Were Buddhists and Jains Persecuted in Ancient India?

"The idea of `invasion’ is actually a naive exaggeration. Most of north western India was fairly sparsely populated in ancient times and the great Indian cities (after the Harappan period) were mainly in the region of present day Bihar until the 6th century BC so many alien tribes from less fertile areas of the north simply entered with little opposition from the local inhabitants."

Murad Saab,

Good that you wrote this. All this self deluded neo kshatriyas will understand their moorings better...

Murad Saab,

Can you suggest books detailing Buddhist/Jain persecution?

Vengy Garu,

Spend a few days in JNU and such other secular institutions. You will find all the evidence you need of persecution of Buddhist and Jainists. They hated Buddhism so much that they even made Buddha an avatar of Vishnu.

Regards

Evidence is important before we go into the loop of speculation.

To suggest that 'evidence' can be found only in marxist books or institutes is laughable!!

On the contrary there is enough bragging by the momeen jehadis telling us how the munda buddhists (mistaken as 'brahmins') were beheaded during the destruction Taxila. which was the strongest center of Buddhism.

These momeen hordes destroyed not only Taxila but also Nalanda.

The Buddhists were infact easy targets because most of them chose to die than to convert to the cult of hate and violence (himsa).

Legend has that the only thing Khilji asked was if there was a copy of the Koran at Nalanda before he sacked it. The Persian historian Minhaz, in his chronicle the Tabaquat-I-Nasiri, reported that thousands of monks were burned alive and thousands beheaded,[20] and the burning of the library contin­ued for several months and "smoke from the burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills."[21]. When the Tibetan translator Chag Lotsawa (Chag Lo-tsa-ba, 1197 - 1264) visited the site in 1235, he found it damaged and looted, with a 90 year-old teacher, Rahula Shribhadra, instructing a class of about seventy students, apparently with the support of a local Brahmin.[22][23].

Mr. Murad,

The Demolition Squad is back!

Don a metal helmet; you will now be attacked by the infamous.

And soon the N.Y Axeman and Sattar will join in for fun, and distant supporting Islam-bashers will cheer them up too.

Regards.

Baig saheb:

Buddhists have no bitterness towards Hindus; Hindus have no bitteness towards Buddhists or Jains. What happened to the collective memories of the people? On the other hand, the collective hatred of hindus towards muslims and muslims towards hindus seems to be manifest on this website and is so strong that even after your marriage with a hindu, you seem to have made it a mission to remove the world's "misunderstanding" of hindus as a tolerant people. There must be a reason, no?

"you seem to have made it a mission to remove the world's "misunderstanding" of hindus as a tolerant people."

Hindu tolerant people? That is a great news for hindus too.

There is nothing wrong in documenting what is known to be a fact. There are not enough Jain or Buddhist left in India to overcome the Hindu intolerance. They lack the numbers so they are unable to sustain the bitterness. As simple as that!

Baig sahib:

It seems you threw Jains for namesake, as you mention nothing about their annihilation. You probably know that there is mention of Parushram, a brahmin, who did kill and conquer. He is mentioned in Ramayana, if I am not wrong.

1,000 year of established Buddhism was turned into Brahminism in 100 or so years. Transformation must have all aspects of Chankaya-Niti.

In Pre-Muslim, India "Hinduism" as we now was non-existent. Even today you will have hard time defining what is Hinduism, because it cannot be viewed with the same lens as monotheistic absolute religions, like Christianity and Islam.

As I remember, even today, Sri Lanka, a Buddhist country, opens its Parliament with invocation of Vishnu. Nailing down the boundaries between indic philosophies must have been difficult then. The fight must have been between Brahmins who had lost power, and Buddhist believers who had power.

Revival of Brahminism was a very concerted effort. We know that four Shankaracharyas were established in the four corners of India. Who financed them? How did they gathered strength? These are unknows atleast to me.

After Ashoka conquered almost all of India, it was easy for Buddhism to establish. Shankaracharyas to get power (intellectual, and not physical in the sense of kingdoms) could not have been easy, no one, like Ashoka, conquered India for them.

Your essay does not tell about the Shankaracharyas revival. They neither had power nor kingdom to kill and conquer. Killings, must have happened only after they had achieved something.

Also, like Majumdar says Buddha was recognized at one of the incarnation of Vishnu, and you have mentioned that Bhddhist priests were there in temples converted to Hindu temples. Does such transition points to violent beginning?

Your article to me, seems like you want to point to killings and conquering to justify other killings in the name of other religions. If so, then you seem to ignore that other religions were organized.

Muslims first, and later British started calling Hindusim to give it an identity like their montheist absoulte reglions. Even in today's India you will not find such an unitary religion, because it never has been. History of India is full that organized behavior among "hindus" is very different. Many years ago, I had a very interesting discussion with a professor from Indian Institute of Management, Kolkatta on this topic as applied to modern management. His research was very revealing.

I must say that there may be something to learn, if your research can bring out how four Shankaracharyas organized the revival. In recent times, Gandhi's yatras come to my mind, from old time. In their times, Buddha's 45 year journey across India comes to my mind. None were violent to begin though.

Seems this article tries a little too hard to connect Hinduism with violence. It is foolish to insist that no Hindu was ever violent. However on balance compared to the monotheistic religions it has had a far more peaceful and tolerant history. For a well written and well sourced article on the decline of Buddhism in India see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_India
http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_India

Buddhism became a major challenge to ancient deformed Aryan caste system. When Aryans came down they introduced caste based on Verma or color. Later the local (Mongrols Drav+Nagas) modified it and made it based on Jati or lineage. In Aryan caste system there were mainly three groups i.e., warrior, farmers and servant. The one who were in grey area used to keep record for community so they were placed between farmers and servants. These were in fact Munshis or record keeper. Rajas were violent and oppression was the rule. All these war stories are derived from that mentality. Anyway, the peace or non-violence preached by Buddha was hailed by farmers and servants. They also started conversion into Buddhism. Then these munshis, who used to do accounting during crop season and rest were weaver, started their own non-violent mission to counter Buddhists and also to save their jobs. They started writing scriptures or in fact modifying them. They pushed their own rank above farmers but still below warriors. Buddhists were steadily growing. Over few generations these munshis started calling themselves Brahmins. Then they formalized Shuddrah and placed them lowest. In scripture Brahmins promoted their rank above warrior in the following era. When Muhammad Bin Qasim attacked Sindh, Raja Dahir was Hindu but most of the public was Buddhist. If you meet any Hilly Billy Raja Maja from mountains they will tell you how they still maintain the ancient Aryan caste system. Brahmins not only victimized servants but also misused the ancient Aryan traditions. For example the concept was quarantine of the infectious person. Brahmins made them untouchable. So this was also an ugly aspect that emerged in this process. If you perform a DNA test (which Brahmins hate) you will find the same DNA makeup in a Shuddera and in a Brahmin.

anil:

I am suspicious of agenda-driven historical research, whether the agenda is to prove that 'hindus' were intolerant or to prove that Muslim rulers were barbarians. I am not a scholar of history but, what the heck, this is chowk, not a university forum, so this is what I think on this issue.

I think Buddha never renounced the religion of his birth, whatever name one wants to give to that religion. On theological level, he challenged the existing orthodoxy that everyone had to go through a fixed number of incarnations (84 lakhs?) to achieve moksha and asserted that the same could be cut short if one is able to curb one's desire in the current birth. He also denounced some brahminical practices and anyone could join his "sangh". His disciples started to be called Bodhis. While people are fond of saying that Buddha preached against the caste system, the reality is that most of his followers were brahmins and kshatriyas and not the people of lower castes, because his philosophy appealed to the mind and not to emotions and only the upper caste had the level of sophistication to understand his philosophy. You can see this happening in the West now: University professors and intellectuals are becoming Buddhists while the lower classes seem to be more attracted to the emotional and egalitarian appeal of Islam.

This was a time when faith was not a lifelong identity and people could change their faith like they change their allegiance to political ideologies from time to time. One of the most wonderful description of the kind of discussions that took place during that period is described by the Muslim writer, Qatar-ul-aieen Hyder in her classic novel, Aag ka Darya.
When Muslim conquerors came to India, they thought of Buddhist monks as brahmins as well. Someone at chowk had pointed out that the word butt-prast was, in fact, a corruption of the word, "buddh-prast".

It is ironical that our Muslim friends now try to portray Buddhism as a victim of Hindu violence. It is these hindus who were protesting the loudest against the demolition of the Bamian Buddha statues. Even the so-called secular english language Pakistani media was largely silent or bemoaning the fact that this demolition was giving a bad name to Islam, not that there was anything intrinsically barbaric about that act.

I frankly do not know how the hindu religion eclipsced buddhism from India. However, the lack of mutual bitterness, the presence of Buddha statues in Hindu temples and the presence of hindu gods in the Buddhist temples, seems to be consistent with the hypothesis that they used their amorous, amorphous embrace, which proved fatal for the faith, just what they more recently seemed to have done with the Brahmo Samajis in Bengal and would have done to the Sikhs if they were not vigilant against this fatal embrace and started emphatically declaring "hum hindu naheen hain".

It is not at all important that Baig Sahib or nanga babu or any one of them be convinced of anything with regard to India or Indic peoples. That kind of dialogue is utterly futile.

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What IS important and needed is that we resolve these issues ourselves, as objectively as possible. Someone like vengat, if he had time and interest, can take the lead, and a group of people can look at all evidence, and describe facts as they are, without putting their own 'interpretations' on things. Once facts are known, people can bring in their interpretations, and leave them as interpretations only.

Ideally, our historians should be doing these things, but our historians have been turned into ideological laborers for powers that be.

I may be wrong, but I suspect one of the main reasons our historians fail to do their job is because they have been infiltrated by baig sahibs and nanga babus. There is nothing wrong the latter, but they think differently and use history differently, for different objectives. They can create an excellent history for themselves, but it won't be useful to the rest of us.

In that sense anil ji's idea earlier about sadna and manto creating a common work of history will not go anywhere - although both are brilliant, knowledgeable, and committed individuals, good in every way.

History cannot survive across unbridgeable ideological divides. It cannot be to used to create some 'integrated' understanding, merely to help us understand things as they were.

#13 #14
Ek bai imho

What is the saying History is written by the conqueror or some time the power of majority in democracy..I never liked history beyond rudimentory and i have been never most depresed than reading Chowk.If history is so important only the 3rd class student in junior high was steered toward it .Best brain went to science which is much better

shah ji, history and ideology are lethal mixes.

NOBODY in his or her right mind will have any problem looking at any history with you, because you are a man of the masses, of people, of reality, not driven blind by ideologies and great agendas. You have faith, but ideology, by itself, is not your thing. One can reach agreement with you.

Please note, I am not saying that only Muslims have ideologies. Hindus do too. It's just these two cannot mix.

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I am assuming, it is you, shah ji. If not, then of course, this should be addressed to senna :)