The Decline That Wasn’t
Photo: Karan Madhok
Popular historian Sanjeev Sanyal pushed the account of India’s intellectual decline post the Islamic conquests. In his research essay, Joshua Fernandes challenges Sanyal’s stance by presenting a connected history through a survey of Sino-Tibetan literature.
Once upon a time, there came to be one mountain in China that would be associated with Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. This is the Mount Wutai in Shanxi province, and is usually referred to as Wutai Shan. While previous references were made to the Himalayas, Wutai Shan's ability to suit descriptions and be appropriated was partly due to its perpetual snow-peak status.
When translating the Avatamsaka Sutra into Chinese, Indian monk Buddhabhadra (359-429) referred to Manjushri’s home as the clear-and-cold mountain. “By the fifth and sixth centuries, when Buddhist doctrines and mythical imagery of the Buddhist universe had percolated through every level of Chinese society, India found itself occupying a unique place in the Chinese world order,” Tansen Sen writes (2003, p. 8). The Tang dynasty (618-907) gave Wutai Shan the most importance, and by the seventh century, it had become a well-known pilgrimage site, even for monks from the ‘Western Lands’ or the ‘Great Xitian’.
Huixiang, a Chinese monk who visited the Wutai Shan in 667, describes an encounter with one monk in his Gu Qingliang zhuan:
Sakyamitra was a monk from the Western Region. He was originally from Simhala. He became a monk at a young age and originally dwelled in the Mahabodhi Temple in Magadha. He traveled everywhere to benefit all beings. He came to this land in the year of Linde (664), saying he wished to visit Clear and Cold Mountain to worship the bodhisattva Manjusri. He said he had walked barefoot for ninety-five summers, and often only ate one meal per day. Sometimes he went seven days on an empty stomach (Cartelli, 2013, p. 63).
Sakyamitra isn’t an outlier in this regard. Tang literature is abound with monks from Indians playing an active role in perpetuating Manjushri’s cult status, like Buddhapali (7th century), who is claimed to have entered the Diamond grotto on the mountain and never returned. Amoghavajra (705-774), also known as Bukong, travelled to China, then went to India and Ceylon by sea to collect manuscripts, and got them translated after returning to China. In 758, he got Emperor Suzong to decree that two imperial temples of Yuhua and Jin’ge be built atop Mount Wutai. Hanguang, a pupil of Amoghavajra, held the “official title the Śramaṇa of Merit Cultivation” and also oversaw the construction of the Jin’ge temple (Yang, 2018, pp. 50, 63). Zhanran (711-782), a monk of the Tiantin school of Buddhism, mentions in his Fahua Wenju Ji that “it just so happened that I was then paying a visit to Mount Wutai together with over forty monks from the Jianghuai areas. Thus, I met a disciple of the “Master of the Three Canons” Bukong, Hanguang, who, by imperial command, was overseeing the construction [of a temple] on the mountain” (Sen, p. 84). The Yi-ching Yiian, or Institute for Canonical Translations, was founded in China in 980 CE under the Northern Sung dynasty (960-1130 CE), and its name was altered three years later to Ch'uan-fa Yuan, or Institute for Transmission of Dharma.
Many Indian monks came to China to collaborate with their Chinese counterparts at this institute in translating Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit to Chinese. The Hsiang-fufa-pao lu (A Catalogue of the Precious Books of Dharma) authored by Chao An-jen in 1013 mentions one Indian monk, Dharmapala.:
He was a native of Kashmir of northern India. His family belonged to a Brahmana caste, and his original surname was Chiao-ssu-chia [probably the Kausikas, a Brahmana clan of Kashmir]. His nature was very simple, his look was handsome, he was very brilliant from his childhood. During his younger days he studied the four Vedas as well as historical records and Sastras. Later, he went to Magadha, became a monk, and learned different subjects at the Chien-ku-k’ai Kung monastery… (Yün-hua, 1966, pp. 39-40).
Sanyal says that it is “tempting” to blame the invaders for the downturn, but his argument is transitive in nature, and one can abductively reason that Sanyal is reducing his theory of decline to the invaders.
Whatever we have read so far, while keeping note of the timeline, corresponds to Indian economist and popular historian Sanjeev Sanyal’s description of India's “golden age”. In his 2008 book The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline (World Scientific Publishing) Sanyal makes a compelling case for India’s contributions in the domains of art, literature, and philosophy, underlining Asia's reliance on India for “intellectual and cultural leadership”.
Yet a change in cultural attitudes by the 11th century created a fossilized society obsessed with regulating all aspects of life according to fixed rules. Not surprisingly, this discouraged the spirit of innovation and led to a long and painful decline. India fell behind not just as an economy but as a civilization (Sanyal, 2008, p. 2).
It is difficult to establish precisely what caused this fossilization. However, a key factor appears to be the erosion of the spirit of entrepreneurship and the openness to new ideas and enquiry. There are several independent signs of intellectual fossilization at around the 11th century (Sanyal, p. 19).
Sanyal says that it is “tempting” to blame the invaders for the downturn, but his argument is transitive in nature, and one can abductively reason that Sanyal is reducing his theory of decline to the invaders. In relation to Buddhism, he writes: “In 1193, Nalanda was sacked and totally destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji. This led to a rapid decline in the practice of Buddhism in India.” (Sanyal, p. 127)
While I agree with Sanyal’s reading that Islamic conquests devastated higher education institutions, I differ with his rationale that this led to a “technological naivete” and “intellectual fossilization” in India, When he claims that "the picture of ancient India is of a society that encouraged innovation and risk-taking”, he’s implying that this “picture” disappears from the eleventh century onwards. In this article, I will reason, that the “intellectual and cultural leadership” of India did not end, and that Buddhists in Tibet and China were not dependent but continued to receive much from India for their knowledge soup, as their writings portray a high regard for Indians who helped them disseminate and translate texts in what Sanyal considers the period of decline.
This article does not question Buddhism's decline or survival in India (for an in depth study on decline, see KTS Sarao (2012); rather, it challenges Sanyal’s dismal stance towards India’s intellectual past. It does so by presenting a connected history through a survey of Sino-Tibetan literature.
Uppasaka, a student of Dharmaswamin, wrote about his teacher’s travels through India from Tibet in the 1230's. Dharmaswamin was a first-hand witness to the destruction at Vikramasila:
Vikramasila was still existing in the time of elder Dharamasvamin and the Kashmir Pandita, but when the Dharmasvamin visited the country there were no traces of it left, the Turushka soldiery having razed it to the ground, and thrown the foundation stones into the Ganga. At the time of the Dharmasvamin’s visit to Vajrāsana [Bodh Gaya], the place was deserted and only four monks were staying in the Vihara. One of them said, “It is not good! All have fled from the fear of the Turushka soldiery.” They block up the door in front of the Mahabodhi image with bricks and plastered it. Near it they placed another image of a substitute. On its surface they drew the image of Mahesvara to protect it from the non-buddhists. For seventeen days, Vajrāsana went into hiding as the Turushka’s were raiding the place.
Following the destruction at Bodh Gaya, Upasala continues: “For at that time, a woman also appeared who brought the welcome news that the Turushka soldiery had gone away. Then the Dharmasvamin returned to Vajrāsana and began worshiping and circumambulating the image of Mahabodhi.” (Upasaka, 1959, p. 64)
While Dharmaswamin restarted the rituals around Bodh Gaya, Sariputra went on to reconstruct Gaya temple. Sariputra took plans of the Mahabodhi site to Beijing and was instrumental in getting the Zhenjue temple commissioned on the lines of the Bodh Gaya.
Sanyal’s interpretation lacks the possibility that social life after the Turushka destruction had the potential to rehabilitate. If Dharmaswamin didn't have this capacity, it’s safe to suppose he wouldn’t have learned anything during the Turushka attacks. When Dharmaswamin returned to Nalanda after Bodh Gaya, he found that much of it had been ‘damaged by the Turushkas, and there was simply no one to look after them or give sacrifices.’ He assumed that no one in Magadha knew more grammar than him. However, he was humbled on knowing that most of the Mahapandita of Nalanda Rahulasribhadra’s disciples were better versed than him. The 90-year-old guru Rahulasribhadra recommended him to study and master the Sanskrit commentaries.
On returning to Tibet, Dharmasvamin met scholars who acknowledged his learning in India. One was a pandit from the Sakya school who after exchanging manuscripts that Dharmasvamin had translated in Tibetan, said to him:
Surely after the Lo-Tsa-Ba Rin Chen Bzan Po, there was no scholar greater than you! When I also thought of becoming a scholar like you, my father and grandfather did not allow me to go to India. As a result of which their grace diminished. At the best they did not make me abandon religion and wealth, at the worst they did not send me to India (Upasaka, p. 103).
He met another pandita Dānaśrī, who on hearing the Sanskrit verses narrated by Dharmasvamin, said: “Learned, learned! you are more learned than I. You have studied for a long time in India, whereas I became like cattle (by staying here). Because of your fame as a scholar, my hair stood erect.” (Upasaka, p. 106)
This possibility of recovery does not imply that things went back to being the same as before. The destruction would cause Tibetans to be extremely wary of coming to Bodh Gaya over the coming centuries. Writing in the early seventeenth century, Tibetan historian Taranatha says in his The History of Buddhism in India (1604) that, “after the Turushka invasion of Magadha, in the southern parts of India like Vidyanagara, Konkana, Malyara and Kalinga were established some centres for the doctrine, though these were not very big and the number of the followers of the doctrine were not very large” (Taranatha, 1990, p. 332-3). Al-Beruni, a source Sanyal uses to frame his argument, says that due to Gazni’s exploits. “Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places” (A-Beruni, 1993, p. 21).
Reading the case of Dhyanabadra or Zhikong (1289-1364), we may infer that monks’ networks of contacts across distant lands remained quite strong:
Zhikong asks Vinayabhadra about the differences between the Buddha, sentient beings, emptiness, and the three worlds. The master responds: “It is “neither existence nor non- existence,” and this is “true wisdom.”” He then tells Zhikong to go and study under the monk Samantaprabhāsa on Jixiang Mountain in the state of Sri Lanka to more deeply study the meaning of truth (Dziwenka, 2010, p. 97).
Zhikong did go and study in Sri Lanka, and then went back through India to Sindh, Mongolia and then to Korea. The above verse is from a Korean biography of him. Remains of temples that he built or took control of still exist in both Koreas. There is one known as Hoeamsa Temple with which he is associated and Ronald Dziwenka has said that “Zhikong chose Hoeam Temple and its site to commemorate his initial training centre, because its surrounding geography reminded him of the area around Nālandā university-temple complex in northern India where he had received his primary education and training” (Dziwenka, p. 60). On one of the Buddhist works that Zhikong translated from Sanskrit to Korean, the government historian Wei Taipu wrote a preface to the edition published in 1353, in which he says:
From India, the Master brought two volumes of the Text of the Precepts of (Neither Arising Nor) Non-arising of Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī of the Highest Vehicle. The Preface was written by the government official Chancellor Wei Dapo. [The Master] also left a hand-written copy of The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment. [By] imperial decree, Ouyang wrote the epilogue. The Master left a great many verses. These were disseminated separately throughout the world (Dziwenka, p. 69).
The Silleulk Temple near Seoul in South Korea houses a Hall of Ancient Masters, where you can see an image of Zhikong.
Images by Ronald Dziwenka (pp. 361, 363). Images used with the author's kind permission.
In the thirteenth century, Ghazan Khan, a Mongol king, conquered parts of Iran. He had erected Buddhist temples in Khurasan and was a Buddhist by birth. He converted to Islam in 1295 and ordered the destruction of all non-Islamic religious sites as his first edict. This very same Ghazan also commissioned Rashid al din Hamadani, a recent Jewish convert, to produce Jami al Tawarikh, one of the first global histories. With the help of a Buddhist monk from Kashmir named Kamalashri, Rashid undertook significant research into the Buddha’s life. Beautiful illustrations have been preserved from an early 1314 manuscript, including a manuscript illustrating Buddha feeding Shaitian/iblis from the story of Sujata, featured here. (Canby, 1993, pp. 300-3).
Image: Shakyamuni offering fruit to the devil (from the life of the Buddha) from The Jami‘ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din by The Khalili Collections (Public Domain).
Ghazan Khan tried to unsuccessfully convert his subjects to Islam, and they were outwardly following Islam but not to its full extent. This sounds just like the New Christians who came to India in the early sixteenth century: publicly Christian, but practicing Jews at home. So, what did Ghazan do? He told them, “Let any of you who so desires, go to India, Kashmir, Tibet or his native country.”
Sounds familiar?
Vanaratna, an early fifteenth century monk from East Bengal, also went to Sri Lanka to study like Zhikong and then later studied further in Bodh Gaya. There are well known biographies on him in Tibet. Here is what Shar-pa Ye-shes rgya-mtsfio (1404-1473) had to say about him:
Although he came for the first time during the period of Gong-rna Grags-pa rGyal-mtshan (1374-1432), an auspicious bond was not formed between them, since there was no translator available for translating his teachings and so forth. As for the middle (i.e., the second journey), he was invited by the master of rGyal mKhar-rtse, Rab-brtan Kun-bzang ’phags-pa (1389-1442), and so he came to Tibet again. At that time he met the “Lion of Speech” Rong- ston Shes-bya kun-rig (1367-1449) and was praised by him in every respect with the words: “In the region of dBus, this Indian Pandita will be someone whom other scholars should be very afraid of!” Thus Vanaratna was invited by the Dharmaraja Grags-pa ’byung-gnas to the palace of sNe’u- gdong (Ehrhard, 2004, p. 245).
The Panchem Lama Lobsang Yeshe was in communication with Raja Chait Singh, the King of Benares. The Raja despatched Acharya Sugatigiri to Tibet, who sent the Panchem Lama a dakshinavarti shankh (dextral conch) and a Singhalese parrot (a hanging parrot), among other things.
The last abbot of Bodh Gaya, Sariputra (1335-1426) in the fifteenth century travelled extensively from India to China and even reached the Ming Imperial Court. In his autobiography that Sariputra wrote in Tibetan, he describes the “upper half of the Vajrasana ghandola, which the Turuska horde had destroyed. I, having made an inspection, accomplished well the repair work” (McKeown, pp. 418-20). Satiputra was able to hold a nine-day debate at Bodh Gaya, and a point to spot, is that the participants were not just Buddhists:
Then, too, the king Skyer-simhadeva, the abbot(s) of the Tirthika priests, who had some respect for both outer (non-Buddhist) and inner (Buddhist) traditions, the learned among all the TIrthikas, and ones who came from Western India were there. A nine day debate was made with them. Many crowds of people gathered as witnesses of that, such as all the learned panditas of outer and inner traditions, the kings and officials, and so forth (McKeown, pp. 418-20).
While Dharmaswamin restarted the rituals around Bodh Gaya, Sariputra went on to reconstruct Gaya temple. Sariputra took plans of the Mahabodhi site to Beijing and was instrumental in getting the Zhenjue temple commissioned on the lines of the Bodh Gaya.
Model of the Mahabodhi Temple, 12th century by Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0)
It was completed in 1473, many years after he died. An inscription from the site reads:
In the early Yongle period, the State Preceptor, the Indian monk Pandita from the Western regions was here. He offered to the Emperor golden Buddha images and a design of the Vajrasana. Thereupon, the emperor chose a site outside the western gate and established Zhuenjue temple. He initiated a throne for the golden images, but this was not easily completed; not until this year 1473. I know the benefit of completing unfinished good deeds, and of course being desirous of that, it was my fate to undertake the refurbishing of the temple sanctuary, creating the Vajrasana stupa using stone. The base is high, reckoned in zhang, and above are five Buddhas, divided between five towers. These are measured in zhang and che. Plus, the throne (baozuo) of Central Indian style is not at all strange. Completed and stele erected in the 11th month of the 30th year of the sexagenary cycle of the Chenghua period (Le. 1473) (McKeown, p. 149).
Sariputra made a pilgrimage to Wutai Shan and made Manjushri his principal deity. When he died in Beijing, Emperor Yongle transferred a portion of Sariputra’s relics to Yuanzhao temple in the Wutai Shan foothills and built a Stupa for him.
Image: Yuanzhao Temple, Temple of Shilisha by University of British Columbia Open Collection (CC by 4.0)
Lu Tong confirms India’s presence with Wutai Shan during the late Ming periods. In his Butuoshan zhi su which is the Preface to the Mount Butuo Gazetteer, published in about 1589 says that, “since the north (Wutai Shan) and west (Mount Emei) are not far from the Buddhist country (India), they have enjoyed close, easy contact and have been gradually influenced by the Way of the Dharma” (Kai, 2013, p. 125).
Mathew Mosca has done an excellent survey of Indian monks in Ming and Qing China (2017) and I shall share two cases from the many that Mosca has surveyed. First is that of Zuo-ji-gu-lu, a late sixteenth century monk in late Ming China. Liu Tong who wrote Dijing Jingwulue in 1639, records that Zuo-ji-gu-lu reached Beijing in 1576. It states that he sat in the suburbs of Beijing without food and drink for over a month. Another reference was made to Zuo-ji-gu-lu by Tao Wangling in his Xie’an ji, which says that “Cisheng bestowed on him (Zuo), as a man from afar, an official ration in Wanshou Temple, and also presented him a purple robe of honour” (Mosca, p. 6-7). The other is of a mendicant finding his way into a seventeenth century Chinese poem by Wang Siqian, that Mosca translates:
Night Chat with a Monk from Kapilavastu, while Staying Overnight at Zhuanshan, I asked the master why he had crossed the Flowing Sands, He had set foot on half of China’s famous peaks, but his desires led him further. Each time he entered those cloud-shrouded peaks, it was to seek the pure land. But because of war horses he was stunned by China. He certainly knew that one zhang of stone could become a Buddha. But marveled to look at jade petals [snowflakes], and was astonished by raindrops. Deep in conversation over the flame of a lamp, as if in a dream. The next morning he set off, again for the edge of the sky (Mosca, p. 11).
Just as Dharmaswamin came from Tibet to India in the thirteenth century, the fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Lobsang (1617-1682) wanted to learn about Panini grammar, so he sent a scholar to India in the 1650’s. Narendra Kumar Dash has studied the manuscripts which the Dalai Lama’s scholar translated into Tibetan, currently held at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. Here is the manuscript’s last line, from which we may learn a great deal about the intellectual climate of the time:
The Pope-King of the Haimavatas of Tibet sent a scholar named Ngag-dbang-phun-tshogs-lhun-grub to India, who learnt the grammar of Panini from a Brahmana of Kurukshetra named Balabhadra. Coming back to Tibet, the scholar translated it into Tibetan with the help of the commentary Prakriya Kaumudi of Ramachandra (Dash, 1994, p. 25).
As a result, we have gone full circle, not just in cross-cultural pilgrimage for Wutai Shan and Bodh Gaya, but also in terms of leaving a physical presence, thanks to names like Amoghavajra, Sariputra, and the Panchem Lama.
Dash has said that Balabhadra and his brother Gokulanath Mishra resided in Tibet for a few years. Tonie Huber has shown that from around the 14th to the 18th century, pilgrimages to Bodh Gaya from Tibet virtually ceased, purely due to the negative perceptions of Islamic rule in Tibet. But he also says that does not imply pilgrimages to India stopped. He shows how the Hyagriva temple in Hajo, Assam which was ransacked by Kalapahad, a general from the Karrani dynasty, was restored in 1583 by Raja of Kamarupa, Nar Narayan (1535-84), the same Raja who rebuilt Kamakhya in 1565. Hyagriva was appropriated as Kushinagar—the site of Buddha’s death—and received many pilgrims during this period. It is only in 1752, that the 7th Drukpa, Kagyu Shingta sent his student Sonam Rabgye to find the Bodh Gaya. The reason, as Rabgye himself says:
Since then, and up until recent times, a series of translators have gone there and translated all of the holy teachings of India into Tibetan and also accurately reported on the condition of the glorious Vajrasana. But nowadays, no one has gone and experienced the site. Due to various factors such as fear [of travel to India], reports of the conditions there are very scarce, and there is a need to go and establish what the conditions are at the site (Huber, 2008, p. 179).
However, upon finding the Bodh Gaya, Rabgye was unhappy with the dilapidated state of Vajrasana and that Giri sannyasis who had occupied the temple premises had replaced the stone image of Sakyamuni with that of Jagannatha.
Ties between Tibet and Indians may be witnessed well into the final quarter of the eighteenth century, when the Panchem Lama Lobsang Yeshe was in communication with Raja Chait Singh, the King of Benares. The Raja despatched Acharya Sugatigiri to Tibet, who sent the Panchem Lama a dakshinavarti shankh (dextral conch) and a Singhalese parrot (a hanging parrot), among other things. In 1773, the Panchem Lama conveyed Blo-bzan tse rin to Benares in exchange for the Lama receiving the blessings of India's sacred places through a proxy (Petech, 1950, pp. 335-8). When British colonial administrator Warren Hastings sent Samuel Turner on the second British diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1784, he inquired from the Tibetans about their intellectual heritage:
After much inquiry, and long investigation, I could never learn that either their tradition, or written records, mention any ancient people eminent for their knowledge, inhabiting towards the north. The general belief, as I was repeatedly assured by the Regent and Soopoon Choomboo, which prevails amongst them, is, that both the sciences and the arts had their origin in the holy city of Benares, which they have been taught to esteem, as the source and centre both of learning and religion (Turner, 1800, 281).
The Panchem Lama sought to build a monastery in India, asserting his past Indian births and his desire to restore Buddhism in India, according to the first diplomatic expedition dispatched by Hastings in 1774. Hastings consented diplomatically and the temple was completed by 1776. Calcutta’s Bhot Bagan/Mandir is still standing today.
As a result, we have gone full circle, not just in cross-cultural pilgrimage for Wutai Shan and Bodh Gaya, but also in terms of leaving a physical presence, thanks to names like Amoghavajra, Sariputra, and the Panchem Lama. While Sanyal believes that India’s risk takers vanished after the eleventh century, we might now reconsider this rhetoric.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Nagammai Nagappan, Bhanu Mungali and the Grade 11 (ISC 23’) history students at Rishi Valley School for their valuable comments, questions and feedback.
References:
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Joshua Fernandes reads graphic novels, plays chess and goes on long walks. They can be contacted at 223.joshuaf@gmail.com and Instagram: @joshuafernandes2020
