Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent

• 1. Introduction

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  The decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent is one of history's quieter extinctions, a faith born in India that by the 13th century had nearly vanished from its own homeland. At its height, Buddhism shaped the intellectual and religious life of the entire subcontinent. It received the endorsement of the Maurya Empire under Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, spread to Central Asia and China, and anchored vast monastic universities like Nalanda. Yet by the time the Mughal courtier Abul Fazl visited Kashmir in 1597, he could find only a few old men who still professed Buddhism, and saw none among the learned. How did a religion so deeply rooted come to be so thoroughly uprooted? The answer involves centuries of shifting royal patronage, religious rivalry, internal tensions within monastic life, and ultimately the destruction brought by Turkic invasions across the 12th and 13th centuries.

• 2. The Gupta Turning Point

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  During the Gupta Empire, which stretched from the 4th to the 6th century, Vaishnavism, Shaivism and other Hindu sects became increasingly popular across the subcontinent. Brahmins forged a new and durable relationship with the state, one that Buddhist institutions would struggle to match. The Gupta kings did not abandon Buddhism outright: they built Buddhist temples at Kushinagara and supported monastic universities like Nalanda, as three Chinese visitors to India recorded. But the distinction between the two traditions was quietly eroding. Mahayana Buddhism adopted more ritualistic practices while Buddhist ideas simultaneously entered Vedic schools. Monasteries gradually lost control of land revenue as this religious crosscurrent deepened. Xuanzang, the Chinese scholar who travelled through the region, wrote that the Hun invasion of the 6th century had reduced numerous monasteries in northwestern India to ruins. Mihirakula, the Alchon Hun ruler of the northwestern region from 515 to 540 CE, ordered monks expelled and many Buddhist monasteries throughout Gandhara destroyed, with the destruction reaching as far as modern-day Prayagraj. Between 525 and 532 CE, Yashodharman of the Malava Empire and rulers of the Gupta Empire reversed Mihirakula's campaign, and the religion recovered slowly during the 7th century.

• 3. Rivals and Lost Patrons

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  A. L. Basham's classic study of the decline argues that the central cause was the resurgence of Hindu religion, focused on the worship of Shiva and Vishnu, which became more popular among common people while Buddhism, centered on monastery life, had grown disconnected from public life and its rituals. Hindu Brahmins filled that gap, presiding over the life ceremonies that Buddhism left unattended. According to Kanai Hazra, Buddhism declined in part because of the rise of the Brahmins and their influence in socio-political processes. Johannes Bronkhorst notes that some Brahmin influence derived from their mastery of incantations and mantras, as well as sciences like astronomy, astrology, calendrics and divination. Many Buddhists refused to engage such sciences and left them entirely to Brahmins. The Brahmins also provided councillors, administrators and clerical staff to the new regional dynasties that arose after the 7th and 8th centuries. Dynasties including the Karkotas, Gurjara-Pratihara, Rashtrakutas, Pandyas, and Pallavas all supported Hinduism. Bronkhorst also notes that Buddhist texts often spoke ill of kings and royalty, while Brahmins had clear and practical ideas about law and statecraft drawn from texts such as the Arthashastra and the Manusmriti. The sole major exception to this dynasty-wide shift was the Pala Dynasty, whose rule from the 8th to the 12th century allowed Buddhism in North India to recover through active royal support.

• 4. Monasteries and Their Isolation

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  Lars Fogelin argues that the concentration of the sangha into large monastic complexes like Nalanda was itself one of the contributing causes of the decline. Monks in these institutions became, in Fogelin's words, largely divorced from day-to-day interaction with the laity, except as landlords over increasingly large monastic properties. Padmanabh Jaini observed that Buddhist laypersons were relatively neglected in Buddhist literature: the tradition produced only one text on lay life, and not until the 11th century, while Jains produced around fifty texts on lay conduct. Rural and devotional movements arose within Hinduism, including Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Bhakti and Tantra, which competed with each other and with numerous Buddhist and Jain sects simultaneously. For Buddhism, this fragmentation of power into feudal kingdoms was damaging, because the tradition had relied heavily on centralized royal support. Some Buddhist thinkers tried to adapt. Texts like the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra began to argue that killing was permissible if necessary to protect Buddhist teachings. Later Buddhist literature even began to describe kings as bodhisattvas. Fire sacrifices were performed under the Buddhist king Dharmapala, who ruled approximately 775 to 812 CE. Alexis Sanderson has shown that Tantric Buddhism filled with imperial imagery in this period, reflecting medieval Indian political realities. Bronkhorst argues that these changes took Buddhism far from its early practices and dangerously close to the very Brahmanical tradition it had long opposed, making it easier for Buddhism to eventually be absorbed into Hinduism.

• 5. Turkic Invasions

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  From 986 CE, Turkic forces began raiding northwest India out of Afghanistan. Buddhist images were smashed because of the Islamic prohibition on idolatry; the Persian traveller Al Biruni's memoirs indicate that Buddhism had already vanished from Ghazni and the medieval Punjab region by the early 11th century. The Buddhist university of Nalanda was mistaken for a fort because of its walled campus, and according to Minhaj-i-Siraj the Buddhist monks who were slaughtered there were mistaken for Brahmins. Odantapuri's monasteries were destroyed in 1197 by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji, and Vikramashila was destroyed by his forces around 1200. According to William Johnston, hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and shrines were destroyed, texts were burned, and monks and nuns were killed during the 12th and 13th centuries in the Gangetic plains. Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India, written in 1608, records these events and describes how many monks fled to Nepal, Tibet, and South India. The Tibetan pilgrim Chöjepal, who lived from 1179 to 1264 and arrived in India in 1234, had to flee advancing troops multiple times as they sacked Buddhist sites. Not all monasteries were destroyed by the invasions: Somapuri, Lalitagiri, and Udayagiri survived. But since these large monastic complexes had become dependent on local patronage, when that patronage ended they were simply abandoned. The replacement of Buddhists in long-distance trade by the newcomers eroded yet another source of financial support, removing the economic foundations on which Buddhist monasteries had built their survival.

• 6. What Survived and Where

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  After the conquest, Buddhism largely disappeared from most of India, surviving in the Himalayan regions and in pockets of south India. Buddhism survived in Gilgit and Baltistan until the 13th or 14th century, perhaps slightly longer in the Swat Valley. In the Kashmir Valley it survived at least until 1323, when the Ladakhi Rinchana converted to Islam as King of Kashmir, and even beyond that into the 15th century, when King Zain ul Abidin, who ruled from 1419 to 1470, maintained a Buddhist minister. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Buddhism survived until the 15th or 16th century, as witnessed by the manuscript of the Manjusrimulakalpa. At Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, Buddhist icons were cast and inscribed until that period, and the ruins of the Chudamani Vihara stood until they were destroyed by the Jesuits in 1867. Around Nalanda, the remains of votive stupas were gradually reappropriated and worshipped as Shiva lingas. An image of the Buddha in bhūmisparśa mudrā at the village of Telhara was venerated as Hanuman during Rama Navami. The last abbot of Bodh Gaya Mahavihara was Sariputra, who was active during the 14th and 15th centuries before he left India for Nepal. According to the 17th century Tibetan Lama Taranatha, the Mahabodhi Temple was later restored by a Bengali queen in the 15th century before passing to a landowner and becoming a Shaivite center. Inscriptions at Bodh Gaya document Buddhist pilgrims visiting the site as late as 1877, when a Burmese mission sent by King Mindon Min arrived there.

• 7. Revival and Modern Presence

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  In 1891 the Sri Lankan Buddhist activist Don David Hewavitarne, later known as Anagarika Dharmapala, visited India. Working with American Theosophists including Henry Steel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, he helped form the Maha Bodhi Society and the Maha Bodhi Journal, and his efforts raised funds to recover Buddhist holy sites in British India such as Bodh Gaya. The 1901 census of British India, which included modern Bangladesh, India, Burma, and Pakistan, recorded a total population of 294.4 million, of which only about 0.3 million Buddhists lived in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan combined, roughly 0.1 percent of the reported population when Burma's nearly 9.2 million Buddhists are excluded. On the 14th of October 1956 in Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with 365,000 followers, pioneering the Dalit Buddhist movement that became known as Navayana or Ambedkarite Buddhism. Marathi Buddhists are now the largest Buddhist community in India. In 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, escaped from Tibet to India and established the government of Tibet in Exile in Dharamshala, which became known as Little Lhasa. The Vipassana Research Institute, founded by S. N. Goenka, who lived from 1924 to 2013, promoted Buddhist meditation in a non-sectarian form that spread across Europe, America, and Asia. In November 2008, the construction of the Global Vipassana Pagoda was completed on the outskirts of Mumbai. A 2010 Pew estimate placed the total Buddhist population of the nations created from British India at about 10 million, with 92.5 percent living in India, 7.2 percent in Bangladesh, and 0.2 percent in Pakistan.