208 Part III: South Asia
done, the king has a garment spread for himself on the ground and sits
down on it in front of the chairman; they dare not presume to sit on
couches in front of the community. (Legge 1886)
Faxian was seeking Buddhist texts to take back to China, but in this he was dis-
appointed, for in most places the dharma was being transmitted orally from
master to pupil without the aid of texts. Finally, he did find a few of them,
which he copied. He stayed three years, long enough to learn Sanskrit and
make some of his own translations to take back. His careful descriptions
amounted to a map of Buddhist India with site plans of all the main shrines.
Three hundred years later, another Chinese monk named Xuanzang made
much the same journey, but now things had changed. Buddhism was in retreat.
Many shrines were in ruins, and in Kashmir and Bengal Buddhists were being
persecuted. Xuanzang wrote of his grief at the empty spaces where Buddha
had once taught, evidence that Buddhism was going into decline. Over the next
several hundred years, two factors would bring the Buddhist era to a close in
India: the reembracing of Hinduism and Brahmanism by Indian kings—King
Harsha was as much a Hindu as a Buddhist—and the incursions of Muslims of
Central Asian origin. Muslim historians described “shaven-headed Brahmans”
who were put to the sword. What the Muslims took to be whole cities and for-
tresses were actually enormous Buddhist monasteries and colleges. The great
library at Nalanda was scattered and images were wrecked, which explains
why those beautiful Buddha images seen in museums all have missing noses,
ears, and arms. This was the end of organized Buddhism in India; those who
survived fled north to the Himalayas, south to Sri Lanka, or east to Burma or
China, and historic amnesia spread over India.
This rediscovery of Indian Buddhism in the nineteenth century led to a
resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage to India. The places where Buddha lived
and taught in the fifth century B.C.E., largely forgotten in India for two millen-
nia, once again became pilgrimage sites. One February morning in 1895 a Sri
Lankan Buddhist named Anagarika Dharmapala entered the temple in Bodh
Gaya, lugging a stone sculpture of the Buddha, which he hauled up the stone
stairs and set in the central altar of the main shrine. Then he and his followers
lighted candles and incense, arranged flowers in front of it, and began the for-
mal ritual of installing a Buddha image. This was a startling event in a Shaiva
Hindu temple controlled by Brahmans. But the temple happened to be on the
site of the revered Bodhi tree where the Buddha had achieved enlightenment 24
centuries earlier. King Ashoka had built the Mahabodhi Temple in ancient
times, which had been reinvented over and over as a Hindu temple where Bud-
dha was only incidentally worshipped as one of the incarnations of Vishnu.
Now, foreign Buddhists reclaimed it for Buddhism (Kinnard 1998).
The controversy over control of Bodh Gaya and the Mahabodhi Temple
carried on into the twentieth century. In 1956 the 2,500th anniversary of the
birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha was celebrated, and India’s
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited neighboring Buddhist governments