Chapter 1. A slow death: the loss of the lay base¶

The death of Indian Buddhism has a widely circulated date: around 1193, the flames of Nālandā. A date gives the illusion that death was an event. This essay first sets a rule. Death is a process; the date is only the moment when the end of that process was recorded. Volume 1, Essay 8, Chapter 6 has already supplied the chronology of decline, the list of internal and external causes, and an overall judgment. This essay does not rearrange those facts. It retells them using the analysis of the earlier essays in this volume: what died first, what died later, and what had actually died long before.¹

Begin with the chronology, because it rules out an account with a single cause from the start. Buddhism in southern India went out first, in the seventh to ninth centuries, with no connection to Islam. Xuanzang had already recorded abandoned monasteries in the south in the early seventh century. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the southern religious map belonged to Śiva and Viṣṇu, leaving Buddhism no foothold. What worked against it was competition, the bhakti tide and the temple network. Essay 5, Chapter 3 recorded those two rivals who never entered the debating arena. The northwest contracted from the seventh century onward, under the destruction of Hephthalite warfare and the rerouting of trade, as cited in Essay 5, Chapter 2. Eastern India held out longest on the continued support of the Pāla dynasty and therefore suffered the most direct military blow. Decline came to different regions hundreds of years apart. A single blow cannot explain a decline that took three centuries and came about through three different causes.

What, then, was being lost over these centuries? The lay base. The paths of its loss can be checked point by point against the human life cycle. After the Guptas, the caste order became firmly established again. Works on dharma brought birth, naming, coming of age, marriage, and funerals entirely under Brahmanical administration, the opposite course described in Essay 5, Chapter 2. Land grants settled the ritual officiants in village after village. The bhakti movement drew people from the other end. You could sing without literacy and love without renouncing the world. The god was in the temple at the village entrance; there were almost no conditions for entry, and the emotional devotion ran deep. Under pressure from both sides, what Buddhism could offer compared poorly. The monastery was far away, the learning in Sanskrit, initiation open only to a few, and one could not ask about attained fruits. Essay 5, Chapter 2 counted no irreplaceable everyday function for Buddhism in the village. This chapter takes that statement to its limit. At every point in an Indian person's life from birth to cremation, Buddhism performed no ritual role at all. It had never entered everyday Indian life on any scale, so it could hardly be driven out of it.²

The first five labels are life-cycle rites; the sixth is the temple’s festival role. The Chinese image has five empty boxes, while the English image gives all six labels an empty box. The boxes illustrate the chapter’s claim about Buddhism’s absence from these everyday institutional roles; their number is not an additional statistic. The chapter presents loss of everyday functions as a conjecture and specifies that evidence of a substantial late Buddhist share of village life-cycle rites would weaken it. Its note also preserves Jaini’s different explanation, which does not make care for the laity the decisive factor.

For South India, “without invasion” means “without the devastation of war,” as in the Chinese label. The regional labels retain their different times: South India in the seventh to ninth centuries, the northwest from the seventh century, and eastern India holding on until 1203. The Chinese eastern bar ends in an arrow, whereas the English one fades. These bars are schematic, not measured curves or proportions of decline. The final line describes gradual loss of participation without an identifiable moment of departure.

The manner of the loss made it harder to reverse than the loss itself: it had no identifiable moment. Essay 5, Chapter 2 pointed out that Buddhist lay status did not constitute a hereditary identity and had no body of law of its own governing that status. In the centuries when boundaries blurred (Essay 7, Chapter 2), this structural weakness let believers gradually merge into the surrounding religions. Volume 1, Essay 8 observed that Mahākāla could be worshipped in both traditions. Ordinary believers felt almost no fundamental change when they "turned" from Buddhism to Hinduism. The doctrine of Viṣṇu's avatars added the last step. The Buddha himself was Viṣṇu's ninth avatar, so worshipping the Buddha was worshipping Viṣṇu. Conversion required crossing no threshold.³ This great loss therefore left almost no sound in the historical sources. There was no moment of apostasy, no ritual of conversion, no countable defection, only people gradually ceasing to come. A religion without a register of members leaves no trace of its losses in the sources.

The community's actions look less like resistance than cooperation. This volume has recorded each of its retreats: the platform turned toward the court (Essay 5, Chapter 2); support shifted from ten thousand households to one king (the same chapter); the teaching was taken inside the gate of initiation (Essay 7, Chapter 1); and signs of attainment were confined to the relationship between teacher and disciple (Essay 7, Chapter 3). Each step made sense at the time. Each reduced the community's contact with ordinary people. By the end, this community could no longer say what it offered a villager. The learning was unintelligible; efficacy was also available next door; no one could show that liberation had been attained (Essay 7, Chapter 3). Retreat into the great monasteries did not come from any single decision. It was the last stage of the process recorded in Essay 5, Chapter 2: talent, reputation, and support flowed to a few great monasteries, and those monasteries then narrowed their doors to the outside.

Of the four questions, only one still deserves a pause: who benefited? For the first time in this volume, no beneficiary from within Buddhism can be named. Taken separately, each retreat had local beneficiaries, the teaching platform, the endowed estate, the ācārya's qualification, all named in earlier essays. Taken together, the retreats benefited no one. This is the worst outcome of the exchanges this volume keeps meeting. Each exchange was rational at the time; all the costs were pushed into the distant future, and the distant future actually arrived.

The rules require an explicit marker. The following is this volume's conjecture. A religion dies from losing everyday life. Once weddings, funerals, and the other rites had all been handed back to Brahmins, Buddhism had withdrawn from the Indian life cycle. After that, its disappearance was only a matter of time. Corroboration lies in the mirror of the comparison cases. Every Buddhism that survived held everyday life in its hands: Ceylon's village monasteries and merit economy (Essay 3, Chapter 3), Burma and Thailand's offerings to monks and rites for the dead, and China's funeral rites and scripture-recitation and repentance rituals (Essay 11). The correlation of survival with a share in the life cycle is far greater than its correlation with doctrinal sophistication. If inscriptions or texts reveal that late Indian Buddhism still held a substantial share of life-cycle ritual, in village records of weddings and funerals or networks of permanent monasteries, this conjecture must be weakened accordingly.

After the lay base had gone, the few great monasteries under the Pālas still flourished, their libraries full and their eloquence unhindered. The next chapter examines these monasteries and the economic structure they depended on.

References¶