Buddhism in India

The Defeat of Buddhism in India 165

ignores the fact that this could have been true only of the elite.

Among the masses of people, certainly, ritual practices and cere-

monies differed from those of traditional Brahmanism, as they do

even today.

Historiographical Questions

One of the most important objections to all the facile generalisa-

tions made about the decline of Buddhism in India is the lack of

historical evidence. This is a general problem of ancient Indian

history. Looked at in comparison with such societies as China, the

difference is almost shocking. Except for reports of outsiders (the

occasional Greek, or Chinese traveller) and what is indirectly avail-

able in literature, there are no social descriptions of the period.

Buddhist literature, which gives such descriptions, was wiped out

of India: not a single Buddhist text, whether in Pali or Sanskrit, was

preserved in India! Today’s references to this literature draw on

manuscripts preserved in Sri Lanka, Tibet and China.

The closest thing to existing Indian ‘histories’ preserved in India

are the itihasa-puranas, which were basically lists of kings of

dynasties, composed after the 8th century but referring only to

kings ruling before the 3rd century CE. They are based in north

India and derived from Brahmanic texts (the vamsavalis or

‘genealogies’ and charitas or ‘biographies’) which sought to legiti-

mize the status of kings (Wink 1990: 282–83). Romila Thapar has

defended the use of these itihasa-puranas by arguing that the

historical tradition of Indian society can be culled from such liter-

ature. However, in effect she confirms their biases. Early India had

its bards and chroniclers, known as sutasand magadhas, who kept

records of events and sang of the glory of kings as happens in every

society. However, the bards were treated as low and ‘mixed’ jatis

by the Brahmanic dharmasashtras, and since their chronicles and

songs were in Prakrit, these were lost, and only after the 4th century

CE was some of this material absorbed by the Brahman elite as it

was transferred into (rewritten in) Sanskrit for the puranas(Thapar

1979: 238–40). Thus, the itihastradition that developed not only

used an orthodox Brahmanic perspective in treating genealogies; its

writers also had a clear interest in covering up the origins of many

of the ruling families, which were ‘low’ in varna terms or even

educational and medical. It is clear that the religious and socio-
economic role of monasteries varied significantly from time to time
and at this point no simple generalisations are possible.
Hsuan Tsang’s account of thousands of monasteries does not
add up to a very large proportion of the population; and it is only
in the case of Nalanda that he indicates much luxury and service to
the monks. This might be compared to the infrastructure sur-
rounding the research of a large university today, but it does not
necessarily describe the typical mode of existence in the monas-
teries. The fact that Brahmanism was more decentralised does not
mean the system required less of the surplus, only that the Buddhist
monasteries provided a more visible religious establishment. It
would indeed be biased to argue that the Buddhist monasteries
were any more ‘unproductive’ or parasitical than Brahmanic priests
who lived off of the innumerable gifts from believers. In fact, the
huge temple complexes and the divinisation of kings that marked
the Brahmanic revival between the 7th to 8th centuries required a
tremendous requisitioning of surplus.
To say that Buddhism offered nothing to lay believers in com-
parison with the innumerable ritual ties binding Brahman priests
and non-Brahman householders evades one crucial issue: there was
a difference in principle between what Brahmanism and Buddhism
taught for lay believers. Buddhism actively contested the highly
ritualised life-cycle ceremonies prescribed by Brahmanism, empha-
sising instead righteous conduct, and seeking actively to displace
both the Vedic sacrifice and the newly developing rituals. This does
not mean that it offered nothing for the religious and ritual needs
of lay followers. There were simple rituals and forms of participa-
tion by lay followers in monastic life. Buddhist devotionalism
under Mahayana especially served popular emotional needs (this is
clear for Chinese society, as Whalen Lai shows). Brahmanism’s
ability to coexist with and absorb local cults (where often only the
elites interpreted local deities as an avatar of Vishnu or a form of
Shiva) is well-attested, but Buddhism did the same in many south-
east Asian countries and we have evidence that Buddhism also was
appropriating various cults of local gods and goddess through
much of the period in India as well.
Finally, we know rather little about the actual rituals and culture
of the masses in this period. Basham’s expressed certainties that
Buddhist families used Brahman priests and followed Vedic rituals

164 Buddhism in India