itage meant that they were destroyed as “false idols” in
a political sense; the destruction served as a message of
the Taliban’s defiance to the world.
Premodern persecutions
Pusyamitra. Our ability to interpret the reasons be-
hind a persecution depends very much on the nature
of our sources. The earliest recorded episode of the
persecution of Buddhism came at the hands of the In-
dian king Pusyamitra in the second century B.C.E. The
event is related in Buddhist literary works that reached
their current form centuries later. Pusyamitra was a
brahmin who murdered and usurped the position of
the last king of the Mauryan empire. The most famous
Mauryan king had been AS ́OKA, who lived a century
earlier. The legend of As ́oka’s patronage of Buddhism
has been perpetuated in Buddhist traditions and con-
tinues to provide a role model for Buddhist rulers to
this day. Among other great acts of piety, As ́oka had
the relics of the Buddha redistributed throughout his
vast empire and re-enshrined under eighty-four thou-
sand new STUPAS, the commemorative funerary struc-
tures that form the fulcrum of the sacred landscape of
Buddhism. Pusyamitra desired to become even more
legendary than As ́oka. Realizing that he could not
compete in virtue, he decided to match virtue with
vice, and set about destroying monasteries and stupas,
burning books, and massacring monks and nuns.
The destruction of the glories and institutions as-
sociated with the royal lineage that Pusyamitra had re-
placed can be understood in terms of his wish to
undermine rival sources of authority. Pusyamitra him-
self celebrated the horse sacrifice, the supreme ritual
demonstration of dominion in brahmanical Hin-
duism, the dominant rival of Buddhism for much of
its history in South and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless,
the narrative also reflects another model—that ofPERSECUTIONSA visitor in 1997 approaches one of the two giant Buddha stat-
ues carved from the face of a cliff at Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
© Muzammil Pasha-Files/Reuters/Getty Images. Reproduced by
permission.
Taliban soldiers and visiting journalists before a niche that had
contained one of the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan after their
destruction in March 2001. © Sayed Salahuddin/Reuters/Getty
Images. Reproduced by permission.