<<< What is perhaps especially valuable about The Buddha and the
Sahibs is Allen's gentle reminder of exactly how and why
Buddhism died out in the land of its birth. Every child in India
knows that when the Muslims first came to India that they
desecrated temples and smashed idols. But what is
conveniently forgotten is that during the Hindu revival at the end
of the first millennium AD, many Hindu rulers had behaved in a
similar fashion to the Buddhists.
It was because of this persecution, several centuries before the
arrival of Islam, that the philosophy of the Buddha, once a
serious rival to Hinduism, virtually disappeared from India:
Harsha Deva, a single Kashmiri raja, for example boasted that
he had destroyed no less than 4,000 Buddhist shrines. Another
raja, Sasanka of Bengal, went to Bodh Gaya, sacked the
monastery and cut down the tree of wisdom under which the
Buddha had received enlightenment.
According to Buddhist tradition, Sasanka's "body produced
sores and his flesh quickly rotted off and after a short while he
died". At a time when Islamaphobia is becoming endemic in
both India and the west, and when a far-right Hindu government
is doing its best to terrorise India's Muslim minority, the story of
how an earlier phase of militant Hinduism violently rooted out
Indian Buddhism is an important and worrying precedent, and
one that needs very badly to be told, and remembered. >>>
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