traditional Indian drama in which adverse events re-
sult from the vices of the king. According to this nar-
rative, Pusyamitra is driven by jealousy, and although
the immediate victims of his persecutions are Bud-
dhists, his acts backfire. Pusyamitra sets a bounty on
the head of all Buddhist monks, and an ever growing
number of heads are presented to him. But the inex-
haustible supply of heads is the product of a miracle
rather than real beheadings, and the resulting bounty
payouts bankrupts the royal treasury. When Pusyami-
tra later tries to destroy the bodhi tree, its protective
spirit has Pusyamitra and his armies crushed to death
beneath a mountain.
This theme of the cruel but ultimately self-
destructive whims of kings is widely attested else-
where in Buddhist literature. It is a recurrent theme
in the JATAKAtales, which teach morals through sto-
ries of the Buddha’s former births. The VINAYAalso
describes the dangers for monks of associating with
kings, an association that has proved both a source of
Buddhism’s success and a trigger for its suppression.
Zoroastrian persecution.The earliest persecution
for which there is contemporaneous historical evi-
dence took place under the Sassanian dynasty, which
came to power in Iran in the third century C.E. The
context was the centralization of power. We know
most about Sassanian efforts to reform and unify the
indigenous Persian religion of Zoroastrianism by es-
tablishing a single Avestan canon, destroying all royal
sacred fires other than its own, establishing a new cal-
endar, and replacing cult images with sacred fires. The
iconoclasm extended to images of other religions. Al-
though Zoroastrianism and Buddhism had coexisted
peacefully in Iran since the Kushan period (first to
early third century C.E.), the dominant Zoroastrianism
felt increasingly threatened by other proselytizing
religions, including Christianity, Buddhism, and Ju-
daism. The Sassanian high priest Kirder proudly
records in an inscription that Buddhists, along with
Jews, Brahmins, various types of Christians, and
Manichaeans were being removed from the land. The
eleventh-century Muslim historian Al-Biruni, who
made use of Zoroastrian sources, claims that Bud-
dhism was widespread in Iran until this persecution.
The long-term result of Sassanian iconoclasm and the
subsequent rise to dominance of Islam, heavily influ-
enced by Zoroastrianism, is that the only traces of
Buddhism in the region are cave temples and place
names, such as Naubihar, which means “new Buddhist
monastery.”
The White Huns.Further pre-Islamic persecution of
Buddhism took place under the White Huns, also
known as the Huna or Hephthatlites. This tribe,
thought to have originated in southwestern Mongolia,
invaded areas of Central Asia and India during the fifth
and sixth centuries. The invasion of Afghanistan in 515
C.E. by Mihirakula (502–542) devastated Buddhist
strongholds in the Gandharan region along the SILK
ROAD. The resulting diminished state of Buddhism can
be traced in the accounts of successive Chinese pil-
grims. At the beginning of the fifth century C.E., the
Chinese monk FAXIANdocuments the flourishing state
of Buddhism in the region. In 520, after the Mihirakula
attacks, Song Yan records monasteries in ruins and
heavy population losses, which had become total de-
sertion and ruination by the time XUANZANGtraveled
that route in the seventh century. Nevertheless, finds
of coins from later periods in stupas of the region in-
dicate that patronage of Buddhism did continue be-
yond this date.The demise of Buddhism in India.The most fa-
mous persecution of Buddhism was that which led to
its demise in India, namely, the series of Islamic ex-
pansions into the subcontinent from the eighth to the
fourteenth centuries. The conquest of the remaining
Pala and Sena dynasties of Bengal and Bihar in the
twelfth to the thirteenth centuries brought an end to
the last powerful Buddhist kingdoms of India and sent
many Buddhists fleeing to safer regions in the Hi-
malayas and mainland Southeast Asia. Although the
increasing popularity of other Indian religions, such
as devotional Hinduism, and the merging of non-
institutional Buddhist practice into the broader In-
dian religious milieu are important factors in the dis-
appearance of Buddhism in India, several Muslim
chronicles of the time portray the impact of repeated
massacres, the looting of monasteries, the destruction
of Buddhist images, and the burning of books, peo-
ple, and libraries.These events had a major impact on the shape of
Buddhism in other regions. In particular, they elimi-
nated the South Asian mainland as a source of Bud-
dhism for East, Central, and Southeast Asia. Tibetan
and Newar Buddhism preserved most fully the features
of Indian Buddhism of the medieval period. Mean-
while, the Sri Lankan victory over the Hindu kingdoms
of South India, led Sri Lanka to become the dominant
source of Buddhist authority in mainland Southeast
Asia, while in insular Southeast Asia, Islam became the
dominant religion. Buddhism was not completelyPERSECUTIONS