The Rashtrakutas and their Times c20.3

c20.3

The new ground gained in the interval was only at Kanauj, where the number of the Vihāras increased from 2 to 100; but this was due to the temporary impetus given by the patronage of Harsha and did not represent the tendency of the age. Buddhism had realised in the days of Yuan Chwang and I-tsing that its days in India were numbered; these Chinese pilgrims record a number of superstitious beliefs, current among the Buddhists themselves, about the destined disappearance of their religion from India. At Budhagaya itself the brethern believed that their faith would disappear when certain images of Avalokiteśvara in that locality would be completely buried under sand, and some of them were already more than chest-deep under that material in the seventh century A.D.(2) A garment alleged to have been worn by the Buddha himself was shown to Yuan Chwang at Purushapura or modern Peshawar; it was in a sadly tattered condition and the monks believed that the religion would perish the moment the garment was no more. I-tsing, who came in the third quarter of the 7th century, saw very clearly what way the things were moving; he emphasises the necessity of a synthesis of the various sects, if the rapid decline of the religion was to be arrested.(3) In the Deccan and Karnataka, Buddhism was never very strong; in the 1st and 2nd centuries B.C. and A.D., as the epigraphic evidence from the Western India shows, it had several centres along the Western Coast; but they had begun to decline much earlier than our period. The pious Fa Hsien did not visit the Deccan because he was told that the people there were subscribing to bad and erroneous views and did not follow the Sramanas and the law of the Buddha.⁴ He had heard only a hearsay report; but it could not have been altogether erroneous. The Vākāṭakas who were ruling in Northern Maharashtra were orthodox Hindus; the founder of the house had performed a number of Vedic sacrifices like Agniṣṭoma, Aptoryāma and As'vamedha and his descendants were either Shaivites or Vaishnavites, but never Buddhists.⁵ Earlier rulers of the Chālukya house, which subsequently rose to power, were again orthodox Hindus, who prided themselves on having performed a number of Vedic sacrifices like Agnichayana, Vājapeya, As'vamedha, Bahusurvarṇa etc.⁶ Buddhism, therefore, naturally began to decline. Yuan Chwang records that in Konkan there were 100 monasteries, but heretics were very numerous; the case could not have been much different in Maharashtra which, though a much a bigger province, had also the same number of monasteries.⁷ The number of Buddhist monks in both the provinces was only 6000. The strength of Buddhism lay in its cloistered population, for there was nothing to mark off distinctively the lay Buddhist population from the ordinary Hindus. Any one could become an upāsaka by reciting the triple formula; the church did not care either to prescribe a special form of recognition, or to regulate religious ideas and habits and metaphysical beliefs of the laymen, or even to prohibit them from becoming at the same time lay followers of some other church.⁸ The total Buddhist population in the Deccan at the middle of the 7th century could not have been much more than 10,000, and that number may have further dwindled down by the beginning of our period.