Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

I NDIA
Tibetans light butter lamps for world peace at Bodh Gaya, India, 1997. Bodh Gaya is where the Buddha achieved enlightenment and
is Buddhism’s most sacred pilgrimage site. © Don Farber 2003. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
several thousand students. And although a liberal education
was possible—including the Vedas, medicine,
and art—every student was required to study Mahayana
literature as well. In later centuries, Nalanda
was supplemented, and then surpassed, by two other
Mahayana universities, Otantapuri and Vikramaśla;
both were established by the Pala dynasty that ruled
in India’s Northeast from about 750 to 1150 C.E. Furnished
with ample lands by their Pala patrons, these
great monasteries were eventually depopulated, their
books destroyed, during the thirteenth-century Muslim
conquest of north India.
The end of Buddhism in India (seventh to thirteenth
century C.E.)
The fact that Mahayanists came to have a significant
public presence does not mean that nikaya-Buddhism
was eclipsed. A census of monks, made by Xuanzang
in the seventh century, reveals that monks who were
primarily identified with the nikayas still outnumbered
Mahayanists. Yet, of the original eighteen-plus nikayas,
only four remained vital, and almost half of all nikaya-
Buddhists belonged to the Sam mitlya sect, whose
tenets were the object of considerable intra-Buddhist
polemic.
When Xuanzang’s census is compared with an account
given by FAXIAN (ca. 337–418) in the fifth century,
however, one notices that the Mahayana’s
institutional gains took place in a landscape within
which Buddhism as a whole had become less prominent.
The same economic developments that supported
the Mahayana also instigated an effloresence of
sectarian Hinduism devoted to VISN U and Śiva. Like
the Buddhists, these Hindus sought royal patronage.
But unlike the Buddhists, the Hindus were effective allies
for kings who needed to socialize indigenous and
tribal peoples. Brahmin legal codes, rooted in the
Vedas, legitimated a strictly stratified society, and gave
every person a fixed place within that society. Such
codes eventually gave rise to a “caste system.” Though
Buddhist texts take the existence of “caste” for granted,
they attempt neither to justify this social system, nor
to disseminate it. From the point of view of India’s
rulers, Buddhist monks were less effective ideologues
than Brahmins. In turn, as Brahmins held primary re-
358 E NCYCLOPEDIA OF B UDDHISM