5
The Defeat of
Buddhism in India
One of the greatest mysteries about Buddhism in India is the cause
of its gradual decline in influence and then its total disappearance
as an overtly practised religion and way of life by the second
millennium CE. Buddhism has never been the sole ‘religion’ of a
society, claiming hegemony over all spheres of life in the way that
Christianity and Islam do: it co-existed in China with Confucianism,
in Japan with Shintoism, in southeast Asian countries with various
local cults and practices. In all these countries there has been conflict,
tremendous fluctuation in the situation of Buddhist teachings and
institutions, and periods of repression. But Buddhism in some form
or another survived as recognisably Buddhism in societies as diverse
as China, Japan and Korea. Why did this not happen in India? Why
could Buddhism not co-exist with Brahmanic Hinduism?
This is a phenomenon that requires sociological analysis. One
tentative answer is that just as ‘Buddhism’ is not a religion in the
conventional sense, ‘Brahmanism’ also was more than just a reli-
gion. It included a required social practice (varnashrama dharma)
and it absorbed, or rather co-opted and reinterpreted, many indige-
nous religions and cults. In the end, we have the rather strange
situation where a religion claiming the kind of ‘tolerance’ which
Hinduism does did not allow scope for Buddhism. There seem to
have been inherent contradictions between Buddhist and Brahmanic
teachings, such that one had to drive out the other. The second ques-
tion that needs answering, then, is, if this is so, why in the end did
Buddhism succumb?
An actual survey of the state of Buddhism in India, which reports
by Chinese travellers make possible, might help in answering this
question.