India. More detailed descriptions of the dharma, as
well as the standard categorization of Indian religions,
are found in Ibn al-Nadm’s Fihrist(Catalogue,987)
and Shahrastan’s Kitab al-milal wa-n nihal(The Book
of Religions and Faiths,1125), works superseded only
by Rashd al-Dn’s Ta’rlkh al-Hind(History of India,
ca. 1305/6), which explores at length the Buddha and
Buddhist concepts of time as presented by the Kash-
miri monk Kamalas ́ri (dates unknown).
Muslim engagement with Buddhism, however, was
not limited to theological and historical works. Islamic
architecture derived inspiration from and appropri-
ated localized Buddhist forms across Asia. And in
opposition to Islam’s well-known iconoclasm, an
extensive Muslim trade in Buddhist icons flourished
through the tenth century. Indeed, over time the term
bot(idol, presumably deriving from Buddha) lost its
religious significance and became a clichéd metaphor
of idealized beauty in Persian poetry.
Extant sources for the Buddhist interpretation of
Islam are more limited. The main source is the
KALACAKRA(Wheel of Time), a work composed in In-
dia during the early eleventh century at a time of in-
creased Muslim migration, primarily Shi’ite groups
fleeing persecution from the Sunni caliphate. The work
outlines Muslim dietary laws, circumcision, marriage,
the nature of god, and god’s relationship to humanity.
Why there are not more Buddhist interpretations of
Islam is uncertain, though the retreat of Buddhism as
a culturally dynamic force certainly played a role.
This retreat was premised on many factors—
economics, politics, and most importantly, the grow-
ing fusion between Hindu and Buddhist thought, par-
ticularly among the laity. A syncretism fueled by
Advaita Vedanta and tantric thought also played a role
in South Asia’s Islamization, as Sufi saints appropri-
ated indigenous Indian religious discourses in trans-
mitting and developing Islam in South Asia. Thus, for
a time these traditions engaged one another, and holy
sites came to share narratives of sacrality. The most fa-
mous of these narratives concerns the footprint on a
mountain in Sri Lanka traditionally attributed to the
Buddha. In the Akhbar al-Sln wa-l-Hind(Stories about
China and India,851), this site was identified as the
place where Adam descended after his expulsion from
paradise. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Batuta noted
that Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists all regarded
“Adam’s Peak” as holy.
Yet amid this South Asian religious multiplicity,
Buddhism became intellectually isolated, losing both
royal and lay support. Chinese pilgrims to India wit-
nessed this diminishing interest and recorded the con-
current disappearance of Buddhist temples and
monasteries. Similarly, artistic remains from the pe-
riod reflect a systematic shift of royal patronage from
Buddhism to Hinduism. Although the Turkic de-
struction of two monasteries in 1202 is held up as the
ultimate demise of Buddhism in India, seventy-eight
Hindu temples were also destroyed in the creation of
an Indo-Muslim state. Islam was a threat, but Bud-
dhism’s inevitable absorption into the amorphous
doctrinal and ritual category of Hinduism was a
greater one.This transition occurred so seamlessly in Southeast
Asia that when Islam finally arrived, the pre-Hindu
layer of Buddhist religious history and culture was
largely forgotten except in its famous monuments. In
Java, Buddhism eventually merged into tantric
S ́aivism, only to be displaced by Islam after royal con-
version in the fourteenth century, a trajectory also
found in Kashmir. More often, Buddhist sources wrote
of fearing Hinduization rather than defeat by Muslim
forces. The nexus of Buddhism’s imminent internal
absorption into Hinduism and the external threat
posed by Islam is most eloquently captured in the cen-
tral eschatological myth of the Kalacakra. This narra-
tive refashioned the Hindu myth of Visnu’s final avatar
Kalkin Cakrin into a Buddhist apocalypse where
Kalkin rides out of Shambhala, the mythical kingdom
where the Buddha’s final teachings are preserved, and
kills the Muslims who have taken over the world, ush-
ering in an age of pure dharma. This vision of Islamic
perfidy has influenced Buddhist representations of
Islam up to the present time.In modern Buddhist states, these negative images
are often framed in terms of such categories as ethno-
national identity, politics, and demographics, with at
times devastating consequences, as witnessed in Burma
(Myanmar), where, in Arakan State, a predominantly
Muslim area, the Burmese government has carried out
policies of institutionalized discrimination including
forced labor, restrictions on freedom of movement, and
destruction of mosques. Elsewhere, however, dialogue
between the traditions is again progressing as Muslim
and Buddhist states and citizens grapple with the reli-
gious consequences of migration and conversion.See also:Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula; Nation-
alism and Buddhism; Persecutions; Politics and Bud-
dhism; ThailandISLAM ANDBUDDHISM