ramashila university, and the chain of founders of the major Tibetan sects
(Tilopa–Naropa–Marpa–Mila Repa) derived from this tantric tradition in
Bengal.
It is tempting to regard Buddhist tantrism as a submerging into a larger
pan-Indian movement. The deities of energy forces, the practice of symbol
worship, occult physiology chants, and orgiastic rites were spreading in the
medieval centuries, especially in the Shaiva movement, which came from
outside orthodox Hinduism (see note 62). But the Buddhist and non-Buddhist
tantra had different trajectories. On the Buddhist side, tantrism was a last gasp;
intellectually it became an umbrella under which rallied what was left of
Buddhist philosophy, fossilized and no longer undergoing creative develop-
ment. Organizationally, it represented the decline of the monks and a shift of
the last wavering center of support to the lay community—which is the
underlying organizational reason why philosophical abstraction was lost. On
the non-Buddhist side, tantrism was going in the other direction, becoming
respectable in Hindu orthodoxy. Instead of losing intellectual acuteness, it was
building it up, incorporating technical philosophy and moving from an incho-
ate movement of primitive ritualists into a recognized part of the world of
educated pandits.
Nyaya Attack and Advaita Counterattack:
The Sophistication of Indian Dialectics
From now on our concern is exclusively with the Hindu side of the field. With
the Advaita factions holding the major slots in the attention space, the other
darshanas readjusted. Their first move was toward syncretism among them-
selves. Nyaya and Vaisheshika, already drawing together in tentative (if not
uncontested) alliance against Buddhism at the time of Uddyotakara in the 500s,
fused completely in the 700s (Halbfass, 1992: 73). The non-Vedanta schools
lost their edge as rivals within the Hindu camp and amalgamated with the
dominant monism of the Advaitas. Vacaspati Mishra in the 900s was the
syncretizer of the losers, writing commentaries on Nyaya, Samkhya, Yoga,
Mimamsa, and Advaita, the last two following the versions of Mandana,
whose school Vacaspati seems to have continued at Mithila; even the version
of Advaita that he defended, Mandana’s Bhamati school, was losing ground
to the branches spawned by Shankara’s pupils (see Figure 5.5).
The adjustment in Samkhya was especially large. Samkhya had been the
archetypal Hindu philosophy for the centuries preceding the Mimamsa and
Advaita revolutions. Now its materialism and dualism had been repudiated by
the leaders; worse yet, the dominant Advaita had stolen the Samkhya theory
of inherent causation and aspects of its cosmology, incorporating them into
External and Internal Politics: India • 257