The End of the World as we know it, part IV

The End of the World as we know it, part IV

The Decline of Buddhism in India

Of course, to speak of the decline of Buddhism in India is a bit superficial in the sense that since Buddhism disappeared in India it flourished in the rest of Asia where it continues as a great moral force today.

But, in so far as Buddhism arose in India as a challenge to Brahmanism, after it had absorbed Brahmanism completely it grew to resemble what it had consumed. The corruption of Buddhism into a cult of priests led to its final rejection by the people of India who had seen abuses by priestly classes before and who rejected them a second time when they resurfaced in the guise of Buddhist enlightenment. Priests slaughtered animals and held orgiastic festivals within their monasteries, all the while collecting gold and silver in tribute from the hapless citizens.

Leaving the problem of corrupt priests masquerading as gurus aside for a moment, and other important movement was responsible for ultimately driving the final nail in the coffin of Buddhism in India.

This movement was led by a thinker and spiritual leader who began the Reformation and rehabilitation of Vedic thought through the abstract texts of its greatest philosophical treatise, the Vedanta Sutras. His name was Shankar. While also known as Adi Shankar, or Shankaracharya, he led the fight for the return of an authentically Indian spirituality and religious tradition.

Essentially, Shankar accepted Buddha’s analysis, but rejected his final conclusions. According to Shankar, while ego is certainly a problem, since identification with the material body engenders desire and desire pain, the dissolution of ego does not resolve into nothingness as Buddha would have it but in the infinite consciousness of the absolute known as Brahman. In short, Shankar substitutes his concept of the infinite for Buddha’s version of nirvana or nothingness and so refutes Buddha.

With his refutation of Buddha, Shankar concludes that the problem of enlightenment becomes a search for the eternal self the divine light. Samsara or the wheel of birth and death is problematic since the eternal soul identifies itself with the illusory material world. The world is an illusion, just as our false sense of self. but there is an underlying reality which is true. Eternal consciousness. This has been summarized by Shankar as brahma-satya jagan-mithya: in other words, “Spirit is real. The world is false.” For Shankar, the false sense of self will dissolve into a higher understanding when one realizes the truth that the soul is eternal.

The self, then, is like a drop of water which dissolves into the ocean of divine consciousness. The background of reality is not a void. Shankar rejects voidism in favor of an internal, infinite, spirit where personality and ego merge into the divine and everything is one. The background of reality is consciousness according to Shankar.

The whole material creation rests on spiritual consciousness as a kind of perverted reflection.

The four noble truths of Buddha remain true for Shankar, but he refutes nonexistence with infinite spiritual consciousness. He finds many logical contradictions in Buddhist logic and exposes these contradictions in his commentaries. He negates the illusion of materialistic ego with the reality of eternal self. He replaces zero with infinity. After all, 0×0 is zero. The infinite times infinite is equal to the infinite.

As for the ethical practices of enlightenment for example the eight noble practices of the Buddha, right living, right association, and so on, Shankar enfolds is into his new system, while criticizing the Buddhist priesthood for failing to follow their own practice. Shankar rejected the corrupted priesthood of the Buddhists and founded his own system of reformed monasteries where the truth could be realized through meditative practice.

And while he absorbs the best practices of Buddhist enlightenment, Shankar reaffirms India’s traditions, rituals, ceremonies, and mythology as helpful towards attaining the final goal: freedom from the wheel of birth and death.

Shankar accepts the worship of the traditional Hindu gods within his Mayavāda theory, observing that the gods too our merely temporary manifestations. Some temporary karmic benefit may be one through such practice, but one should be mindful that both gods and worshipers are illusions in the end. In the end, we are all one, according to the view of Shankar.

Shankar’s solution hit a nerve. He had harmonized the Buddhist critique with the analysis of Vedanta, rejecting nihilism and embracing the rich wisdom tradition of the Indian subcontinent that had been denied for so many years.

Shankar traveled far and wide throughout seventh century India, developing his message, fine-tuning his sermons, writing important commentaries of Bhagavad-Gita, Vedānta, and other Scriptures that are still studied today. Established monasteries, publicly defeating many Buddhist gurus in argument. Some of them later became his disciples. He converted kings and princes as well as masses of common people to his cause. He established his own school of transcendental wisdom and mysticism influential in yoga schools throughout the world today.

Shankar Acharya

His metaphysical system was sophisticated and resilient enough to withstand the attacks brought by Islamic scholars who conquered India at the time of moguls. His philosophy was subtle enough to outlast hundreds of years of evangelization by Christian preachers and Catholic Jesuits highly educated in the idealism of Kant and Hegel, John Locke, and David Hume. Biblical scholars working on behalf of the British colonial authorities were determined to convert what they considered the barbaric tribes of India to the cause of Christianity just as had the Spanish missionaries working with the Aztecs in Mexico. But they failed. Christianity is today a minority religion in India. Would be preachers who confronted Hindus with the absurdities of Platonic accounts would find themselves confronted in turn with the patent nonsense of biblical stories like Adam and Eve, Jonah and the whale, Noah and the Arc, etc. And setting aside the mythical characteristics of their respective scriptures when the missionaries would enter into it a true debate on the nature of reality, time, creation, consciousness, karma, or divinity itself, they would find themselves challenged with the arguments that Shankar had honed in his debates with the best Buddhist scholars 1000 years before Shakespeare.

Some of those missionaries were themselves converted. Shankar’s views on the Upanishads would penetrate the European consciousness via philosophers like Schopenhauer who marveled at their simplicity.

Perhaps Shankar’s greatest contribution was in promoting the ancient Sanskrit literatures which form the basis of India’s wisdom tradition. In this way he gave support to a renaissance of interest in the original texts of Hinduism. While many of his ideas have since been refuted, most notably by scholars of the Vaishnavas school such as Madhva, Nimbarka, Vishnuswami, Ramanuja, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and Baladeva Vidyabhushana, shakuntas contribution is such that all subsequent commentators on Vedānta have had to deal with his legacy.

Baladev Vidyabhushan

In “The Rice and Decline of Buddhism in India,” Kanai Hal Hazra writes, “Śaṃkarācārya or Śaṃkara was a Brahmin of the South. He did a great job for the glorificaiton of the Vedas and Vedāntas. He was against Buddhism. He built his Śṛṅgeri maṭha on the exact site of a Buddhist monastery. His biographies refer to his campaings against the Buddhists from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. Owing to his anti-Buddhist activities Buddhism fell on its evil days. One of his biographers writes, ‘The Buddhist monasteries began to tremble and the monks began to disperse pellmell.’ We can get and idea of Śaṃkara’s anti-Buddhist activities from a passage int he Brahmasūtra-Śaṃkara-bhāṣya. Here Śaṃkara states, ‘Buddha was an enemy of the people and taught contradictory and confusing things.’ From the above discussion we conlcude that due to bitter hostilities and fierce campaigns of Kumāriḷa Bhaṭṭa and Śaṃkara, Buddhism disappeared from many parts of India.”

For having done so much for the cause of Hinduism and Shaivism, as well as for his great influence on Indian spirituality, Shankara has long been considered as an avatar of Shiva himself and is known as Shankaracharya, the greatest of spiritual teachers by many who still revere his name.

Jayadeva Goswāmī in his daśāvatara-śloka speaks of Buddha as an avatara of Vishnu who came to promote nonviolence when animal slaughter became popular. If Buddha’s purpose was to promote nonviolence, it feel to Shankara to restore India’s rich traditions and allow for deeper interpretations of Bhagavad-Gita than his own to gradually emerge in the Bhakti school which promotes divine love on the basis of surrender to God. In some sense Buddhism didn’t exactly disappear; it was absorbed by Hinduism, or as S. Radhakrishna put it, “Buddhism perished in India to be born again as a refined Brahmanism.” In “The Rice and Decline of Buddhism in India,” Kanai Hal Hazra writes, “ Gradually Buddhism was absorbed with Hinduism which accepted many cardinal elements of the religion of the Buddha. It is known that the Mahāyāna admitted many ideas from Hinduism and the latter also took certain teachings of Buddhism. This ‘give and take’ policy of these two religions did not help Buddhism. On the contrary, it lost its identity and gradually it came to be absorbed with Hinduism.”

L.M. Joshi writes, “The Tantra practices harmonized th two systems so completely that Buddhism’s independent existence might have appeared needless or even impossible.”

Buddhist Tantric ritual and ceremony borrowed so heavily from its Hindu antecendents as to be Shaivishm in Buddhist garb. C. Elliot says, “Even in the monasteries, the doctrine taught bore a closer resemblance to Hinduism than to the preaching of Gautama and it is this absence of the protestant spirit, this pliable adaptability to the ideas of each age, which caused Indian Buddhism to lose its individuality and separate existence. In some localities its disappearance and absorption were preceded by a monstrous phase known as Tantrism or Śāktism, in which the worst elements of Hinduism, those which would have been most repulsive to Gautama, made an unnatural alliance with his church.”

In the end, Hazra identifies a seven important factors for the historical decline of Buddhism in India, as follows:

1. Laxity in Monastic Discipline and Improper Conduct of Monks and Nuns

2.Schism in the Buddhist Sangha

3.Mahayanism, Development of Tantrism and Hinduistic Tendencies in Rituals and Worship

4.Brahminical Hostility and Fierce Campaigns by some Philosophers of Brahminical Thought

5.The Doctrine of Suffering (Duchkavāda) was too Pessimistic

6.Muslim Persecution

7.Decline in the Patronage of the Ruling Powers and Nobility

It took a thousand years for Buddha’s star to rise and fell in the Indian firmament. Over roughly the same millennium the great Roman Empire rose and fell around the destruction of democracy, the apogee of empire, the growth of faith in Christianity and its spread, and finally the reaction of barbarism. And of these factors in the rise and fall of empire, perhaps the most important to our brief survey of ideas and the decline of empires is the introduction of Christianity and the advent of Christ.