Truschke POWERISLAMICSWORD 2018

THE POWER OF THE ISLAMIC SWORD IN NARRATING THE DEATH OF INDIAN BUDDHISM
Author(s): Audrey Truschke

Source: History of Religions , May 2018, Vol. 57, No. 4 (May 2018), pp. 406-435
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26548181
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Audrey Truschke THE POWER OF THE
ISLAMIC SWORD IN
NARRATING THE DEATH
OF INDIAN BUDDHISM
Brahmanism beaten and battered by the Muslim invaders could look to the
rulers for support and sustenance and get it. Buddhism beaten and battered
by the Muslim invaders had no such hope. It was an uncared for orphan and
it withered in the cold blast of the native rulers and was consumed in the fire
lit up by the conquerors. (BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR)1
Scholarship on Buddhist and Muslim interactions has long featured a partic-

ular story about Islam’s central role in Indian Buddhism’s decline. This nar-
rative can be summarized in a single sentence: iconoclastic Muslims invaded
India, attacked Buddhist monasteries and institutions of higher learning, and
in so doing destroyed the foothold of Buddhism on the subcontinent. It is
hard to overstate the potency and prevalence of this story line. As Johan
Elverskog has put it, “Whenever the topic of Buddhism and Islam is ever
mentioned it almost invariably revolves around the Muslim destruction of
the Dharma.”2 Modern academics often shy away from the more sensational
descriptions of this alleged apocalyptic clash that characterized earlier, pop-
For comments and conversations on earlier drafts of this work, I thank Alexandra Kalo-
yanides, Paul Harrison, and the participants of “Buddhist and Muslim Encounters in Premodern
South Asia” at the University of Lausanne, October 12–13, 2015.
1
Quoted in Vasant Moon, ed., Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, vol. 3 (Bombay:
Department of Education, Government of Maharashtra, 1987), 232–33.
2
Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2010), 2.
© 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0018-2710/2018/5704-0003$10.00

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History of Religions 407
ular thinking on the subject, as exemplified by the above quote by B. R.

Ambedkar, a founding father of modern India and late-life convert to Bud-
dhism. Nonetheless, the basic narrative that Islam killed South Asian Bud-
dhism remains alive and well, such as in this quotation from a popular
2013 textbook on Buddhism: “ From 986 CE, the Muslim Turks started raid-
ing north-west India from Afghanistan, plundering western India early in the
eleventh century. Forced conversions to Islam were made, and Buddhist
images smashed, due to the Islamic dislike of ‘idolatry’. Indeed, in India,
the Islamic term for an ‘idol’ became ‘budd’. By 1192, the Turks established
rule over north India from Delhi. The north-eastern stronghold of Buddhism
then fell, with the destruction of Nālandā university in 1198.”3 Much about
this account is historically dubious, and I reconsider throughout this essay
the shaky evidentiary foundation for the clash-based story of Islam and Bud-
dhism by revisiting Indo-Persian (and, to a lesser degree, Sanskrit and Ti-
betan) texts. In addition to questions of facticity, I take up here the power
of the Islamic sword as a rhetorical, historiographical, and narrative device
that wields considerable influence over many modern scholars and has im-
peded our ability to analyze what happened to Buddhism in India during
the early second millennium CE. I do not offer an answer here to the ques-
tion of what happened to Indian Buddhism.4 Rather, I seek to analyze our
assumptions about the decline of Buddhism in its homeland and thereby bet-
ter position future scholars to free themselves from the ideological baggage
that has hampered investigation of this topic for decades.
The demise of Indian Buddhism garners little scholarly agreement, except
for its basic occurrence and Islam’s involvement. Put in broad terms, Buddhism
ceased to be an active tradition across India between 1100 and 1300 CE. Some
scholars have pointed to limited evidence that pockets of Buddhism survived
in tucked-away corners of the subcontinent.5 But overall there is widespread
3
Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd ed. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 194. According to a survey run by Stephen C. Berkwitz
in December 2014, about one-fifth of professors who teach an introduction to Buddhism course use
Harvey’s Introduction to Buddhism. Stephen C. Berkwitz, “Textbook Buddhism: Introductory
Books on the Buddhist Religion,” Religion (2015): 13.
4
For recent attempts to answer this question, see D. C. Ahir, Buddhism Declined in India:
How and Why? (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 2005); Gail Omvedt, Buddhism in India: Challenging
Brahmanism and Caste (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 149–85; K. T. S. Sarao, The De-
cline of Buddhism in India: A Fresh Perspective (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2012); Gio-
vanni Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India (Delhi: Manohar, 2011).
5
For example, Arthur McKeown analyzes the Indian Buddhist intellectual Shariputra, who
lived from 1335 until 1426. See Arthur McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing: The
Life and Times of Sariputra (c. 1335–1426), Last Abbot of Bodhgaya” (PhD diss., Harvard Uni-
versity, 2010). Kim and Pal discuss the 1446 illustrated Kalachakra tantra manuscript produced
in a village in Bihar. Jinah Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Bud-
dhist Book Cult in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 250; Prata-
paditya Pal, “A New Document of Indian Painting,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of

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408 The Power of the Islamic Sword
consensus that Buddhism went extinct or nearly extinct from South Asia in
the early second millennium.6 The second point on which there is general schol-
arly concurrence is that Islam had something to do with Indian Buddhism’s
Armageddon, especially the alleged sack of Nalanda by Muhammad bin Bakh-
tiyar Khalji in 1193 (or 1197 or 1198 or 1200 or 1202 or 1205 or 1206).7 As
Sankalia put it in his influential University of Nalanda, published in 1934
and still cited today, “The history of the end of Nalanda, hence, is, in a sense,
the history of the extinction of Buddhism from the land of its birth.”8 Overall,
scholars of Indian Buddhism have devoted limited sustained attention to the
question of the tradition’s decline in the past few decades. But when they ad-
dress the topic in textbooks or in work on specific Buddhist sites, academics
often bring out the trope of blood-thirsty, iconoclastic Islamic raiders as a key
part of the story.9
Great Britain and Ireland 3, no. 4 (1965): 103–11. Some Buddhists lived in Orissa and Bengal
as late as the sixteenth century. Verardi, Hardships and Downfall, 378. See further references in
McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 18 n. 33.
6
As McKeown has noted, there have long been dissenters from this standard view, but they have
“failed to have the impact their dissent warranted” (“From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 3).
7
1193 is the most common date, working on the assumption that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar
hit Nalanda shortly following the sack of Bihar Sharif dated to 1193 in Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i
Nasiri. Charles S. Prebish and Damien Keown give the date of Nalanda’s destruction as
1197 (Introducing Buddhism, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 2010], 94). Also see S. R. Goyal,
Indian Buddhism after the Buddha (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Book World, 2003), 212; and Ste-
phen Berkwitz, South Asian Buddhism: A Survey (New York: Routledge, 2010), 141. Harvey
gives the date of 1198 (Introduction to Buddhism, 194), as does Donald W. Mitchell (Bud-
dhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience, 2nd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press,
2008], 158). Steven Darian puts the destruction at “around 1200” (“Buddhism in Bihar from
the Eighth to the Twelfth Century with Special Reference to Nalanda,” Asiatische Studien 25
[1971]: 346). Richard Eaton gives the date of circa 1202 (“Temple Desecration and Indo-
Muslim States,” in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South
Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence [Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000], table 10.1). Sankalia gives the date as 1205–6 (The University of Nalanda [Madras:
B. G. Paul, 1934], 213). Some scholars simply give a range of dates. For example, Hartmut
Scharfe says that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar hit Nalanda between 1197 and 1206 (Education
in Ancient India [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 150). The variety of dates indicates the lack of a clear
historical record that Nalanda was sacked by Turkish raiders.
8
Sankalia, University of Nalanda, 208.
9
For example, Ahir, Buddhism Declined in India, 48–61; Berkwitz, South Asian Buddhism,
140–1; Cathy Cantwell, Buddhism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 3 and 143;
Goyal, Indian Buddhism after the Buddha, 212–13; Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 194–
96; Mitchell, Buddhism, 158; Prebish and Keown, Introducing Buddhism, 94; Richard H. Rob-
inson, Willard L. Johnson, Sandra A. Wawrytko, and Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Reli-
gion: A Historical Introduction, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997), 135–37; Kevin
Trainor, Buddhism: An Illustrated Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54;
A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism, 3rd ed. repr. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004), 478–87; Al-
exander Wynne, Buddhism: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 175. There are also
scholars who prefer to note the destruction of sites such as Nalanda without naming the agents
of such destruction; e.g., John S. Strong, Buddhisms: An Introduction (London: Oneworld
Publications, 2015), Appendix A, 391. Some overview textbooks decline to explicitly discuss
what caused the end of Indian Buddhism and instead focus on tantra as “the final development

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Historians have recognized for quite some time that the standard take on
Buddhism’s disappearance in South Asia and Islam’s role therein is too sim-
plistic. For instance, Marshall Hodgson wrote in 1977:
Probably Buddhism did not yield to Islam so much by direct conversion as by a more
insidious route: the sources of recruitment to the relatively unaristocratic Buddhism—
for instance, villagers coming into the cities and adopting a new allegiance to accord
with their new status—turned now rather to Islam than to an outdated Buddhism.
The record of the massacre of one monastery in Bengal, combined with the inherited
Christian conception of Muslims as the devotees of the sword, has yielded the widely
repeated statement that the Muslims violently “destroyed” Buddhism in India. Muslims
were not friendly to it, but there is no evidence that they simply killed off all the Bud-
dhists, or even all the Buddhist monks. It will take much active revision before such
assessments of the role of Islam, based largely on unexamined preconceptions, are
eliminated even from educated mentalities.10
I agree with Hodgson’s assessment of the lack of evidence for the proposi-
tion that Islam killed off Indian Buddhists or Indian Buddhism and also with
his contention that this narrative relies mainly on prejudices rather than facts.
Here I take up Hodgson’s call for “active revision” of the presumed destruc-
tive relationship between Islam and Buddhism by interrogating premodern
and modern limiting preconceptions.
I am far from the first scholar to take issue with the “Islam killed Indian
Buddhism” narrative, but my interests and interventions stand apart from ear-
lier work in a few key ways. Several scholars have tried to undercut the as-
sumption of a single-mindedly destructive relationship between Islam and
Buddhism by drawing attention to little known interactions between medie-
val Buddhists and Muslims. Johan Elverskog’s Buddhism and Islam is espe-
cially enlightening in this regard, but it ultimately takes us away from the
question of what happened to Indian Buddhism circa 1200, a query in which
I am invested. Scholars such as Jinah Kim and Arthur McKeown have pre-
sented new evidence about Indian Buddhist patronage and monks, respec-
tively, in the early to mid-second millennium.11 I cite the insightful work
of both scholars here, but my lens is larger and more attuned to historiographic
and narrative issues. The idea that Islam violently undercut Indian Buddhism
cannot be overturned by new research alone because the theory does not rest
of Indian Buddhism”; e.g., Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 268. As Berkwitz points out, Gethin’s Foundations of Buddhism is a fa-
vorite textbook in introductory courses on Buddhism (“Textbook Buddhism,” 4).
10
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Mid-
dle Periods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 557.
11
Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred; and McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” re-
spectively.

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on solid historical evidence in the first place. As Gregory Schopen wrote

twenty-five years ago concerning why Buddhist studies scholars often priv-
ileged texts over archaeological evidence, “the choice made was, apparently,
not based on an assessment of the two kinds of sources as historical witnesses,
but on some other kind of an assumption.”12 Analogous, powerful presuppo-
sitions are at work, I argue, in how many scholars account for Indian Bud-
dhism’s demise at the hands of Islamic invaders.
The alleged relationship of destruction between two major world religions
is compelling and persistent in modern scholarship for several reasons. A
conflict-driven narrative is grounded in premodern Islamic chronicles and
confirmed by Indian and Tibetan sources. Accordingly, there is a perceived
historical basis—from both sides of the supposed clash—for this violent plot-
line. As I discuss below, the textual evidence is far thinner than most scholars
realize, and it is irresponsible to present premodern Persian, Sanskrit, and Ti-
betan texts as clear statements of fact for a host of reasons. But it is tempting
to sweep such issues under the rug, especially since most scholars of Indian
Buddhism are not deeply familiar with the Indo-Persian work (and it is sin-
gular) that forms the core of this violent narrative. More troublingly, “Islam
killed Indian Buddhism” is an alluring story that plays on contemporary prej-
udices about both religions. Additionally, while Islam is a poor factual expla-
nation for the decline of Buddhism in South Asia on several counts, it none-
theless constitutes a convenient and, more or less, time-appropriate killer.
We currently lack a fully fleshed out alternative historical explanation for
the (near) disappearance of Indian Buddhism circa 1200, and the best re-
search to date suggests a complex web of causes. I list some of the likely fac-
tors in what follows, but I conclude the essay on a different note by offering
a few suggestions for how to better frame the entire inquiry. To tip my hand,
I propose that scholars should ask what happened to Buddhists rather than
Buddhism in medieval India because the question is more precise and opens
up cognitive space to consider the complex identities at play. Scholars also
ought to be open to multiple narratives and moments of decline and should
not begin with the assumption that another religion must be at fault for elim-
inating Indian Buddhism. In order to understand why these interventions are
necessary and valuable, however, we must start by appreciating the historio-
graphical and narrative force of the Islamic sword in scholarly and popular
thinking on the decline of Indian Buddhism. Considering the different sources
and narrative motivations at play positions us to better understand the chal-
lenges of recovering the reasons behind the fall of Indian Buddhism in the early
12
Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian
Buddhism,” History of Religions 31, no. 1 (1991): 3–4.

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second millennium and enables us to more accurately characterize premodern

Buddhist-Muslim interactions moving forward.
A PERSISTENT HISTORICAL QUESTION
In part, the standby tale that Islam finished off Indian Buddhism lives on be-
cause it offers a clear causal explanation, however dubious, to an enduring
historical question: What happened to Indian Buddhism? The Gautama Bud-
dha died in northeastern India circa 411–400 BCE.13 Buddhist teachings
grew in prominence on the subcontinent for centuries, attracting state support
from Gandharan rulers and the Mauryan and Gupta empires and amassing
monastic and lay followers. One thousand years after the Gautama Buddha
walked the earth, the Buddhist dharma encompassed several schools of thought,
included an array of different practices, had spread far beyond India to other
parts of Asia, inspired great works of literature and art, and enjoyed a robust
philosophical tradition. The standard story of Indian Buddhism thereafter, es-
pecially after the sixth or seventh century CE, typically takes on a murky qual-
ity and often features a slow decline punctuated by devastating moments of
violence.
The beginning of Indian Buddhism’s atrophy is a subject of considerable
disagreement among academics. Some scholars trace the roots of decay to the
fall of the Gupta dynasty in the sixth century and the “new culture of military
adventurism” that supposedly followed.14 Others point to events in the sev-
enth century CE, especially the rise of Shankaracarya, an Advaita Vedanta
philosopher, and Hindu devotional traditions.15 At least one scholar says that
the Buddha himself prophesied the decay of the dharma (he said it would be-
gin in the first century CE) and that rumors of impending decline swirled
about seventh-century India.16 Moving into the second millennium, some re-
13
The date of 411–400 for the Gautama Buddha’s death is a relatively recent adjustment.
Paul Dundas, The Jains, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 24.
14
Ronald Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 74. Davidson based his analysis, in large part,
on John Keegan’s idea of war as a cultural activity in A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage,
1993). Verardi also emphasizes the role of persistent conflict, including violent conflict, in un-
dercutting Indian Buddhism (Hardships and Downfall).
15
For example, Robinson et al., Buddhist Religion, 134–35. Padmanabh Jaini raises the ques-
tion of why Jain communities were not equally threatened by bhakti movements and suggests
that Jains countered and coopted key bhakti figures and practices (“The Disappearance of Bud-
dhism and the Survival of Jainism: A Study in Contrast,” in Studies in History of Buddhism:
Papers Presented at the International Conference on the History of Buddhism at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison, WIS, USA, August, 19–21, 1976, ed. A. K. Narain [Delhi: B. R. Pub-
lishing, 1980]).
16
Goyal, Indian Buddhism after the Buddha, 211; also note the same section (211–32) re-
peated in S. R. Goyal, A History of Indian Buddhism (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Book World,
2002), bk. 2, 211–32.

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searchers note declining patronage for Buddhist institutions following the

overthrow of the Palas, a dynasty that ruled parts of north India from the
eighth through the twelfth centuries.17 In their heyday, the Palas supported
major Buddhist sites; for example, they helped to build Vikramashila, Od-
antapuri, and Somapuri and patronized Nalanda.18
These proposed intellectual and political factors are hardly exclusive, and
different scholars emphasize certain ideas above others. For example, Mc-
Keown has observed that “the declining popularity of the idea that the Muslim
invasions destroyed Buddhism made the notion that Buddhism had become
philosophically untenable more widespread.”19 Even when scholars posit a
preexisting decline of Indian Buddhism, however, they generally agree that
Buddhist institutions and practices survived such blows (even if in a severely
reduced form) on the subcontinent until the arrival of Muslim raiders and rul-
ers circa 1200. Indeed, nearly all of the scholars that McKeown surveys (and
McKeown himself) argue that “Muslim invasions” were “definitely a contrib-
uting factor” in the decline of Indian Buddhism.20 Writing in 2002, Ronald
Davidson articulates the suspected link between earlier decline and Muslim-
led raids as follows: “Ultimately, medieval Buddhist systems became fatally
wounded in the profoundly altered Indian culture that coalesced in the frac-
tious aftermath of the founding of Muslim states in the late twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries.”21
While I question significant chunks of this narrative, especially Islam’s role
in Indian Buddhism’s demise, I endorse the historiographical impulses that
produced this story. It is a legitimate, even a pressing, historical project to
search for the reasons behind the evaporation of Buddhist thought, institutions,
practitioners, and practices from the tradition’s homeland in the early second
millennium. As I discuss at the end of this essay, there are multiple problematic
assumptions behind how we pose the question of Indian Buddhism’s waning.
But, even if we concede that the historical query is poorly put, I concur with
Ananya Vajpeyi, who has identified “one of the biggest historical puzzles”
in studying India’s past to be “Why did Buddhism ‘die’ in India?”22
17
For example, Robinson et al., Buddhist Religion, 135–36. Also see Wynne, Buddhism, 175.
18
Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (London: Penguin, 2003), 409.
However, as Eaton notes, the Palas had shifted to supporting mainly Shaivites and Vaishnavites
by the eleventh century (The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 [Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993], 13). For another discussion of Pala land grants, see Sayantani
Pal, “Religious Patronage in the Land Grant Charters of Early Bengal (Fifth to Thirteenth Cen-
tury),” Indian Historical Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 185–205.
19
McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 17.
20
Ibid., 17.
21
Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism, 2. Filliozat made a similar claim (McKeown, “From
Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 8).
22
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 218.

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Most well-documented reasons for the disappearance of religious traditions

in other times and places do not fit the case of Indian Buddhism. For instance,
Indian society did not collapse around 1200, and so the flagging of the Buddhist
dharma in South Asia is unlike instances where a religion went extinct along
with its entire supporting social infrastructure. Buddhism was not declared il-
legal in India, nor were Buddhists exiled from the subcontinent. Additionally,
Buddhism did not fade away in many other places in premodern Asia and even
took hold in some regions, such as Tibet, where it was introduced in the seventh
and eighth centuries and was revitalized in the late tenth century.23 Accord-
ingly, the factors that prompted the dwindling of Indian Buddhism do not ap-
pear to have been entirely internal to the Buddhist tradition (if such a level of
generalization is even useful). Last, and perhaps most potently, India has long
housed many religious traditions, and no others of Buddhism’s size and influ-
ence have declined to the point of near extinction on the subcontinent. In fact,
smaller religions such as Jainism thrived throughout the second millennium
CE and into the present day. Sikhism developed as a religious tradition during
India’s early modernity. Incredible religious diversity and the coexistence of
multiple religious traditions are defining features of India that span the ancient,
early modern, colonial, and modern periods. These factors increase the pres-
sure on scholars to articulate a causal explanation for how Indian Buddhism
largely ceased to exist eight hundred years ago.24
Islam has struck many people as a solid reason behind Buddhism’s down-
fall in India for a host of reasons. In the remainder of this essay, I take up
these elements and explicate their logic, the historiographical and intellectual
flaws therein, and why they persist nonetheless in contemporary scholarship.
In the final section of this essay, I return to the question of how we might
pose more fruitful queries concerning the collapse of the Buddhist tradition
in early second-millennium South Asia. I suggest a few key ways of refram-
ing the question of what happened to Indian Buddhism that may better po-
sition future scholarship to account for multiple factors at play and move be-
yond the tired and largely ahistorical approach of blaming Islam.
THE RHETORIC OF CONQUEST IN INDO-ISLAMIC CHRONICLES
The most robust evidence that Islam—specifically Turkish Muslim raiders—

eradicated Indian Buddhism comes from premodern Indo-Islamic chronicles.
Premodern Islamic texts hardly single out Buddhism or Buddhist institutions
for attack. Rather, for premodern Perso-Islamic writers, the sacking, looting,
23
Mitchell, Buddhism, 160–67.
24
Buddhism was reinvigorated in India in the twentieth century by Dalit conversions, largely
following the example of B. R. Ambedkar, one of India’s founding fathers and a convert to Bud-
dhism shortly before his death in 1956. I do not deal with this revival of Indian Buddhism here.

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and destruction of non-Muslim Indian religious sites—whether Hindu, Bud-

dhist, or Jain—was a poignant way of underscoring the power of Islamic rul-
ers of the day. This rhetoric of glorifying attacks against non-Muslim Indians
is common in Arabic and Persian poetry as well as in Islamicate court chron-
icles from the tenth century onward. Especially starting with Mahmud of
Ghazna (d. 1030) in the early eleventh century, Islamic texts portray encoun-
ters with non-Muslims “not as defensive jihads in face of an urgent threat to
Islam, but as aggressive and unprovoked assaults led by the formidable ghazi
king.”25 Islamic writers during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries embellished
Mahmud of Ghazna’s damage to Indian religious sites, especially the temple-
rich town of Somnath in Gujarat, and the wealth he obtained as a result.26 The
Indo-Islamic text crucial to the story of Indian Buddhism’s fall dates to the
thirteenth century and must be responsibly read in this broader context of an
inherited tradition in which exaggerated instances of idol-breaking and temple
raids were popular tropes of praise.
The story of the fatal clash between Buddhism and Islam rests largely upon
a single Persian-language chronicle: Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri.
Juzjani was born into a learned family in Afghanistan, near Ghur, and moved to
the subcontinent in the mid-1220s.27 He completed his large history of the Is-
lamic world in 1259–60 for the Sultan of Delhi Nasiruddin Mahmud Shah
(r. 1246–66). The work begins with Adam, the first man, and covers events
in Iran, Central Asia, and India. In addition to the genre expectations of icon-
oclastic rhetoric for Indo-Islamic court chronicles of this period, Juzjani was
writing within the context of the Mongol invasion that disrupted life across
much of Asia in the thirteenth century. Accordingly, as Ali Anooshahr has
pointed out, Juzjani emphasizes the ruler’s prerogative to defend and enlarge
the domain of Islam.28
Within his history of Islamic conquest, Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani records an at-
tack led by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji on a monastery in Bihar, as he
heard it from a man from Farghana (in modern-day Uzbekistan). This is a cru-
cial tale for the “Islam killed Indian Buddhism” story, largely because it fea-
tures Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar, the man who allegedly sacked Nalanda.
The passage is worth quoting in full in a fresh translation:
[Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji] led an army toward Bihar and plundered that
area. For a year or two he proceeded apace in those environs and region until he
25
Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the
Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (New York: Routledge, 2009), 58.
26
Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of History (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004), 54–59.
27
Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–
2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 46.
28
Anooshahr, Ghazi Sultans, 35.

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organised an attack on a fortified city in Bihar.29 Trustworthy narrators have relayed

that he approached that Bihari fortress with two hundred well-armed cavalry and sud-
denly attacked. There were two brothers who were wise men from Farghana, Niza-
muddin and Samsamuddin, who were in Muhammad-i Bakhtiyar’s service. The au-
thor of these lines met Samsamuddin in Lakhnavati in 641 AH, and this account is
from him. When they arrived at the fortified city and began the assault, these two wise
brothers were among the army of ghazi soldiers. Then Muhammad-i Bakhtiyar threw
himself against the back door of that fortified city with strength and courage, thereby
conquering the fort and acquiring great plunder. Most of the inhabitants of that area
were Brahmins with shaved heads. They were all killed. There were many books
there. When that library came to the attention of the Muslims, they summoned those
[Brahmins] in order to ask them to divulge the meaning of those books. But they had
been slain. When [the Muslims] figured out [the meaning of those books], they learned
that the fortified city and fort were a school and that bihar is the Hindui word for
school.30
For nearly 150 years scholars have relied upon this episode in order to piece
together the end of premodern Indian Buddhism. The story has appeared in
two major English-language translations. First, Henry Elliot and John Dow-
son translated excerpts from the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, including the section on
Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, in the mid- to late nineteenth century as
part of their History of India as Told by Its Own Historians.31
While Elliot and Dowson’s History of India is still cited with alarming
trust in contemporary scholarship, it is best understood as colonial propaganda.
Elliot’s preface to the first volume openly extols “the supremacy of the British
[colonial] Government” over “Muhammadan” kings who emulate “the vices
of a Caligula or a Commodus.”32 Dowson’s preface to the second volume,
which contains the excerpts from the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, advertises itself as fea-
turing “a conspicuous and brilliant example of the strength and weakness, the
crimes, vices, and occasional virtues of Musulman despotism.”33 Writing in
29
I follow earlier translators in rendering this phrase, hiṣār-i bihār, as a fortified city in Bihar.
However, it could also mean a “fortified vihāra,” that is, a protected Buddhist monastery. The San-
skrit word vihāra is transliterated into Perso-Arabic script on the following page of Juzjani’s work
and appears, as one would expect, as bihār; Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, 2 vols., ed.
W. Nassau Lees, Khadim Hosain, and ‘Abd al-Hal (Calcutta: College Press, 1864), 1:148.
30
Juzjani, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, 1:147–148 (translation is my own). Compare Raverty’s transla-
tion in Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri, 2 vols., trans. H. G. Raverty (London: Gilbert &
Rivington, 1881), 1:551–52; note that Raverty adds the word “Hindu,” which does not appear in
the original Persian.
31
Henry M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians,
vols. 1–2 (London: Trubner, 1867–69), 2:305–14.
32
Ibid., 1:xx.
33
Ibid., 2:v. For other scholarship on the problems with Elliot and Dowson’s work, see, e.g.,
Shahpurshah Hormasji Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: A Critical Commentary on
Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (Bombay, 1939); Mohammad
Habib, “Introduction,” in Henry M. Elliot and John Dowson, History of India as Told by Its Own

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1934, Sankalia cited Elliot and Dowson’s excerpt of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri in
his University of Nalanda, a work that is itself still cited.34 Even in the third
edition of his Indian Buddhism, first published in 2000, A. K. Warder quoted
from Elliot and Dowson’s History of India; K. T. S. Sarao cited this passage in
Elliot and Dowson’s translation in 2012.35 A decade or two after the publica-
tion of excerpts from the Tabaqat-i Nasiri in Elliot and Dowson’s History of
India, Henry George Raverty translated Juzjani’s history (more or less in full)
into English.36 Raverty’s translation has earned accolades from some scholars,
whereas others note that he garbles the original Persian of certain episodes.37
Raverty’s translation of Juzjani’s history is the version most commonly used
today.
Juzjani’s story has also been disseminated through its repetition in schol-
arly and popular writings, often unattributed to Juzjani. A good example of
the latter is Walter Hutchinson’s illustrated Story of the Nations, published in
Britain in the 1930s. Hutchinson commissioned illustrations for the work,
including one labeled “The end of the Buddhist monks, A.D. 1193” (see
fig. 1).38 Clearly following Juzjani’s chronicle, the description of the painting
mentions the invasion by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar and even includes the
detail that the general and his men were unable to read Buddhist sacred texts.
The image shows the raiders seated on horseback and puzzling over a man-
uscript, while the bodies of the monks who could have helped decipher the
work litter the ground around them. The painting also contains other sugges-
tive elements. A few structures glimmer in the background, perhaps invok-
ing India’s past glory, even while ivy and twisted branches begin to swallow
up the crumbling walls of the just-sacked vihara.
Juzjani’s narrative, which claims to record an attack on Brahmins, is not
an obvious candidate for the core of the alleged clash-based relationship be-
tween Islam and Indian Buddhism. Indeed, interpretations of this passage
are fraught with historiographical uncertainties. For starters, most interpreters
understand Juzjani to be speaking about Buddhist monks when he writes about
Brahmins in this passage.39 Such a reading is certainly plausible, especially
given the reference to shaved heads, but far from certain. A more formidable
Historians (Aligarh: Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1952), 2:1–102; K. A. Nizami, Supplement to

Elliot & Dowson’s History of India, 2 vols. (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1981).
34
Sankalia, University of Nalanda, 207.
35
Warder, Indian Buddhism, 478–80; Sarao, Decline of Buddhism in India, 157.
36
Raverty, Tabakat-i-Nasiri.
37
Compare S. A. A. Rizvi, Wonder That Was India: 1200–1700 (Delhi: Rupa, 2001), xxv,
and comment in Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29 n. 29.
38
Walter Hutchinson, Hutchinson’s Story of the Nations (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 169.
39
For example, Sankalia silently corrects the Brahmin/Buddhist error (University of Nalanda,
212).

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FIG. 1.—Illustration of “The end of the Buddhist monks, A.D. 1193,” in Walter
Hutchinson’s Story of the Nations.

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historiographical obstacle is Juzjani’s source for this information. Juzjani con-

fesses that he is relaying hearsay at this point in his history. While Juzjani iden-
tifies his narrator, Samsamuddin of Farghana, as a reliable witness, nonetheless,
he is repeating a story that he heard fifty years after the fact and had not inde-
pendently verified.
Last, we must make a leap of faith regarding the identity of Juzjani’s “for-
tified city.” Most modern scholars understand the fortified city in the above
passage to be Bihar Sharif, including its associated monastery of Odantapuri
(Uddandapura). Like the shift from Brahmins to Buddhists, this identification
is reasonable but lacks concrete evidence. Indeed, the precise location of
Odantapuri has not been established.40 Historians sometime cite Taranatha,
a Tibetan monk who lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centu-
ries, as further support for this identification. In his History of Buddhism in
India, Taranatha notes that turushka (Muslim or Turkish) rulers destroyed
Odantapuri as well as Vikramashila.41 But Taranatha wrote in 1608, hundreds
of years after these events.42 Moreover, Taranatha gives information about
Nalanda and other Buddhist sites in India that we know is incorrect.43 Tara-
natha’s views of Islamic raids in twelfth-century India were also perhaps
colored by his local context of ongoing conflict in Tibet involving Mongol
descendants. For example, Sultan Said Khan, a Muslim descendent of the
Mongols, led a jihad against Lhasa in the 1530s, and Mongols attacked cen-
tral Tibet on behalf of the Dalai Lama in the early 1600s.44 Dharmasvamin, a
Tibetan monk who visited India in 1234–36, arguably offers more reliable in-
formation than Taranatha regarding Turkish raids on Indian Buddhist sites.
Dharmasvamin only mentions Odantapuri as the residence of the Turkish
commander at the time of his visit.45
My point is not so much that the standard interpretation of Juzjani’s story
as concerning the sack of a Buddhist monastery at Odantapuri is historically
shaky (although it is more tenuous than most scholars have cared to admit).
40
Frederick M. Asher, Nalanda: Situating the Great Monastery (Mumbai: published by
Radhika Sabavala for the Marg Foundation, 2015), 27.
41
Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, trans. Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyaya,
ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 319. On establishing the lo-
cation of Vikramashila, see Alexis Sanderson, “ The Śaiva Age—the Rise and Dominance of Śai-
vism during the Early Medieval Period,” in Genesis and Development of Tantrism, ed. Shingo
Einoo (Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009), 88 n. 156.
42
Preface to Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, xxiii. Taranatha claimed to rely on
three Sanskrit sources, none of which are extant (Sanderson, “Śaiva Age,” 89–90).
43
Taranatha says that Nalanda was founded by Ashoka (Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in
India, 101), whereas a Gupta origin is more likely according to Darian, “Buddhism in Bihar,”
344–45. Sanderson notes some of Taranatha’s other errors concerning, for example, Somapuri,
Trikatuka, and Odantapuri (“Śaiva Age,” 90–96).
44
Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam, 175–79, 218.
45
Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Chag lo tsa-ba Chos-rje-dpal), a Tibetan Monk Pilgrim,
trans. George Roerich (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959), 93.

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Rather, more crucially for my purposes, scholars have rarely bothered to out-
line the interpretative measures required to arrive at this narrative, much less
problematized them. When taken as a whole, Juzjani’s story can be made to
fit a preconceived narrative about Muslims sacking Odantapuri, but the text
itself does not furnish the details required to construct this specific story.
In addition to the interpretive acrobatics needed to read this episode from
Juzjani as an attack on Odantapuri, there are substantial reasons to doubt
the strict veracity of assaults on non-Muslim religious sites as recorded in
the Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Premodern Islamic texts regularly exaggerate raids on
Indian religious sites and their impacts, as I discuss above. Juzjani’s narration
of this incident bears some of the hallmarks of this rhetorical style. In partic-
ular, his attestation that the raiders killed every single person present at the site
and only afterward sought to identify what sort of place they had sacked smacks
of hyperbole. And yet, some modern thinkers have taken Juzjani and other
Indo-Islamic sources at their word on this point, such as Peter Harvey, who
notes that after “Muslim invasions,” “The Saṅgha thus died out in most areas,
and could not be revived without existing monks to ordain new ones.”46 Mu-
hammad bin Bakhtiyar’s feats also attracted aggrandizement among later writ-
ers, such as Ghulam Hussain Salim, who wrote in his Riyaz al-Salatin (1788)
that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji destroyed Hindu temples after his con-
quest of Bengal in 1204 (contemporary evidence suggests no such actions).47
Such rhetorical flourishes tell us a great deal about premodern Islamicate cul-
ture but little about historical military feats and their potential impact on Indian
Buddhists.
Despite scholars proffering compelling evidence for the theatrical tenden-
cies of Indo-Islamic chronicles, many continue to be drawn to the idea that
these documents are one-dimensionally factual. The reason for this tendency
is twofold. First, Indo-Islamic chronicles appear factually similar to premod-
ern Western histories in their citation of names, dates, people, and real-world
events. Second, more problematically, admitting that these so-called “chron-
icles” are sometimes more literary than historical potentially places the entire
exercise of premodern Indian history in jeopardy. To put it bluntly, aside from
Indo-Islamic chronicles, written historical records from premodern India are
thin. Sanskrit and vernacular texts present deep historiographical problems,
and we have yet to even recognize many of the most pertinent sources in these
languages. Beyond texts we are left largely with brief inscriptions and archae-
ological evidence, which are discounted by many Buddhist studies scholars.48
46
Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 196. Verardi also appears to take this point literally,
although he reads the passage as trying to explain that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar was not re-
sponsible for the massacre (Hardships and Downfall, 362–63).
47
Eaton, “Temple Desecration,” 278 n. 34.
48
Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions.”

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We could (and should) use sophisticated hermeneutical tactics for reading

Persian-medium chronicles, but many modern scholars remain ill-equipped to
deal with literary aspects of premodern texts. Despite the long-standing recog-
nition of the literary nature of written historical sources, led by Hayden White,
many prefer to act as if such works are objective factual accounts. It is easier to
pretend that Islamic chronicles are straightforward histories, rather than com-
plex documents that we need to parse with an array of critical literary tools.
THE SPECIAL PLACE OF NALANDA
Even if we follow scholarly opinion and accept the modified reading of Juz-
jani’s story (and Taranatha’s confirmation) that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar dec-
imated a Buddhist site in Bihar, the jump to destroying Nalanda requires further
steps. Nalanda was a well-known monastery and center of Buddhist learning in
India for centuries before the advent of Islamic raids. The Chinese traveler Xuan-
zang (i.e., Hsuan Tsang, d. 664) visited Nalanda in the seventh century to study
Buddhist doctrines and philosophy.49 Another slightly later Chinese monk,
Yijing (635–713), similarly described a robust curriculum of learning at Na-
landa.50 Xuanzang dated the founding of Nalanda to shortly after the death
of the Gautama Buddha, although the site likely dates from Gupta rule several
hundred years later.51 By the early thirteenth century, Nalanda appears to have
fallen on hard times. For instance, Taranatha reports that by the time of King
Ramapala (whose date is unclear, but prior to Turkish raids), Nalanda shared
a head teacher with Vikramashila, another monastery in the area.52 Few inscrip-
tions survive that record support for Nalanda in the twelfth century, which sug-
gests a severe drop off in patronage.53 Nonetheless, for most modern scholars,
49
Xuanzang/Hsuan Tsang wrote about his time at Nalanda in a text penned in the first half of the
seventh century. As Asher has pointed out, even readers in the eighth century did not see this ac-
count as a travelogue. Today, we access Xuanzang’s account through Samuel Beal’s English trans-
lation, which is itself dated and mediated through a French translation of the original Chinese
(Asher, Nalanda, 31–33). Abhishek Amar also draws attention to the problem with taking Xuan-
zang as an “authentic historical document” in “Buddhist Responses to Brāhmaṇa Challenges in Me-
dieval India: Bodhgayā and Gayā,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 22, no. 1 (2012):
158. On how Xuanzang even heard about Nalanda, which was not so famous at the time, see
Kuwayama Shoshin, “How Xuanzang Learned about Nalanda,” China Report 48, nos. 1–2 (2012):
61–88.
50
Ronald James Dziwenka, “The Last Light of Indian Buddhism—the Monk Zhikong in
14th Century China and Korea” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010), 89.
51
Xuanzeng, Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World: Translated from the Chinese
of Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 629), trans. Samuel Beal, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co., 1906), 2:167–68.
52
Asher, Nalanda, 131; Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, 313.
53
Asher, Nalanda, 131. One exception is the “Nalanda inscription of Vipulasrimitra,” which
dates to the early twelfth century and seems to record a monastery built at Nalanda. Epigraphia

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Nalanda was the center of Buddhist learning in India, and so the destruction of
Nalanda is required to pronounce the death of Indian Buddhism.
Many historians and Buddhist studies scholars have assumed that, after hit-
ting Bihar Sharif, Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar went on to sack Nalanda and that
the monks there fled or were killed. As Frederick Asher has recently noted, no
premodern writer ever claims that there was a Muslim-led assault on Nalanda.54
However, scholars have overwhelmingly assumed that the attack took place
regardless. They further presume that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar destroyed
Nalanda’s library (working on the supposition that Nalanda had an extensive
library at this point in time).55 Some historians seem to identify Juzjani’s nar-
ration of the attack on a fortified city in Bihar to in fact be about Nalanda, which
would make for a tighter narrative but is not supported within the Persian text.56
More commonly, scholars argue—by reasoning rather than based on specific
textual evidence—that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar likely sacked multiple places
in Bihar and that Nalanda must have been on that list.
Within either reading of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar’s presumed sack of Na-
landa, scholarly and popular opinion alike posit that this event was a fatal blow
for Indian Buddhism. Take, for example, the following account by Amartya
Sen, a world-renowned economist known for his forays into Indian history.
In 2015 Sen penned an op-ed piece concerning the controversy surrounding
his decision to step down as chancellor of the new Nalanda University, founded
in 2010. Seemingly transferring details from Juzjani’s account to a presumed
attack on Nalanda and drawing loosely on Tibetan sources, Sen wrote:
After more than seven hundred years of successful teaching, Nalanda was destroyed
in the 1190s by invading armies from West Asia, which also demolished the other
universities in Bihar. The first attack, it is widely believed, was led by the ruthless
Turkic conqueror Bakhtiyar Khilji, whose armies devastated many cities and settle-
ments in North India. All the teachers and monks in Nalanda were killed and much of
the campus was razed to the ground. Special care was taken to demolish the beautiful
statues of Buddha and other Buddhist figures that were spread across the campus.
The library—a nine-story building containing thousands of manuscripts—is reputed
to have burned for three days.57
Indica, ed. Hirananda Sastri, K. N. Dikshit, and N. P. Chakravarti (Delhi: Archaeological Sur-
vey of India, 1931–32), 21:97–101; also cited in McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,”
16 n. 30.
54
Asher, Nalanda, 27.
55
Asher points out the assumption about both the existence of Nalanda’s library at this point
in time and its destruction (Nalanda, 27).
56
For example, Satish Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals (1206–1526),
2 vols. (Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1997), 1:41. Note, however, that Satish Chandra points
out “several difficulties” in accepting parts of Juzjani’s narrative (42–43).
57
Amartya Sen, “India: A Stormy Revival of an International University,” New York Review
of Books, August 13, 2015.

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Sen declines to mention that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar was Muslim, perhaps
in a nod to our ignorance about the religious makeup of his troops and the in-
terpretive problems of labeling his raids as “Islamic.”58 But Sen dwells on the
violence and alleged animosity of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar, describing the
Turk as “ruthless” and a “conqueror,” and noting the “special care” taken re-
garding the iconoclastic destruction of Buddhist images. The core story of ag-
gression and the crucial sack of Nalanda, resulting in the death of a religion,
stands strong.
Few historians would have written Sen’s account, but they too have been
reluctant to let go of the presumption that Turkish raiders must hold some re-
sponsibility for the decline of Indian Buddhism. For example, even the few
scholars who have more recently recognized the surprisingly thin historical ba-
sis for assuming that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar attacked Nalanda have fallen
short of questioning the underlying assumption that this man was responsible
for the monastery’s fall. For example, Frederick Asher argues in his 2015 book,
Nalanda, that Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar’s raids “destabilized the region” and
cut off patronage networks. Thus, in Asher’s words, “So even if there was no
direct attack on Nalanda, the monastery almost certainly suffered irretrievably
from this invasion.”59 During his life Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar bolstered an
image of himself and his overlord, Muhammad Ghori, as fierce destroyers.
For example, in 1204–5, he had gold coins struck that bore an image of Mu-
hammad Ghori riding a galloping horse and wielding a mace, accompanied
by the Sanskrit phrase “on the conquest of Bengal” (gauda vijaye).60 But only
circumstantial evidence suggests a connection between Muhammad bin Bakh-
tiyar’s warring and Nalanda.
In fact, the date of Nalanda’s closing does not coincide with Muhammad bin
Bakhtiyar’s presumed raid. Tibetan sources attest that Nalanda remained open
well into the thirteenth century. Dharmasvamin, a Tibetan monk who visited
India between 1234 and 1236, includes an entire section on Nalanda in his trav-
elogue.61 Dharmasvamin mentions that turushkas (Muslims) harmed temples
in the recent past and that a band of raiders passed through Nalanda while he
was there. Nonetheless, he says, monks still lived at Nalanda, and Dharma-
svamin spent several months studying under one of them.62 A Tibetan source
from the eighteenth century records that “after the Turushka raiders had made
incursions in Nālandā,” a nine-storied library known as Ratnodadhi (Ocean
58
Asher, Nalanda, 131.
59
Ibid., 28, also see 131.
60
Eaton, Rise of Islam, 33–34.
61
Biography of Dharmasvāmin, 90–97.
62
Ibid., 90–95.

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of Jewels) was still standing and was used by a population of monks.63 Dhyana-
bhadra, an Indian monk, was sent to Nalanda to study for over a decade with
Vinayabhadra during the mid- to late thirteenth century before traveling to Sri
Lanka.64 Cingalaraja, a ruler in Bengal, and his queen supported repairs to sev-
eral temples and monasteries at Nalanda in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu-
ries.65 In short, Nalanda survived any attacks by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar
or other Islamicate raiders, and the institution also survived the proposed dev-
astating effect of such military activities on the region. Local Buddhist rulers
also outlived such raids and continued to rule parts of the area in the thirteenth
century.66 Elsewhere in India, such as Bengal, we find evidence for royal patron-
age of Buddhist monasteries into the early thirteenth century.67
A BUDDHIST STORY: ISLAM IN THE KALACHAKRA
An antagonistic and ultimately fatal narrative of interactions between pre-

modern Islam and Indian Buddhism also emerges from the Buddhist tradition
in the Kalachakratantra (Tantra of the Wheel of Time). The Kalachakra-
tantra was composed in Sanskrit in the first few decades of the eleventh cen-
tury and translated into Tibetan sixty years later.68 The work does not offer
specifics about sites and raiders. Indeed, the text predates Muhammad bin
Bakhtiyar Khalji and his attack parties by more than a century and has a
strong mythical bent. But the work provides important indications that Bud-
dhists perceived certain Muslims as a threat. Perhaps more crucially for my
purposes, the Kalachakratantra’s views on Islam echoed through later Ti-
63
Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, 6. The same account is cited in Sankalia, University of
Nalanda, 208; and Mahamahopadhyaya Satis Chandra Vidyabhusana, A History of Indian Logic
(Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Schools) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1921), 516.
64
Arthur Waley, “New Light on Buddhism in Medieval India,” Melanges Chinois et Boud-
dhiques 1 (1931–32): 361. Much of our information on Dhyanabhadra’s life, including his early
study at Nalanda, comes from the fourteenth-century writer Yi Saek. On Yi Saek, see Dziwenka,
“Last Light of Indian Buddhism,” 47–50; for a direct quotation on Dhyanabhadra’s study at
Nalanda, see 77. On the difficulty of establishing Dhyanabhadra’s birth date, see Dziwenka, “Last
Light of Indian Buddhism,” 78–88.
65
Scharfe, Education in Ancient India, 150–51.
66
Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Altekar’s introduction), xiv–xvi; Elverskog, Buddhism and
Islam, 2.
67
Pal, “Religious Patronage in the Land Grant Charters,” 203.
68
On the Kalachakratantra’s representation of Islam, see John Newman, “Islam in the
Kālacakra Tantra,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 21, no. 2
(1998): 311–71; Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam, 97–103; Alexander Berzin, “A Buddhist View
of Islam,” in Islam and Inter-faith Relations: The Gerald Weisfeld Lectures, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon
and Perry Schmidt-Leukel (London: SCM Press, 2006), 225–51; Helmut H. R. Hoffman,
“Kālacakra Studies 1: Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” Central Asi-
atic Journal 13, no. 1 (1969): 52–73. On the Kalachakra tradition generally, see John Newman, “A
Brief History of Kalachakra,” in Geshe Lhundub Sopa, Roger Jackson, and John Newman, The
Wheel of Time: The Kalachakra in Context (Madison, WI: Deer Park Books, 1985), 51–90.

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betan works that dealt with Islam, such as Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in
India.69
The Kalachakratantra is one of the few Sanskrit texts to explicitly discuss
Islam as a religion, although it remains uncertain what branch of Muslims the
author(s) encountered. One verse gives a list of eight prophets: Adam, Noah,
Ibrahim, Moses, Jesus, the White-Clad, Muhammad, and the Mahdi.70 This
list is associated with a still-unidentified branch of Islam, perhaps a group
similar to the Ismailis or the Mubayyida.71 For my purposes, what is most in-
teresting is how the Kalachakratantra disparages these Muslim figures. All
are described as demons (asura) and barbarians (mleccha), and the first three
are said to belong to the family of Danava demons (danubhugajakule).
Some verses in the Kalachakratantra also contain subtler and more pointed
criticisms. For example, the verse on the eight prophets styles Muhammad as
Madhumati, which could mean “honey mind” but could also mean “wino” or
“drunkard.”72 This method of adapting Arabic and, later, Persian names and
words to have meaning in Sanskrit would become a common practice in sub-
sequent decades.73 But there is a harsh edge in adjusting Muhammad’s name
to accuse him of hypocrisy regarding the Quranic injunction against alcohol
consumption. The Kalachakratantra repeats this thinly veiled criticism in
other verses and also calls Muhammad by the slightly improved name Madhu-
pati (wine-master).74 The verse on the eight prophets has a similar approach
regarding the Mahdi, who is described—depending on how one breaks the
Sanskrit text—as either the destroyer (mathani) or the one to be destroyed
(mathaniya).75
69
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions—an Introduction,” in Islam
and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, ed. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit
Yoeli-Tlalim (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 13–14.
70
A Critical Edition of the Śrī Kālacakratantra-Rāja (collated with the Tibetan version), ed.
Biswanath Banerjee (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1993), 39, verse 153 (my translation). For trans-
lations and comparison with the Tibetan version, see Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,”
320 and 352; Hoffman, “Kālacakra Studies,” 56–57.
71
Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam, 98.
72
For a reading of madhumati as “honey mind,” see Hoffman, “Kālacakra Studies,” 57; and
Matthew Kapstein, “Just Where on Jambudvipa Are We? New Geographical Knowledge and
Old Cosmological Schemes in 18th Century Tibet,” in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern
Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800, ed. Sheldon Pol-
lock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 343; for a reading of madhumati as “wino,”
see Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 333.
73
Later, more positive or at least neutral examples include Sanskrit sūtratrāṇa (chief protec-
tor) or sūratrāṇa (protector of the gods) for Persian sult ̣ān, and Sanskrit sphuramāna (a thing
that goes forth) for Persian farmān. Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the
Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 66.
74
Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 333.
75
Compare Hoffman, “Kālacakra Studies,” 56–57, and Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra
Tantra,” 352.

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In addition to maligning Muslim religious figures, other verses in the

Kalachakratantra characterize Muslim practices, such as eating habits, as
both abhorrent and un-Islamic. For example, one passage emphasizes the
range of meats that Muslims consume and their cooking practices in lan-
guage designed to evoke disgust: “The [barbarians (mleccha)] slaughter cam-
els, horses, and cows, and then cook the flesh and blood together just a little.
Then they mix together beef, quicksilver, ghee and pungent spices, and rice
and vegetables. Once cooked over the fire with forest fruits, men then eat it with
relish and drink bird eggs. That, O King, is the place of demons (asura).”76 Cru-
cial to grasping the impact of this passage is that Muslims generally proscribe
the consumption of blood and slaughter animals in such a way that blood does
not contaminate the meat. Thus, this verse simultaneously argues that violence
is embodied in the Islamic practice of slaughtering and consuming animals and
that Muslims break their own taboos in the process.77 In order to level such crit-
icisms, the author(s) of the Kalachakratantra were likely familiar with basic
Islamic beliefs and practices.
The Kalachakratantra prophesies that the rise of the “Muslim dharma”
(mlecchadharma) will result in an apocalyptic war against Buddhists. Spe-
cifically, 1800 years after the founding of Islam, Muslim forces will rise
up and mount a fierce but ultimately failed assault on the mythical Buddhist
kingdom of Shambala.78 Premodern commentators of the Kalachakratantra
interpreted this myth as indicating an inner battle rather than a physical
one.79 But nonetheless, this vision seems, in the words of Johan Elverskog,
“clearly a response to contemporary realities in northwest India.”80 This pre-
saged defeat of Islam is perhaps invoked by the name “one to be destroyed”
(mathaniya) for the Mahdi, the final Muslim prophet. Such prophecies indi-
cate another possible source of the presumption that these two religious
traditions were engaged in a fatal struggle, especially in the Tibetan tradition.
DEBILITATED BUDDHISM
Many scholars have proposed that by the time of Turkish-led raids in Bihar
in the early thirteenth century, Indian Buddhism was already a shell of its
76
Critical Edition of the Śrī Kālacakratantra-Rāja, 39, verse 154 (my translation). Also see
Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 352; Hoffman, “Kālacakra Studies,” 65. For other
translations, see Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 319 and Hoffman, “Kālacakra Stud-
ies,” 66.
77
For other mentions of Muslim eating habits in the Kalachakratantra, see, e.g., Newman,
“Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 340.
78
Berzin, “Buddhist View of Islam,” 240; Alexander Berzin, “Holy Wars in Buddhism and
Islam: The Myth of Shambhala” (2006), http://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/history
-culture/buddhism-islam/holy-wars-in-buddhism-and-islam.
79
Berzin, “Buddhist View of Islam,” 240–41.
80

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former self. This cluster of arguments posits that Buddhism had lost ground
on multiple fronts—which shift depending on the thinker and time period—
over the previous few centuries or perhaps even the previous millennium.
I am less interested here in the veracity of specific events and claims, al-
though many fall short in terms of their historical backing and persuasive
power. Rather, I am more intrigued by how these arguments, especially con-
cerning monastic-centered Buddhism, have been deployed by modern schol-
ars in order to imagine Indian Buddhism as feeble enough to be destroyed by
a handful of raiders.
Many twentieth-century scholars saw Indian Buddhism’s decline as the re-
sult, in part, of internal transformations. For example, some argued for the
moral decay of Indian Buddhism as it incorporated tantric practices and then
corroded from within.81 In a parallel track, some thinkers suggested that
certain Mahayana practices made Buddhism susceptible to being absorbed
within Hinduism.82 Neither of these theories grapples with historical examples
that seem to disrupt the proposed causality (tantric practices arguably helped
Shaivism to thrive in medieval India, and the Buddhist sangha in medieval
Bihar aggressively appropriated Hindu gods).83 But both found articulation,
although in a dissatisfied tone, in Jean Filliozat’s L’Inde classique, published
in 1953.84 Also popular among a previous generation of scholars was the idea
of seeing Buddhism’s decline in terms of its social function. For instance,
D. D. Kosambi argued that Indian Buddhism “inevitably faded away” when
its most useful aspects were coopted by Brahmins, who were better positioned
to reach common people.85 The fatalism and universalism that undergird Ko-
sambi’s argument have come under increasing fire, however, as scholars strug-
gle to come to terms with the immense diversity that characterizes Buddhist
history in different times and places.
While moral corruption and Marxist social theories are largely out of fash-
ion these days, the notions that Indian Buddhism was internally corrupt and
that Brahmins posed a potent threat to Buddhists both have strong echoes in
more recent theories that assert medieval Indian Buddhism’s waning intel-
lectual power. Some of these arguments assert a possible overemphasis on
monks in medieval Indian Buddhism, at the expense of the laity. For instance,
religious studies scholars and historians alike have suggested that Buddhism
81
For example, Sankalia, University of Nalanda, 210. One also sees this idea cited more re-
cently; e.g., Kanai Lal Hazra, Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India (Delhi: Munshiram Mano-
harlal Publishers, 1995), 382–85. Compare Mitchell, Buddhism, 154–57.
82
Jaini, “Disappearance of Buddhism,” 86–88.
83
On both points, see Amar, “Buddhist Responses to Brahmana Challenges,” 158–59, 174–82.
84
McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 7–8.
85
D. D. Kosambi, “The Decline of Buddhism in India,” Times of India, May 24, 1956.

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became too obsessed with philosophy and so monks “began to lose touch
with the world outside the cloister,” which alienated the laity.86
Several other ideas, some of them contradictory, concerning relations be-
tween Buddhist monks and laypeople also filter into the notion of a debilitated
Indian Buddhism. Some scholars contend that many medieval Indian Bud-
dhists migrated east and north, which nearly eliminated the Buddhist laity and
their accompanying support of monastic life.87 For others, the Indian Bud-
dhist laity was decimated by conversions to “devotional Hinduism.”88 Through
the centuries, monks were not especially cognizant of the needs of the laity,
some have alleged, and they even failed to produce a manual of conduct for
lay Buddhists until the eleventh century.89 Alternatively, scholars have drawn
attention to lay support for Mahayana Buddhist art and practices into the early
second millennium CE.90 One scholar has even argued that the Mahayana tra-
dition was overly responsive to the demands of the Indian laity and that this
“demand-based development strategy perhaps sacrificed this tradition’s dis-
tinctive character and ultimately led to its absorption into other religious tra-
ditions.”91 A myriad of assumptions about the laity, monks, and their mutual
reliance run through these disparate propositions. Such ideas, at least in their
current state, provide a poor basis for explaining the supposed feebleness of
medieval Indian Buddhism.
Scholars tend to be more united when they suggest that Hindu attacks of
various sorts weakened Indian Buddhism. For instance, many argue that Hindu
thinkers applied intellectual pressure to Buddhist followers and Buddhist
thought.92 Buddhists were also subject to periodic military assaults by Hindu
rulers. For example, Xuanzang testifies that Mihirakula, a sixth-century Hun
king and a Shaivite, found the Buddhist dharma wanting and so destroyed
86
Prebish and Keown, Introducing Buddhism, 94. For more detail on the argument that In-
dian Buddhist monks ignored the laity, see the discussion in André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making
of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 2: The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th–13th Cen-
turies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 335–51.
87
88
Mitchell, Buddhism, 158.
89
Vinay Lal, “Buddhism’s Disappearance from India” (2006), https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu
/southasia/Religions/paths/BuddhismDisappear.doc. As Padmanabh Jaini points out, Jains, by
contrast, produced around fifty texts on lay conduct (“Disappearance of Buddhism,” 84).
90
For example, Michael Willis, “Avalokiteśvara of the Six Syllables: Locating the Practice of
the ‘Great Vehicle’ in the Landscape of Central India,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, n.s., 23
(2009): 221–29.
91
Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, 269–70.
92
For example, Ahir, Omvedt, and Verardi argue, in different ways, that Brahmanical pres-
sure and attacks were largely responsible for Buddhism’s decline. Respectively, Ahir, Bud-
dhism Declined in India; Omvedt, Buddhism in India, 168–74; and Verardi, Hardships and
Downfall.

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Buddhist stupas and killed both monks and lay followers in Kashmir.93 Kal-
hana, a twelfth-century Sanskrit chronicler, confirmed Mihirakula’s penchant
for destruction and slaughter.94 More generally, as early as the fifth century,
the Chinese traveler Faxian suggests Indian Buddhism was on the wane.95
Subsequent travelers, including Xuanzang in the seventh century, likewise at-
test to depopulated monasteries and the strength of Hindu traditions.96
The notion of an enfeebled medieval Indian Buddhism, confined largely to
fragile monastic institutions, can be used to replace the “Islam killed Indian
Buddhism” narrative, but, more commonly, it is marshaled to undergird it.
For example, R. C. Mitra put it thus in a passage that Hazra cites approvingly
in his 1995 book on Indian Buddhism: “The monasteries had been the nerve
centres of Buddhism, and with their collapse, communal life was unhinged
and abruptly terminated. Their very concentration had made the monasteries
easier targets of attack than the Hindu temples and sacred places, which must
have provoked equal fury of the Moslems.”97 In short, the thinking goes, Indian
Buddhism circa 1200 was not a full-fledged religion but merely the shadow
of one, which explains why it could be so easily demolished by a few military
strikes. More recently, a few scholars have cited this coalescence of factors
in order to downplay the role of Islam. For example, as K. T. S. Sarao had re-
cently written, “the Arab and Turkish onslaught on Buddhist institutions may
have worked at the most only as a coup de grâce in some parts of India.”98
The idea that medieval Indian Buddhism was concentrated in monasteries
elucidates why the Nalanda narrative is key to many modern explanations of
the tradition’s demise. By the time Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar arrived in Bihar,
(in the eyes of many scholars) vulnerable places like Nalanda were the only
thing left of Indian Buddhism to be destroyed. As Prebish and Keown put it
in their 2010 edition of Introducing Buddhism, “Unlike Hinduism, which has
always had roots at the village level, Buddhism became concentrated in a
few key institutions of higher learning. This proved to be its undoing when
Muslim raiding parties began to enter India in increasing numbers from the
tenth century.”99 Even within this mix of extenuating factors, however, many
thinkers continue to emphasize the crucial role played by Turkish assaults, es-
pecially in introductory textbooks. For example, Peter Harvey’s Introduction
93
Romila Thapar, “Cultural Transaction and Early India: Tradition and Patronage,” Social
Scientist 15, no. 165 (1987): 10–11; Xuanzang, Si-Yu-Ki, 1:167–72.
94
Kalhana, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini: A Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir, 3 vols., trans.
and ed. M. A. Stein (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), vol. 1, bk. 1, verses 289–324.
95
Hazra, Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India, 371.
96
Lal, “Buddhism’s Disappearance from India”; Hazra, Rise and Decline of Buddhism in In-
dia, 371–77; Omvedt, Buddhism in India, 150–60.
97
Cited approvingly in Hazra, Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India, 392.
98
Sarao, Decline of Buddhism in India, 251.
99
Prebish and Keown, Introducing Buddhism, 94.

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to Buddhism, revised in 2013, lists tantric practices and “Hindu hostility”

among the causes of Buddhism’s decline in India but reserves the fatal assault
for Islam, proclaiming that “Muslim invasions were the worst blow.”100 Set-
ting aside the persistent recourse to Islam as the killer, the proposition that
South Asian Buddhism had been on the downward swing for centuries con-
tains major drawbacks in terms of its argumentative logic and evidentiary
backing.
Most thinkers posit that the concentration of Indian Buddhism in monastic
centers, part of the process of decay, happened over the course of hundreds of
years. This prolonged time frame echoes that of Gibbons in his Fall of the Ro-
man Empire, a process that allegedly unfolded over more than one thousand
years. Such arguments rest heavy on the trope of decline, especially modern
assumptions about what constitutes vitality in a tradition, and are nakedly tel-
eological. In addition, arguments for elite medieval Indian Buddhism rely un-
abashedly on elite evidence, such as texts and inscriptions. Even these elite
forms of evidence do not always support a vision of monastic Buddhism.
For example, Kim has written about how the Buddhist book cult thrived among
lay Indian Buddhists in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.101 Ac-
cording to Kim, village-based lay patronage and production replaced an earlier
model that featured monastic sites of book production (and largely monastic
and royal patronage) around the middle of the twelfth century, before Muham-
mad bin Bakhtiyar’s raids.102 But there is also a larger problem that “elite Bud-
dhism” may reflect the types of evidence that Indologists consult and perhaps
the types of evidence that are available more than the historical reality of me-
dieval India.
THE STORIES WE TELL
Medieval textual evidence alone, even given its misuse as candid fact, can-
not entirely account for the strength of the modern supposition that Islam
brought an end to the once diverse and thriving tradition of Indian Bud-
dhism. Contemporary prejudices about both Islam and Buddhism (and, to
a lesser degree, Hinduism) as religions also play into the formulation of
an antagonistic relationship between these two traditions. Popular discourse
in the twenty-first-century West widely assumes that Islam is a violent, ag-
gressive force and Buddhism a peaceful faith with little means of defense.
Such ideas date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when West-
ern thinkers first formulated views of these two traditions under the rubric
100
Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 195 and 196, respectively.
101
Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, chap. 6.
102
Ibid., 221, 251–53.

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of world religions.103 Contemporary scholars typically shy away from such

sweeping generalizations, and religious studies thinkers also generally reject
the proposition that religious traditions possess any unchanging core as an-
alytically bogus. More specifically, some have pointed out that Buddhists
have often demonstrated a capacity for violence on par with followers of other
traditions and have even justified murder within Buddhist thought.104 But con-
temporary biases about specific religions nevertheless crop up in many text-
book accounts of the fall of Indian Buddhism.
For example, A. K. Warder, a leading scholar of Buddhism until his death
in 2013, wrote a summary of Indian Buddhism that was first published in
1970 and has been reprinted several times. The final section of his book is
boldly titled “The Spirit of Destruction” and details the end of Indian Bud-
dhism at the hands of Islam. He opens the section with more than two pages
of quotes from Islamicate chronicles, including Juzjani’s account of sacking
Bihar Sharif, that purport to record the destruction of Hindu, Buddhist, and
Jain holy sites.105 Warder’s presentation of these texts suggests that these Per-
sian sources can be read without any context or interpretive framework, as
statements of pure fact. He freely mixes sources written over the span of
six hundred years and tales about Islamic rulers and raiders from roughly
the same stretch of time. Warder does not need to explicitly state his under-
lying argument that Islam is a monolithic tradition. Regarding Islam’s alleged
violent edge, Warder makes the prima facie false statement: “It is hardly nec-
essary to emphasise the thoroughness with which the older religions have
been obliterated in practically every country where Muslims have ruled for
any length of time.”106 A few pages later, Warder admits that he has no ex-
planation for why Brahmanism (his word) survived the Islamic onslaught
while Buddhism fell, but he proclaims as relevant that “Buddhism has always
been a philosophy and religion of peace in all senses of that word.”107
Few recent works have displayed such blatant biases regarding Islam and
Buddhism, but several staples of Warder’s approach are endemic to the field.
For example, Warder cites various Persian texts on temple destructions with-
out specifying what temples (or even what religious traditions) are being tar-
geted. A similarly blasé attitude toward detail arises in other overviews of
103
For a detailed discussion, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or,
How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2005), chaps. 4 and 6. Also see references in Johan Elverskog, “Ritual
Theory across the Buddhist-Muslim Divide in Late Imperial China,” in Islam and Tibet: Inter-
actions along the Musk Routes, ed. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 294 n. 4.
104
Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 94–99.
105
Warder, Indian Buddhism, 478–80.
106
Ibid., 480.
107
Ibid., 484.

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Indian Buddhism that are commonly used in undergraduate courses. For ex-
ample, a December 2014 survey of subscribers to the H-Buddhism Listserv
indicated that 14 percent of respondents used Prebish and Keown’s Introduc-
ing Buddhism (2010) in survey courses on Buddhism.108 Prebish and Keown
wrote in their section on the end of Indian Buddhism that “the Turkic gen-
eral Mahmud Shabuddin Ghorī sacked Nālandā in 1197 and Vikramaśīla in
1203, burning their libraries and destroying priceless literary and artistic trea-
sures.”109 In reality, Mahmud Shabuddin Ghori (better known as Muhammad
Ghori) never set foot in Bihar; the raids were carried out by other parties. Get-
ting the facts straight is hardly relevant to a project propped up, in part, by pre-
set judgments about specific religious traditions.
Warder’s broader notion that violence is intrinsic to Islam is on display,
both vividly and subtly, in many overview works on Buddhism that are com-
monly assigned in introductory courses and relied upon by scholars. For ex-
ample, writing in 1997, Robinson and his cowriters cannot believe that
Bodhgaya and other holy Buddhist sites survived the Muslim onslaught, say-
ing that such events occurred “miraculously.”110 Prebish and Keown deem
“similar” the attitude that led Muslim raiders to destroy Buddhist icons circa
1200 and the Taliban to blow up the colossal Buddha statues at Bamiyan in
2001.111 Even scholars who have moved away from such inflammatory state-
ments continue to think with the idea that Islam and Buddhism are polar op-
posites. For example, Cathy Cantwell brings up Islam and Christianity a few
times in her book, Buddhism: The Basics (2010), as foils for understanding
Buddhism. For Cantwell, Christianity is often similar to Buddhism, whereas
Islam is Buddhism’s inverse.112
In addition to appealing to popular views of the diametrically opposed
cores of Buddhism versus Islam, the tale of one religion being wiped away
by iconoclasm has other narrative charms. The story has a gripping villain
(Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar) and relatable victims (peaceful monks). The pos-
tulation that Islam, specifically Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar and his raiding par-
ties, killed Indian Buddhism is compelling in most respects, except its histor-
ical truth-value. The more realistic, honest story line about the potential
108
Berkwitz, “Textbook Buddhism,” 9.
109
110
Robinson et. al., Buddhist Religion, 136. Compare Strong, who says that Bodhgaya was
destroyed along with Nalanda (Buddhisms, 391).
111
112
Cantwell, Buddhism, 76; cf. references to Christianity on 20, 45, and 163. Berkwitz also
notes Cantwell’s “frequent comparisons to other religions such as Islam and Christianity” (“Text-
book Buddhism,” 11). Compare to the approach of Wynne who points out similarities between
Buddhism and Islam (and Christianity) as well as differences (Buddhism, 1–2 and 78) and that
of Gail Omvedt who portrays Buddhism and Islam as sharing many overarching characteristics
(Buddhism in India, 175).

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impact of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar’s attacks on Indian Buddhist sites runs

as follows. Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji and his raiders hit some non-
Muslim targets in Bihar, likely including Buddhist sites such as Odantapuri
and perhaps Nalanda, and did some damage. But the raids were not cataclys-
mic for all monastic centers, and Nalanda continued to operate for decades
(perhaps even centuries) afterward. Lay Buddhist practices also seem to have
continued into the thirteenth century in the area. Nalanda and other Buddhist
institutions in the region eventually closed due to lack of interest and support,
stemming from larger social and religious changes in premodern North India
that are still under-researched and poorly understood. We are not sure exactly
when that happened.
Between these two tales, the one told by Juzjani and many modern schol-
ars and popular writers is far more exciting and also appeals to a basic human
desire, on display perhaps nowhere more than in the discipline of history, to
find concrete agency and causality. The more nuanced narrative is far more
grounded in solid analysis, but it is vague and a bit bland. One finds varia-
tions on this second narrative in select scholarly monographs and disserta-
tions, but it rarely gets a broader hearing in textbooks much less popular dis-
course. In short, many people keep repeating the “Islam killed Indian
Buddhism” narrative, in part, because the real story is still so murky.
CONCLUSION
The decline of Indian Buddhism is often depicted as a great loss for the subcon-
tinent. For example, talking about the raids of “Muslim Turks,” Robinson and
his cowriters lament, “Because the universities had been the repositories not
only of Buddhist traditions but also of secular arts and sciences, their annihila-
tion was a devastating blow to Indian culture as a whole.”113 Specific manu-
scripts and individuals perished in Turkish raids on Buddhist sites. But one gets
the sense that Robinson and his coauthors mean to bereave a deeper, almost
civilizational loss. A similar sense of large-scale injury comes through in the
language of other authors as well, such as Warder’s “Spirit of Destruction,”
Amartya Sen’s “thousands of manuscripts” that “burned for three days,” and
the persistent recourse of many scholars to Islamic iconoclasm.114 Such mourn-
ful attitudes contain unhelpful assumptions about what is pertinent and vibrant
within Indian culture (Buddhism) and what is foreign and destructive (Islam).
Such thinking, even when toned down by scholarly convention, prevents
scholars from fruitfully investigating the end (or near end) of Indian Buddhism
113
Robinson et al., Buddhist Religion, 135.
114
For example, Prebish and Keown underscore the vast extent of this perceived harm by
asserting that, after being hit by Turks, “The great library of Nālandā is said to have smouldered
for six months” (Introducing Buddhism, 94).

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in the early second millennium, a project that could also benefit from several
additional adjustments.
Instead of analyzing “Indian Buddhism,” we are better off talking about In-
dian Buddhists. This small semantic change represents a significant conceptual
shift. When we talk about whether or not Islam killed off Indian Buddhism, we
discuss a story about traditions rather than people. In fact, the historiographical
question of what happened to Indian Buddhism is really a query about what
happened to the people who practiced Indian Buddhism. Why do we not find
many such individuals after circa 1200? Or do such individuals survive, and we
have failed to properly identify them? Were Buddhists really all slaughtered
by raiders led by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji? If they were not all killed
by Turks, then why did Indians no longer find it important or compelling to in-
corporate Buddhist ideas and practices into their lives? Taking up this last ques-
tion, some have suggested that many Buddhists converted to Islam in order
to escape the Hindu caste system.115 The idea that caste motivated Indians to
adopt Islam lacks evidence.116 Nonetheless, based on manuscript colophons,
it seems that lay Buddhists in medieval eastern India were well integrated into
the caste system.117 So when we talk about “Indian Buddhists,” how exactly do
we define such individuals and their complex relationships with other religious
traditions and social conventions? Exploring textured religious and social iden-
tities may well yield promising venues of inquiry.
Talking about specific Buddhists may also focus scholarly attention in
productive ways. Was Buddhism really an Indian tradition writ large in the
early second millennium? Was it ever such a thing? It is perhaps more useful
to ask what happened to specific Buddhist communities in specific parts of
the subcontinent. Such an approach has served scholars well in dealing with
other instances of “decline” on the subcontinent. For example, Sheldon Pol-
lock has taken up the challenge of trying to make sense of what is often termed
“the death of Sanskrit,” meaning how “the capacity of Sanskrit thought to
make history had vanished.”118 Pollock’s answer is, in brief, it’s complicated,
and that we can pinpoint no single moment of collapse but rather need to ac-
commodate multiple historical cases and rhythms into the narrative of how
Sanskrit ceased to be a living tradition. While Pollock’s death of Sanskrit the-
sis has proven (and was designed to be) controversial, it has been enormously
productive for the field. For Indian Buddhism, making the questions and an-
115
Verardi, Hardships and Downfall, 379 referring to quotes on 53–54.
116
Richard Eaton discusses the lack of evidence that Indian converts to Islam were motivated
by social mobility and escape from the caste system in “Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim ‘Con-
version’ in Punjab and Bengal, 1300–1700,” Medieval History Journal 12, no. 2 (2009): 193–244.
117
Kim, Receptacle for the Sacred, 238–39.
118
Sheldon Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43,
no. 2 (2001): 392– 426, quote at 394.

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swers more specific and people-focused may help scholars do away with the
unfounded presumption that there is a single life cycle to Indian Buddhism as a
tradition.
In addition to talking about specific people rather than abstract traditions
and being open to multiple vectors of decline, we ought to be more critical
about assuming that another religion must have played a decisive role in Bud-
dhism’s decline on the subcontinent. The fallacy here is that because Bud-
dhism, a religion, is the subject of inquiry, scholars have long assumed that
another religion must be involved in its demolition. Some, such as William
Theodore de Bary, have even argued that the spread of Islam was dependent
upon demolishing Indian Buddhism, writing, “It is noteworthy that Islam had
its greatest success in those parts of India where Buddhism had been strongest,
in the Northwest, and in Bengal.”119 This suggestion is undergirded by a dis-
tinctly Protestant assumption that people belong to a single religion.120 More-
over, Muslims did not require the elimination of any other Indian religious
traditions in order to gain a foothold on the subcontinent. And so, perhaps
things outside of Islam prompted and hastened a decline in the number of In-
dian Buddhists. Some scholars have suggested that Hinduism was a more ac-
tive agent in this regard than Islam, an argument that follows a strikingly similar
pattern in that one religion is held responsible for the demise of another.121
More promising is the notion that Islamic peoples may well have played a role
in the shrinking numbers of Indian Buddhists, but not as Muslims per se. Aside
from their religion, Islamic groups brought new ways of ruling, fresh social
norms and orders, and an array of other political and social changes to India
in the second millennium. Perhaps social and political shifts, rather than any-
thing religious, were causal factors in the decline in South Asian Buddhists.
Another important corrective is to continue seeking out alternative ways
that Buddhists and Muslims interacted before, during, and after the alleged
disappearance of Indian Buddhism. For example, Jinah Kim, an art historian,
has recently argued in the context of talking about the Buddhist book cult in
medieval India that survived until the fifteenth century: “Everything Buddhist
did not disappear due to the impact of violent destruction caused by the arrival
of Islamic forces.”122 McKeown has discussed a recorded debate between a
Muslim thinker and a Buddhist intellectual in the early fifteenth century.123
119
William Theodore de Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition: In India, China and Japan (New
York: Modern Library, 1972), 117. This idea is echoed by others, including Verardi in Hard-
ships and Downfall, 379.
120
For another way that Protestant assumptions have shaped Buddhist studies, see Schopen,
“Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions.”
121
Most notably, Verardi, Hardships and Downfall.
122
Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, 264.
123
McKeown, “From Bodhgaya to Lhasa to Beijing,” 221–25.

180.179.211.224 on Sun, 27 Oct 2024 17:12:39 UTC
Elverskog has written about how Muslims and Buddhists engaged on the silk
roads as traders, allies, and as patrons and seekers of patronage between the
eighth and nineteenth centuries.124 Especially interesting for thinking about
the question of whether Muslims were always antagonistic toward Indian Bud-
dhism, Elverskog talks about Buddhist rulers operating under Muslim over-
lords as early as the eighth century (an arrangement still witnessed in Bihar
in the thirteenth century).125 These venues of research, while promising, ulti-
mately take us away from the question of what happened to Indian Buddhists.
It is a reasonable historical question to try to explain the decline (or mul-
tiple moments of decline) of Indian Buddhists and the tradition in which they
participated. Here I have taken a first step of describing and thereby partially
disarming the historiographical vigor of the Islamic sword in this narrative.
However, in order to progress further on the path of challenging our assump-
tions about the alleged violent relationship between medieval Islam and In-
dian Buddhism, we need other sorts of explanations for why the number of
Indian Buddhists dwindled. Those explanations will have to grapple with the
formidable challenges of telling a less compelling story and arguing for a nu-
anced reading of Indo-Islamic chronicles and Sanskrit and Tibetan sources.
But a solid first step is to ask what happened to Indian Buddhists, be open to
more layered answers, and seriously interrogate the presumption that our ex-
planation must begin and end with religion.
Rutgers University Newark
124
Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam.
125
Ibid., 49–50.

180.179.211.224 on Sun, 27 Oct 2024 17:12:39 UTC

Truschke POWERISLAMICSWORD 2018

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THE POWER OF THE ISLAMIC SWORD IN NARRATING THE DEATH OF INDIAN BUDDHISM

Author(s): Audrey Truschke

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26548181

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Scholarship on Buddhist and Muslim interactions has long featured a partic-

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ular thinking on the subject, as exempliﬁed by the above quote by B. R.

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on solid historical evidence in the ﬁrst place. As Gregory Schopen wrote

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second millennium and enables us to more accurately characterize premodern

A PERSISTENT HISTORICAL QUESTION

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searchers note declining patronage for Buddhist institutions following the

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Most well-documented reasons for the disappearance of religious traditions

THE RHETORIC OF CONQUEST IN INDO-ISLAMIC CHRONICLES

The most robust evidence that Islam—speciﬁcally Turkish Muslim raiders—

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and destruction of non-Muslim Indian religious sites—whether Hindu, Bud-

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organised an attack on a fortiﬁed city in Bihar.29 Trustworthy narrators have relayed

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Historians (Aligarh: Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1952), 2:1–102; K. A. Nizami, Supplement to

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historiographical obstacle is Juzjani’s source for this information. Juzjani con-

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We could (and should) use sophisticated hermeneutical tactics for reading

THE SPECIAL PLACE OF NALANDA

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A BUDDHIST STORY: ISLAM IN THE KALACHAKRA

An antagonistic and ultimately fatal narrative of interactions between pre-

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In addition to maligning Muslim religious ﬁgures, other verses in the

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to Buddhism, revised in 2013, lists tantric practices and “Hindu hostility”

THE STORIES WE TELL

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of world religions.103 Contemporary scholars typically shy away from such

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impact of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar’s attacks on Indian Buddhist sites runs

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Rutgers University Newark

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