primary reason was that the mohammedans cut off the heads of all the
monks they could find. since buddhism was centralized in the buddha
viharas, this meant it could be eradicated easily.
guess who else is centralized in a few holy places? :-)
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Why Did Buddhism Vanish from India?
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1 comment:
It is instructive that the Islamic word for idol ('but') may be etymologically derived from Budh (or Buddha) - as it is well known that the Buddhist iconography comprised mostly of statues of the enlightened one; or pictoral depictions of the details of his life, Jaataka tales etc. Hence the great love of iconoclasm was most certainly directed at the hapless Buddhist.
At the time of the first Islamic contact with the lands that lay east of it - the larger Indian civilization, epitomized by Gandhara (Kandahar) and Kambhoj were Buddhist, as most certainly were the great Central Asian steppes.
The genius that flowered here can be seen by the fact that even after a 1000 years the Bamiyan Buddhas were still standing - until mortar attacks by the Taliban.
The great Hindu expansion to South East Asia - in Angkor and Borobodur is well known; lesser known - and lost in the mist of time - the greatness of the Buddhist expansion to the north-west.
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