Syncretism in Dying Buddhism
The old Buddhist schools now drew together defensively. Shantarakshita and
his pupil Kamalashila in the mid-700s synthesized the rival Mahayana schools
of Madhyamika and Yogacara, folding in Dharmakirti’s Sautrantika epistemol-
ogy as well (Raju, 1985: 161; Nakamura, 1980: 283). Kamalashila warded off
Hindu attacks on Dharmakirti’s logic while counterattacking every school:
Samkhya and Kumarila’s Mimamsa soul reification, Nyaya-Vaisheshika uni-
versals, Yoga’s God, and the Upanishadic Vedantist self. Everything was drawn
into this culminating and futile battle. The Yogacara-Madhyamika-logician
synthesis was the last prominent school in technical Buddhist philosophy,
and Shantarakshita and Kamalashila were the last important philosophers at
Nalanda; symptomatically, both ended up as missionaries in Tibet, along with
Padma Sambhava, the proselytizer of tantric magic.^60
More popular but less intellectual was the rise of Vajrayana (“diamond ve-
hicle”) tantrism. Here Buddhist transcendental salvation concerns were turned
into this-worldly magic. Practices turned from sunyata meditation to visualiz-
ing inner god-forces and mandalas; chanting mantras whose syllables were
supposed to resonate with the bodily chakras of occult physiology; and sex-
ual-yogic intercourse. Since the community of family-less and property-less
ascetic monks was the organizational basis of Buddhism, sexual tantrism
involving male and female devotees suggests a shift in that base; and indeed,
most of the Buddhist intellectuals whose names we know from Dharmakirti
onward were lay followers rather than monks.^61 As the last outposts of Bud-
dhism were winnowed down to Kashmir and the Pala kingdom of Bengal, even
the monastic universities became dominated by tantrists. What scholars were
still present were generally eclectics; some were reputed experts in all schools
of Buddhism, but teaching Vajrayana seems to have been their biggest stock
in trade.
Tantrism was an end of philosophy, bringing Buddhism down to a lower
level of abstraction, as well as displacing most of its moral emphasis. It also
acted as the last vehicle for syncretism. Even Nagarjuna’s name is attached to
the magic-alchemical texts which circulated from the 700s onward. Around
1040, when Buddhism was about to expire in Bengal, a last philosopher,
Ratnakarashanti, classified all the Buddhist sects into a sequence of under-
standing leading up to Vajrayana. In these late centuries the number of students
dwindled to a few hundred, and the monastic universities were kept going
mainly by missionaries and foreign students (Dutt, 1962: 375). Already in the
700s, Buddhist missionaries such as Amoghavajra introduced tantric rites into
the Chinese court, from whence they were further transmitted to Japan. The
famous Tibetan adept Naropa began as admissions “gatekeeper” at Vik-256 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths