of Shiva the deity of the deity Shiva around whom there were a number of tantric practices already in India or at least that were arising in India and that had been practiced in one form or another for centuries and I'll be discussing the Tantra a little bit more later on this video in any event by the mid of eighth century now basically India had split into three three major kingdoms of these three only one of these the pala dynasty was Buddhist to any significant degree the other two dynasties were basically Hindu dynasties that is to say they they did not work on Buddhism's behalf so buddhism had basically retreated to a small area a relatively small area in the sort of center east of india around where the buddha would have lived and during his lifetime that is to say that during this time buddhism was already well on its way to splitting into two major branches which the historian johann elvis gog terms the buddhist Mediterranean which is this part around the Bay of Bengal where we find tera vaada Buddhism basically in the Southeast Asia and what he calls the tantric bloc which that moves up into Tibet and into China and into East Asia that way this split into two was already well on its way by that mid eight century of the Common Era so these are sort of some of the ground works of the internal Buddhist issues well we'll continue with some of that as we move forward as well but now let's turn to our second part which has to do with Buddhism's competition with Hinduism by the time of the Muslim invasions in the late 7th century the beginning of those the first ones in the late 7th century of the Common Era as we have begun to see you know Buddhism was already well on its way to being a second-class citizen within India proper that most of India was at this point Hindu and this is partly due as we've seen to switching trade routes and and the question of urban versus rural kinds of communities but it was also due to the changing dynamics between buddhist laity and buddhist monastics where monastics were slowly but surely retreating into their monasteries and getting more involved in more shall we say scholastic or recondite kinds of interests now vedic brahmanism which is the religious belief system into which out of which hinduism arose was always a kind of an approach based around home and hearth it was an idea of the way that one should behave in family and as a family it involved the sacrifices that one should make to the deities in order to have a successful family in order to have a successful lay life and the kinds of profession propitious kinds of of the actions one should take towards the deities and these were the kinds of practices that mostly people were interested in and so as buddhism retreated hinduism what would become hinduism what was becoming hinduism had always been there it had not gone away and so many of the people normal laypeople would have simply turned their their practices more towards those of home and hearth those are the local deities that that everyone was practicing around them as one scholar has put it a scholar of the earth of this of this period the term Buddhist was really mostly ascribed to monastics during this period and laypeople were not called Buddhists so to speak it was it was considered that laypeople might perhaps donate to a Buddhist Sangha or might help one out in various ways but most practice in general during India even down to the present day is somewhat syncretic that is to say most of Indian practice is not involved with a an exclusivist kind of religious aim the way we see often times in let's say the West where one might have to decide if one was a Christian or Jewish or Muslim what have you you're supposed to be one and not the other whereas in India for many many millennia really there were a whole number of different religious ideals going floating around at the time and one might practice all of them to an extent one might as it were hedge ones bets in the way that one would also in let's say ancient Rome and you you prayed to all of the deities or you made sacrifices to all of the deities and to an extent you practice all of the different practices so there wasn't we shouldn't think of of India in general as being one that was was ever particularly separated into communities of one sort in another now because all people might practice all different versions of the different religions that were around at the time but in any event the Buddha had never been interested in fostering a lay community that was ministered to by Buddhist priests who would officiate during certain lifecycle ceremonies such as births or weddings that was not at all the Buddha's interest indeed the Buddha largely left of those kinds of ceremonial ideas up to the local Brahmins such as they were and indeed that continued where as I say Brahmanism was a religion of home and hearth so to Hinduism what became the same kind of almost simply was the same kind of practice and so insofar as lay people would want let's say an officiant who would sit help them celebrate the birth of a child or a wedding they would have to turn to the Brahmin priests indeed that's ordinarily it's always how they would have done it and so if the Buddha if the Buddhist monastic or retreating away anyway there were there were places where people had to go that people could go and would have gone anyhow as one scholar puts it in the long run this congenital weakness of not having nurtured a loyal lady made Indian Buddhism a potentially failed religion and indeed Hindu practitioners also adopted various kinds of Buddhist symbology and Buddhist practices in order to make their assimilation of people interested in Buddhism easier for example there's an example of the Lingam which is this object of practice which is basically a male penis that was prayed to and sacrificed to it within Hinduism it's still to this day and it's been shown that over the decades and centuries the Lingam slowly began to be changed into the form of a more more like a stupa more like a Buddhist stupa so it was became more Shashi became less realistic and more something that was easier to deal with by local Buddhists lest's let's say and as many of us may know the Buddha also was absorbed in Hinduism as an avatar of the god Vishnu so not only was were Buddhist practices then and Buddhist practices in but a second iconography adopted into Hinduism but also the Buddha himself was adopted into Hinduism so one could remain somebody who let's say was devoted was devoted to the Buddha as a figure as an individual and yet be practicing Hinduism because one might say ok I'm simply devoting myself to an aspect of the god Vishnu so in this sense Buddhists of the time could remain Buddhists and be Hindus too in the sense that they would retain all of their normal ritual practices they simply would be doing it within a broader umbrella context of the Hindu Pantheon rather than an exclusively Buddhist pantheon let's say and in as we got into the seventh and eighth centuries as we've seen we have the rise of Buddhist Tantra which came out of a a general Melia of Hindu shaivite Tundras shy byte practices shaivite devotional practices and these were absorbed into early Buddha's or I should say Buddhism at this time and became a very sort of syncretic blend of Hinduism and Buddhism indeed the scholar pada met up Janie has argued that one of the reasons that Hinduism was able to absorb Buddhism into it whereas it was not so much able to absorb Jainism which was another religion at the time was because there could be an easy kind of wonder one [Music] modeling of the Hindu Shaivite types of deities with the early Buddhist Bodhisattva deities so once we identified let's say a particular Bodhisattva with a particular Hindu deity then once again we could meld practices we could be practicing as Buddhists within a Hindu context as Buddhism retreated this became it seems to have become more than norm indeed as the historian johan elvis cog has argued he says as Buddhist Tantra evolved it was no longer distinguishable in practice and theory from Hinduism indeed the idea that Buddhism eventually dissipated within the ever amorphous category of Hinduism as a result of Tantra is one of the most common explanations for the eventual disappearance of Buddhism in India that is to say within India as we have this blending of Hindu and Buddhist practices the Hindu devotional ism eventually won out the scholar James Mallinson has a really fat quite fascinating paper where he goes into the history of one particular temple which originally was a Buddhist Vajrayana temple and that eventually between the 11th and 14th centuries became a shaivite temple he says that originally the the Vajrayana temple was one of the originating origins I should say one of the origins of hatha yoga hatha yoga we will know down to the present day as a yogic practice it began it seems to have begun from within a Buddhist context of Buddhist veggie on a context but in any event in this particular temple over a period of decades and centuries the practices slowly evolved from a Buddhist context of Vajrayana into a Hindu Shaivite context and as Mallinson argues this shift seems to have been peaceful so even down to the present day he recognizes that there are a number of prominent statues that are actually Buddhist deities or Buddhist Bodhisattvas let's say but they're not being they're not being seen as Bodhisattvas they're not being seen as Buddhists nowadays they're seen as Hindu they're seen as particular avatars of Hindu deities nothing has been changed in them they haven't been destroyed in any way they haven't been defaced they simply continue the same practice with the same statues even though they're being put to different use and Mallinson argues that this kind of peaceful change over decades and centuries seems to have been the norm we have to be careful not to say that it was exclusively so there were examples of Hindu violence there were examples of violence of various kinds a destruction of temples and so on during this period not by Hindu groups so it was not always a peaceful however as Mallinson argues it seems to largely have been peaceful now third let's turn to the influence of Islam on this whole story and here we'll try to let's remember that by the time of the arrival of Islam within the Indian context around the seventh century Buddhism had largely disappeared in in the Buddhists in the Indian subcontinent at least an alarm in a majority of part of it we saw that in the northwest corner which was one there very prominent place in her and Buddhism in earlier centuries it had largely disappeared Buddhism had largely disappeared and by the by the time of the arrival of Islam Islam was basically impacting into Hindu parts of India basically that was that was what was a prominent in most of India in the certainly in the western part within India proper it was really only the pala dynasty as we've said that was Buddhist and Buddhist and Muslim forces or people really only met for the first time in the eighth century and it's important to keep in mind that Muslims and Buddhists lived side by side in relative peace for centuries the the Muslim rule was typically one of a great deal of latitude for people of other religious beliefs living in the same group of living in the same areas as then oftentimes they would let's say put taxes upon people from other religions but they would allow them to practice and indeed that was the case for centuries within India the Buddhists practiced perfectly safely and happily relatively happily so it seems within the but within the overall Muslim umbrella of those parts of India that had fallen under Muslim control and indeed in these early centuries of contact between Islam and Buddhism Muslim Chronicles depict but it's very favorite favorably they see Buddhism as a cosmopolitan kind of religion just like they thought of Islam being cosmopolitan they thought of is Buddhism actually as being superior to Hinduism in that regard where Hinduism was seen as a more nationalistic kind of a belief system that was less in line with their own kind of approach which was more sort of global more interested in the broader issues and less interested in let's say local deities which is again a huge difference between much of the Buddhist Dharma and at least part of the Hindu Dharma and we find historically that has Islam moved slowly east from the eighth century to the 11th century across India again the Buddhists Buddhist groups tended to split into these two that we've mentioned before the the tantric block going north into Tibetan into China and the Buddhist Mediterranean going let's say south east into Southeast Asia this was the the general this had been the general theme for centuries is that Buddhists were tending to leave to other areas as Islam encroached however that said as I've tried to stress over and over again even by the time of Islam's arrival within the Indian subcontinent Buddhism was largely absent from most of it Buddhism was only really in one kingdom in the southeast or central east of India now the end of Buddhism in India is often ascribed to the invasion that was associated with Mohammed Ghori around the Year 1200 it's important to keep in mind though that at this period Buddhism in the area in which Marie was active had basically retreated to a few of various a handful really of of large monastic institutions which were large landowners that were under royal patronage under the royal patronage of the remains of the pala dynasty and they were seen as such by the Muslims who were coming in now as a number of scholars have pointed out there seems to have been a great overstatement of temple destruction in particular overstatement by members of the British Raj during the 19th century in intending to puff up their own importance and and beneficence to India they made a lot out of the potential Muslim destruction of India many centuries earlier however looking at the data there does not seem to have been nearly as much destruction as we're ordinarily led to believe indeed the scholar Richard Eaton who has looked into this has has found only a handful of Buddhist institutions that were desecrated or destroyed during the period of the 13th of the 18th centuries perhaps three Buddhist institutions and a number in let's say the high 70s of institutions total within India which is not nothing it did happen however it was not the wanton destruction of enormous numbers of temples that were sometimes led to believe also is important to note and this is something that scholars have also pointed out that the Muslim armies did not target religious institutions in particular they targeted institutions that were under royal patronage because these were institutions that were symbols of royal power within their communities and since it was that the Buddhist temples now were prototypically within or under royal patronage they fell under this problematic kind of designation and we see that now on the university itself was heavily fortified and had guards at the doors it was not a normal shall we say open temple that was simply a religious institution it was also a symbol of royal control and power and authority and and grandeur shall we say and so as such it was targeted by the Muslims although they did not target other institutions that were not under such royal patronage however when it came to Buddhism within India that was really all that remained at the time it that we have this Muslim invasion now as to now Linda's destruction in particular the scholar Audrey tresh Key has has noted that the evidence we have about the destruction is relatively thin it stems from reports that were that seem to have a rote arisen several centuries after the fact so we don't really know in great detail about it however we do know that there was still activity or in at Nalanda by Buddhists well after the supposed destruction of Nalanda now it would have been much smaller and most of the people who were involved there would have left by then however it's not a complete destruction and there were still people around the problem was however that the institutional support was destroyed the institutional support was all that was left for Buddhism in India by that time as we've seen Buddhism for centuries had been out of contact with with basic the the broader lay community it had relied upon institutions it had relied upon taxation and a large land owning areas as a means of support and when that was taken out from under them by the destruction of the dynasties Buddhism had nowhere to turn and so at that point you have a great Exodus I shouldn't say great but an exodus of the last people remaining there into in particular Tibet into the north into the tantric bloc many tantric masters who were left and ascetics who were left went north into Tibet and into China and the few who were left with in India we have to surmise would have slowly been assimilated into the broader Hindu culture of the time so what's the upshot here the upshot is that the decline of Buddhism in India cannot be ascribed to Islam alone Islam may have been a factor but it was arguably the least important factor in this whole long saga what we we do know another thing from the upshot is that the invasion of Islam and and this general centuries-long kind of development led to a resurgence or a an upsurge in the importance of Tibet as a cultural center in particular as a center for tantric Buddhism for Vajrayana as well as for aspects of Mahayana it became a new sort of a Buddhist holy land and remains to an extent that way to this day as well we have the other part of the this Buddhist split into Southeast Asia remaining with with that group we call the tera vaada nowadays who were more in arrested in earlier teachings so on being exiled from India in a sense Buddhism went from being a local belief system a local kind of philosophy and practice within India to a global and world belief system by moving into China Southeast Asia Tibet Japan Korea and then around the world in much the same way that we see a similar kind of occurrence after China's invasion of Tibet in the exile of the Dalai Lama in the 20th century that as well led to a kind of a a rebirth of Buddhism in Tibetan along Tibetan lines around the world as Tibetan teachers went to different countries to to promote their inter interpretation of the Dharma the Dharma is a paradigmatically cosmopolitan kind of belief system as we've already mentioned when Islam met with Buddhism there was they saw a lot of commonality in their broader interest in the broader world and their rejection of things like the caste system which both Islam and Buddhism agreed upon and that kind of cosmopolitanism is one of the things that has led to the the popularity of Buddhism to this day however that popularity and this is one of I think the main lessons we can take that popularity depends essentially upon a close contact between the teachers the monastics the the knowledgeable people in the Dharma and the broader lay community that when and if that link is broken the strength of Buddhism as a practice begins to wane the health of what is amount ooh the present day requires an avoidance of let's say scholasticism an avoidance of our perhaps natural wish to retreat to the monastery and simply discuss the Dharma among friends but rather to to bring the Dharma out to the broader lay community to the broader world and indeed we can see that down to the present day with the development of new forms of Buddhism forms of Buddhism that that you may hear on the news such as mindfulness practice or MBSR or insight practices or in various forms of tibetan practice or zen or indeed secular buddhist practice as well now some of these practices are are denigrated by various scholars who perhaps that should know better because there are all kinds of developments within any kind of belief system over the years it's I think two in my way of thinking the development of new forms of Buddhism is is extremely important so long as these new forms really touch on lay concerns can touch on concerns in the broader community and indeed it's exactly these kinds of developments in the broader community that brought Buddhism back to India in the person more than anybody the person of dr. BR Ambedkar whose new Buddhism whose ref might say revolution in Buddhism has his retelling of the Buddhist story within a contemporary context has resonated with so many within India down to the present day and I did an earlier video on dr. Ambedkar which you might want to take a look at if you want to see how Buddhism has come back to life thanks so much if you're getting anything out of these videos check out my patreon page you might want to join all the patrons on patreon who make this possible thanks so much and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Doug's Dharma

Views: 19,179

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Keywords: buddhism, buddhist, buddha, secular buddhism, doug's secular dharma, secular dharma, philosophy, secularbuddhism, onlinedharma.org, early buddhism, online dharma institute

Id: y8GNgWatUwE

Length: 37min 5sec (2225 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020