The standard Marxist "explanation" -- the economic cause,
the fulfilling of historical functions and thereafter
disappearing, right to the remorse at the lapsing into
"primeval cults". But today, these "theses" won't do. For
today the need is to make people believe that Hindus too
were intolerant, that Hindus also destroyed temples of
others....
Or take another figure -- one saturated with our history,
culture, religion. He also wrote of that region --
Afghanistan and beyond. The people of those areas did not
destroy either Buddhism or the structures associated with it,
he wrote, till one particular thing happened. What was
this? He recounted, "In very ancient times this Turkish
race repeatedly conquered the western provinces of India
and founded extensive kingdoms. They were Buddhists, or
would turn Buddhists after occupying Indian territory. In
the ancient history of Kashmir there is mention of these
famous Turkish emperors -- Hushka, Yushka, and
Kanishka. It was this Kanishka who founded the Northern
School of Buddhism called Mahayana. Long after, the
majority of them took to Mohammedanism and completely
devastated the chief Buddhistic seats of Central Asia such
as Kandhar and Kabul. Before their conversion to
Mohammedanism they used to imbibe the learning and
culture of the countries they conquered, and by assimilating
the culture of other countries would try to propagate
civilization. But ever since they became Mohammedans,
they have only the instinct of war left in them; they have
not got the least vestige of learning and culture; on the
contrary, the countries that come under their sway
gradually have their civilization extinguished. In many
places of modern Afghanistan and Kandhar etc., there yet
exist wonderful Stupas, monasteries, temples and gigantic
statues built by their Buddhist ancestors. As a result of
Turkish admixture and their conversion to
Mohammedanism, those temples etc. are almost in ruins,
and the present Afghans and allied races have grown so
uncivilized and illiterate that, far from imitating those
ancient works of architecture, they believe them to be the
creation of super-natural spirits like the Jinn etc.,...".
The author? The very one the secularists tried to
appropriate three-four years ago -- Swami Vivekananda.
And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain
that such facts and narratives must be swept under the
carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them
will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour
against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say.
Simultaneously they insist on concocting the myth of
Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction
not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative,
specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact,
not embitter Hindus?
Swamiji focussed on another factor about which we hear
little today: internal decay. The Buddha -- like Gandhiji in
our times -- taught us first and last to alter our conduct, to
realise through practice the insights he had attained. But
that is the last thing the people want to do, they want
soporifics: a mantra, a pilgrimage, an idol which may
deliver them from the consequences of what they have
done. The people walked out on the Buddha's austere
teaching -- for it sternly ruled out props. No external
suppression etc., were needed to wean them away: people
are deserting Gandhiji for the same reason today -- is any
violence or conspiracy at work?
The religion became monk-, and monastery-centric. And
these decayed as closed groups and institutions invariably
do. Ambedkar himself alludes to this factor -- though he
puts even this aspect of the decay to the ravages of Islam.
After the decimation of monks by Muslim invaders, all
sorts of persons -- married clergy, artisan priests -- had to
be roped in to take their place. Hence the inevitable result,
Ambedkar writes: "It is obvious that this new Buddhist
priesthood had neither dignity nor learning and were a poor
match for the rival, the Brahmins whose cunning was not
unequal to their learning."
Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and others who had
reflected deeply on the course of religious evolution of our
people, focussed on the condition to which Buddhist
monasteries had been reduced by themselves. The people
had already departed from the pristine teaching of the
Buddha, Swamiji pointed out: the Buddha had taught no
God, no Ruler of the Universe, but the people, being
ignorant and in need of sedatives, "brought their gods, and
devils, and hobgoblins out again, and a tremendous
hotchpotch was made of Buddhism in India." Buddhism
itself took on these characters: and the growth that we
ascribe to the marvelous personality of the Buddha and to
the excellence of his teaching, Swami Vivekananda said,
was due in fact "to the temples which were built, the idols
that were erected, and the gorgeous ceremonials that were
put before the nation." Soon the "wonderful moral strength"
of the original message was lost "and what remained of it
became full of superstitions and ceremonials, a hundred
times cruder than those it intended to suppress," of
practices which were "equally bad, unclean, and
immoral...."
Swami Vivekananda regarded the Buddha as "the living
embodiment of Vedanta", he always spoke of the Buddha
in superlatives. For that very reason, Vivekananda raged
all the more at what Buddhism became: "It became a mass
of corruption of which I cannot speak before this
audience....;" "I have neither the time nor the inclination to
describe to you the hideousness that came in the wake of
Buddhism. The most hideous ceremonies, the most
horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever
wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial
forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all
been the creation of degraded Buddhism"....
With reform as his life's mission, Swami Vivekananda
reflected deeply on the flaws which enfeebled Buddhism,
and his insights hold lessons for us to this day. Every
reform movement, he said, necessarily stresses negative
elements. But if it goes on stressing only the negative, it
soon peters out. After the Buddha, his followers kept
emphasising the negative, when the people wanted the
positive that would help lift them.
"Every movement triumphs," he wrote, "by dint of some
unusual characteristic, and when it falls, that point of pride
becomes its chief element of weakness." And in the case of
Buddhism, he said, it was the monastic order. This gave it
an organizational impetus, but soon consequences of the
opposite kind took over. Instituting the monastic order, he
said, had "the evil effect of making the very robe of the
monk honoured," instead of making reverence contingent
on conduct. "Then these monasteries became rich," he
recalled, "the real cause of the downfall is here.... some
containing a hundred thousand monks, sometimes twenty
thousand monks in one building -- huge, gigantic
buildings...." On the one hand this fomented corruption
within, it encoiled the movement in organizational
problems. On the other it drained society of the best
persons.
>From its very inception, the monastic order had
institutionalized inequality of men and women even in
sanyasa, Vivekananda pointed out. "Then gradually," he
recalled, "the corruption known as Vamachara
(unrestrained mixing with women in the name of religion)
crept in and ruined Buddhism. Such diabolical rites are not
to be met with in any modern Tantra...."
Whereas the Buddha had counseled that we shun
metaphysical speculations and philosophical conundrums --
as these would only pull us away from practice -- Buddhist
monks and scholars lost themselves in arcane debates about
these very questions. [Hence a truth in Kosambhi's
observation, but in the sense opposite to the one he
intended: Shankara's refutations show that Shankara knew
nothing of Buddha's original doctrine, Kosambhi asserted;
Shankara was refuting the doctrines which were being put
forth by the Buddhists in his time, and these had nothing to
do with the original teaching of the Buddha.] The
consequence was immediate: "By becoming too
philosophic," Vivekananda explained, "they lost much of
their breadth of heart."
Sri Aurobindo alludes to another factor, an inherent
incompatibility. He writes of "the exclusive trenchancy of
its intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions," and of how
"its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive
negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with
the native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich
synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was
a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the
people...."
We find in such factors a complete explanation for the
evaporation of Buddhism. But we will find few of them in
the secularist discourse today. Because their purpose is
served by one "thesis" alone: Hindus crushed Buddhists,
Hindus demolished their temples....
In regard to matter after critical matter -- the Aryan-
Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the
nature of Islamic rule, the character of the Freedom
Struggle -- we find this trait -- suppresso veri, suggesto
falsi. This is the real scandal of history-writing in the last
thirty years. And it has been possible for these "eminent
historians" to perpetrate it because they acquired control of
institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, you
have to undo the control.