Buddhism in India

The Defeat of Buddhism in India 183

between Brahmanism and Buddhism. The wealthy subcontinent

with its many kingdoms, as reported by the Arabs in the 9th and

10th centuries, had emerged after a long period of economic devel-

opment influenced by Buddhism—and many of these kingdoms

were to fall prey, before long, to new vigorous invaders whose rule

was significantly different from that of earlier ‘barbarians’

absorbed into Brahmanic hierarchies. Trade linkages continued,

but Indian merchants no longer played a role in them; they were

takers of external trade, not its makers. The contrast with the

vigorous economic growth and political consolidation of China

around the same time is striking; it is from this period that China

pulls ahead of India. As Brahmanism succeeded in defeating

Buddhism much more thoroughly than Confucianism ever did in

China, it did so at the cost of weakening the overall economic and

political capacity of Indian society.

The contrast with China can be seen in other ways. We can

analyse the fate of Buddhism by comparing its relationship to

Confucianism and Taoism, on the one hand, with its relationship

to Brahmanism in India, on the other. Buddhism in China had its

ups and downs, with periods of heavy repression and of recovery.

Both Confucianism, as the ideology/religion of the elite, and

Taoism, as a mass-based, mystic materialism similar to Tantra,

opposed Buddhism almost as thoroughly as did Brahmanism. In

China, as Whalen Lai puts it, ‘the holocaust of 845’ when ‘the

Buddhist establishment was destroyed, as the state decimated

Sangha membership and confiscated its property’ resulted in the

major decline of Buddhism in that country, with ‘no escape to a

southern haven, no restoration...no popular support for a revival,

and saddest of all, no rebirth of the tradition’ (Lai 1995: 339). This

was around the same period as the period of Brahmanical repression

and triumph in India.

Similar also was the fact that the triumphant Neo-Confucianism

appropriated many specifically Buddhist features (including service

to the poor) while Taoism appropriated local gods and cults

(Wright 1959: 93–97)—just as Brahmanism appropriated Buddhist

features of non-violence and integrated locally popular deities and

cults with the overall Sanskritic–Vedantic framework. Similarly,

some scholars of China, like Wright, argued that Buddhism was

a ‘politically incompetent religion’ (ibid.: 106), just as those of

India, like Drekmeier, have argued that in giving a solution to

and continuing for centuries after that when India was a major
force in global trade and development. It also fostered a dynamic
and open commercial society that meant a relative advance in the
development of productive forces.
But what was the economic impact of hegemony of Brahmanism?
In part, this question has been debated within India in terms of the
issue of ‘feudalism’. While Kosambi’s version of feudalism stressed
the relations of dependence that came to develop between overlords
and subsidiaries, the contributions of a later Marxist historian,
R.S. Sharma, have also emphasised relative economic backwardness:
demonetisation and some stagnation of production, a turning
inward, and an enserfment of most the peasantry (Sharma 1997:
48–85). There has been a vigorous historical debate on this issue,
which has provided the context for Andre Wink’s intervention.
Wink connects the resurgence of Brahmanic orthodoxy, beginning
around the 7th century, with the Muslim impact by relating the
varying fates of the new regional kingdoms of India with external
alliances and stressing the role of Arab-Muslim control of world
trade. However, he goes on to link this with an effort to disprove
the ‘feudalisation’ thesis. He argues that demonetisation within
India itself did not take place because in many cases Arab coinage
replaced it. He stresses the way in which the Arabs in the 9th and
10th centuries saw India as a land of tremendous wealth and who
described the Rashtrakuta king as the fourth richest in the world
and as ‘king of kings’ in India (Wink 1990: 219–31). This accord-
ing to him is sufficient to argue against Sharma’s and the feudalism
thesis. He argues instead that there was a ‘deepening’ of the regional
economies, an extension of agriculture, a continuing expansion
of trade even if its coinage was provided by outsiders, and a
‘re-urbanisation’ which was ‘more solid’ than the world ‘of the itin-
erant trader and Buddhist monk’ (ibid.: 230). The picture is one of
Buddhism as supporting a more extended, shallow, less economi-
cally developed society, while the Brahmanism/Islam combination
was connected with economic advancement.
However, trade in the earlier period was hardly that of ‘itinerant’
traders; it was extensive and organised. The ‘deepening’ of the new
regional economies could be called, in other terminology, ‘agricul-
tural involution’ —a weakening of commercial ties, a gradual stag-
nation in enterprise and innovation. Sharma is right about this
aspect of feudalism, though he does not link it with the conflict

182 Buddhism in India