Buddhism in India

The Defeat of Buddhism in India 163

and commercial orientation, was encouraging capitalism, why

should it be overwhelmed by a Brahmanism that mainly functioned

to extend agricultural production? By all accounts, the mode of

production fostered by Brahmanism was more backward, more

feudal, less commercial and urban-oriented, more ritualised: why

in an era of expanding world trade should it have come to domi-

nate in India? Why a historical process that is apparently a step

backward to a form of agriculture-centered production? This is, in

part, a question about the nature of ‘feudalism’ in India, and also

whether the hegemony achieved by Brahmanism in the last half

of the first millennium really represented a step backward in socio-

economic terms.

As to why Brahmanism could triumph, there are further ques-

tions. First, did monastery-centered Buddhism by the middle of the

millennium represent a ‘decadent’ or ‘exploitative’ social pheno-

mena that gave nothing significant in exchange for the surplus it

appropriated? Second, did its lack of ritualism or daily life cere-

monies leave openings that Brahmanism could fill? If neither expla-

nation holds, then what others can be given?

There are inconsistencies in the analysis of the role of the monas-

teries. If they were really centers of clever commercial organising

and banking, then they were not simply parasitic and unproduc-

tive. And, if monasteries drew peasants away from their ‘produc-

tive’ (i.e., exploited) life in society, that meant they provided an

outlet for escape, an alternative power center to state tyranny—

this would suggest a reason for the political ruling classes to be

hostile to them, but then this doesn’t square with the notion that

they simply were an exploitative burden on the peasantry. More

nuanced descriptions of Chinese society reveal fluctuations in the

role of monasteries: though they had become exploitative at the

end of the millennium, they played an important entrepreneurial

role earlier, and at many periods they provided crucial support in

the forms of grain and other charity to peasants (Wright 1965: 58–59;

Lai 1995). Kosambi himself has, as we noted in Chapter 4,

described the entrepreneurial role of monasteries in supporting

trade and helping to extend agricultural production. Descriptions by

Chinese travellers indicate that the monasteries often did provide a

life of comfort, and sometimes luxury, that might well have lead to

hostility from sections of the masses or non-Buddhist elites—but

it is also true that at the same time they provided services, both

This is eloquent, but Kosambi, the Marxist son of a famous Buddhist
convert (see Chapter 7), is never so sarcastic regarding Brahmanical
ritual!
The theme of Buddhist decadence is a pervasive one, finding
support in Marxist analyses of the wealth of the Sangha as essentially
non-productive and result of exploitation of the peasants who
provided the surpluses which maintained them. A good example is a
study by Jacques Gernet on the economic role of Buddhism in Chinese
society. The Vinaya texts, he argues, had sophisticated legal concepts
regarding property, and because with state support the monasteries
were free from taxation and corvee labour, they could attract people
away from the tedious life of farming to a supposedly non-productive
life. Some monasteries were maintained by the imperial state; others
were privately maintained, and some functioned as large estates living
off the labour of peasant serfs. Many became business enterprises.
Monasteries, in other words, were far from being the centres for col-
lective living and spiritual search that they had been meant to be
(Gernet 1995). While there has never been sufficient data to study
monasteries so closely in India, the notion of exploitative monasteries
is repeated by most Marxists, including Kosambi.
Finally, the idea that it was Muslim invasions, with the sacking
of many of the great centers of Buddhism, such as the university-
monasteries at Nalanda, which dealt the final blow is widely
accepted in India today. This ‘sword of Islam’ thesis was accepted
even by Ambedkar:

brahmanism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders could look

to the rulers for support and sustenance and get it. Buddhism beaten

and battered by the Muslim invaders had no such hope. It was an

uncared for orphan and it withered in the cold blast of the native

rulers and was consumed in the fire lit up by the conquerors....This

was the greatest disaster that befell the religion of Buddha in India....

The sword of Islam fell heavily upon the priestly class. It perished or

it fled outside India. Nobody remained to keep the flame of Buddhism

burning (Ambedkar 1987: 232–33).

Some Questions

There are puzzling aspects, sometimes contradictory, to all these
interpretations. If, for instance, Buddhism, through its monasteries

162 Buddhism in India