Buddhism in India

The Defeat of Buddhism in India 169

As Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s study of the Gupta period

puranas makes clear, Brahmanical attitudes towards pashandas

hardened over time. Tolerance in the period of the Upanishads and

Asoka turned into a prescription for murder in the puranas. As the

Linga Puranadescribes in its version of history, the Dharma was

distroyed because of the Buddha-avatar, a ‘chastiser’ was born

called Pramitra who ‘destroyed barbarians by the thousands and

killed all the kings who were born of Sudras, and cut down the

heretics.... At the age of 32 he set out, and for 20 years he killed all

creatures by the hundreds and thousands, until the cruel act reduced

the earth to nothing but ashes’ (O’Flaherty 1983: 123). The version

she cites from the Matsya Puranais equally stark:

Those who were unrighteous—he killed them all: those in the north

and in the central country, and the mountain people, the inhabitants of

the east and the west, those in the area of the highlands of the Vindhyas,

and those in the Deccan, and the Dravidians and Sinhalas, the Gandharas

and Paradas, the Pahlavas and Yavanas and Sakas, Tusakas, Barbaras,

Svetas, Halikas, Darada, Khasas, Lampakas, Andhras and the races of

the Cola. Turning the wheel of conquest, the powerful one put an end

to the Sudras, putting all creatures to flight....

O’Flaherty thus calls the Matsya Purana, Vayu Purana, Brahma-

nanda Purana, Vishnu Puranaand Bhagwat Purana‘the basic

scriptures of Gupta paranoia and insecurity’ (ibid.: 124). In fact,

Brahmanic paranoia would be more accurate, since as she makes

clear, Gupta practice was actually quite tolerant.^3

Buddhist sources point more specifically to a great deal of violence

in the millennial-long conflict of Buddhism and Brahmanism. Hsuan

Tsang, for example, gives many stories of violence, including the

well-known story of the Shaivite king Sashanka cutting down the

Bodhi tree, breaking memorial stones, and attempting to destroy

other images (Beal 1983: II, 91, 118, 121). He also mentions a great

The Question of Violence

What about the role of force and violence in the disappearance of
Buddhism from India? The ‘Hindutva’ forces, so powerful in India
today, make much of the argument that historically Hinduism has
been a tolerant religion, absorbing and co-opting its opponents
rather than using force against them, and they, in contrast, depict
Islam as a violent, prosyletising religion. This argument fails when
we consider the problem of historical evidence. Those who sack
monasteries and kill monks or their lay supporters do not leave
evidence of their crimes! Consider how much would be known, for
example, about the attacks on and murders of Indian Christians
and missionaries in Adivasi areas during the period 1999–2000, if
it had not been for the world-wide Christian connections and the
modern mass media?
That Brahmanism was not tolerant of ‘heretics’(pashandas) is
quite clear from the Sanskrit sources themselves. The story of
Rama killing Shambuk is symbolic of violence exerted both against
‘low’ castes who overstepped their role and against ‘heretical
ascetics’. The Arthashastra is quite specific in classifying the
samana sects along with untouchables: ‘Heretics and Candalas
shall stay in land allotted to them beyond the cremation ground’
(Arthasastra 1992: 193). More specifically, Kautalya says, in
Rangarajan’s translation, ‘Ascetics who live in ashramas and
Pashandas[who live in reserved areas] shall do so without annoy-
ing each other; they shall put up with minor irritations. Those who
are already living in an area shall make room for newcomers; any
one who objects to giving room shall be expelled’. The passage
makes it clear that pashandaswere forced into something like
‘reservations’.
The Arthashastra’s general orientation suggests that Buddhists
were looked upon as being equivalent to untouchables; and a
Maharashtra historian, B.G. Gokhale, makes a similar point when
he notes that Buddhists in the late period in Maharasthra were tar-
gets of a resurgent Brahmanism, noting that locally at Ellora and
elsewhere some of their units were known as Dhedwada and
Maharwada (Gokhale 1976: 118). It is not without reason that
19th and 20th century Dalit leaders such as Ambedkar and Iyothee
Thass argued that Dalits were descendents of Buddhists who had
been transformed into untouchables by Brahmans.

168 Buddhism in India

(^3) O’Flaherty shows that the myth of the Buddha as an avatar of Visnu was linked
to the instigation of kings to destroy them as heretics. Another version of this was
the story of the destruction of Buddhists by four Kshatriyas born of a fire ceremony
in the Bhavisya Purana. Later in Muslim times, these ‘fire-born’ Kshatriyas were
identified as Rajputs with similar story that they were created to oppose Buddhist
‘traitors’ as well as Muslims and Christian mlecchas(Hiltebeitel 2001: 278–81).