The decline of Buddhism in India
After centuries of slow decline, the great monasteries of north India are sacked during the Turkic conquests around 1200, and Buddhism all but vanishes from the land of its birth.
- Nalanda — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (2nd ed.) — Peter Harvey, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road — Johan Elverskog, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010)
- The Foundations of Buddhism — Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press (1998)
For more than a thousand years Buddhism flourished in India, and the monastic university of Nalanda, in Bihar, drew students from China, Korea and Tibet from the fifth century onward. By the end of the first millennium, though, Buddhism survived mainly in the north-east under the Pala kings, centred on a few vast monasteries.
- Nalanda — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (2nd ed.) — Peter Harvey, Cambridge University Press (2013)
Around 1200, Turkic forces led by Bakhtiyar Khalji overran Bihar and Bengal, and Nalanda and Vikramashila were sacked; exact dates are uncertain. Monks fled to Nepal and Tibet. Within a century or so, organised Buddhism had almost disappeared from India outside the Himalayan fringes.
- Nalanda — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Foundations of Buddhism — Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press (1998)
- Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road — Johan Elverskog, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010)
- An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (2nd ed.) — Peter Harvey, Cambridge University Press (2013)
Buddhism was already weakening in much of India long before the Turkic raids. It depended on large monasteries and royal patronage, had little organised lay community, and lost ground to devotional Hinduism, which absorbed many of its ideas and even counted the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu. When the great monasteries fell, there was little left to rebuild them.
- An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (2nd ed.) — Peter Harvey, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- The Foundations of Buddhism — Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press (1998)
- Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road — Johan Elverskog, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010)
Many Buddhists, and some Indian historians, stress the violence of the conquest: the sack of Nalanda and Vikramashila, the killing of monks and the burning of libraries, recorded by Muslim and Tibetan chroniclers alike. Monks who escaped fled to Tibet and Nepal, carrying texts with them.
- Nalanda — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Tibetans — Matthew T. Kapstein, Blackwell (2006)
Some scholars argue that later polemics on all sides, Hindu nationalist and others, have exaggerated or simplified the story, and point out that Buddhist–Muslim relations elsewhere on the Silk Road were long and varied. Who did what, and how much each factor mattered, remains debated.
- Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road — Johan Elverskog, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010)
Why it matters today
For Buddhists across Asia, India is the holy land, yet it was nearly empty of Buddhists for 700 years. The revival of Bodh Gaya as a pilgrimage centre, the restoration of Nalanda as a university, and the mass conversions led by Ambedkar are all, in different ways, a return home.