Since Tibetans are outcastes, how does it effect Tibetan Buddhism?

[Palzang Jangchub]

Would you suggest this book for Muslim friends, Malcolm? Sounds like quite an interesting read.

[BuddhaFollower]

Would you suggest this book for Muslim frienda, Malcolm? Sounds like quite an interesting read.

Author creates a strawman, that Nalanda was the sole custodian of Buddhism, just to knock that strawman down.

And the author doesn't even deny Nalanda was sacked.

[BuddhaFollower]

Elverskog admits the destruction of Nalanda, Odantapuri, and Vikramasila was "a devastating blow to the Dharma in India."

"Nevertheless, with the support of an ever-dwindling pool of Buddhist merchant elite the tantric tradition had been kept alive in the few remaining Dharma institutions, such as the monasteries of Nalanda, Odantapuri, and Vikramasila. When the Ghurids sacked these institutions it was therefore a devastating blow to the Dharma in India." page 131

[MiphamFan]

Islam destroyed Buddhism in India less by outright force and more by throttling and supplanting Buddhism's role in international trade.

[Malcolm]

Before people continue to broadcast the political myth that Islam delivered the coup de gras on Buddhism in India, they should really read this book.

And if you keep reading he says:

"Indeed, contrary to the standard idea promoted by the above story that Nalanda’s destruction signaled the death of Buddhism, the fact is that the Dharma survived in India at least until the seventeenth century."

and:

As noted above, the destruction of Nalanda offers us a clear-cut narrative with good guys and bad. It avoids entirely the complex shades of gray that most often color the messy fabric of history.

So he fully admits Nalanda was destroyed.

One out of two Buddhist temples:

Muhammad Ghuri was in fact the first Central Asian ruler who projected Muslim power beyond the Punjab. And by 1206 his forces had marched all the way across north India and even attempted an invasion of Tibet by following the Brahmaputra River up through the Himalayas. 31 While this particular expedition failed spectacularly, by the early thirteenth century India from the Khyber Pass to Bengal was under the control of the Ghurids. And in order to secure their hold on power they followed the age-old Muslim custom of temple destruction. Although it is now known that the claims of such destruction are vastly inflated in Muslim conquest literature as well as in Hindu and Buddhist histories, we do know that at least eighty temples were destroyed during this period. 32 Two of these destroyed temples were Buddhist. 33

Elverskog, Johan (2011-06-06). Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Encounters with Asia) (Kindle Locations 2248-2256). University of Pennsylvania Press. Kindle Edition.

The point is that this narrative of Muslims sweeping into India and murdering all the Buddhists is not true. The White Huns did that at the end of the 5th century, rendering a blow to Indian Buddhism from which it would never fully recover.

[MiphamFan]

The White Huns did that at the end of the 5th century, rendering a blow to Indian Buddhism from which it would never fully recover.

I find this rather hard to believe. Buddhism certainly was on a decline cycle from the 5th century (collapse of WRE destroying trade with Europe etc) but Buddhism was respected enough to be adopted by the mandala surrounding India up throuh the tantric period. Indonesia, the Maldives, Cambodia, Tibet all adopted Buddhism long after the 5th century.

[Malcolm]

The White Huns did that at the end of the 5th century, rendering a blow to Indian Buddhism from which it would never fully recover.

I find this rather hard to believe. Buddhism certainly was on a decline cycle from the 5th century (collapse of WRE destroying trade with Europe etc) but Buddhism was respected enough to be adopted by the mandala surrounding India up throuh the tantric period. Indonesia, the Maldives, Cambodia, Tibet all adopted Buddhism long after the 5th century.

Most historians agree that Indian Buddhism suffered greatly at the hands of the white Huns, who looted the whole of the Gangetic plain and toppled the Guptas, throwing Indian Buddhism into the crisis that precipitated the rise of Vajrayāna. Davidson's book is instructive in this respect.

[MiphamFan]

I am not saying the white Huns had no effect. I am saying they were far from the death knell of Buddhism the way you seem to put it. Verardi's whole thesis is that Vajrayana was the final anti-nomian Buddhist weapon against the nomos of Brahmanical society, and it was effective until Islam came into the scene.

Anyway I agree, Islam doesn't usually outright slaughter/force-convert a population historically (besides in Central Asia). It works more slowly and insidiously most of the time, by what Nassim Taleb calls the minority rule:

In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim[3]. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that is typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.

Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail) –we saw earlier in the chapter that for Kosher rules to work, one needed Jews to be somewhat spread out across the country. But in places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other Non Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage.

Egypt’s Copts suffered from another problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to Islam when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One do not have to really believe in it since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family bearing the marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.

So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one. [4]

We know too little about the Roman side during the rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting her jailors until she was beheaded, except that… she may have never existed. There are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints –but very little about the other side, Pagan heroes. All we have is the bit we know about the reversion to Christianity during the emperor Julian’s apostasy and the writings of his entourage of Syrian-Greek pagans such as Libanius Antiochus. Julian had tried to go back to Ancient Paganism in vain: it was like trying to keep a balloon under water. And it was not because the majority was pagan as historians mistakenly think: it was because the Christian side was too unyielding. Christianity had great minds such as Gregorius of Nazianzen and Basil of Caesaria, but nothing to match the great orator Libanius, not even close. (My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religious such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.)

In fact we can observe in the history of Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the mother-rule and the confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? there have been many Islams, the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by the purists simply because these were more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis, founders of Saudi Arabia, were the ones who destroyed the shrines, and to impose the maximally intolerant rule, in a manner that was later imitated by “ISIS” (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant). Every single accretion of Sunni Islam seems to be there to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.

[Malcolm]

I am not saying the white Huns had no effect. I am saying they were far from the death knell of Buddhism the way you seem to put it. Verardi's whole thesis is that Vajrayana was the final anti-nomian Buddhist weapon against the nomos of Brahmanical society, and it was effective until Islam came into the scene.

On the whole, I think Verardi's thesis is reductionist, wrong-headed and naive. He shows no understanding of Tantric Buddhism at all. If anything, Indian Buddhism responded by becoming more normative with respect to the by then Brahmin dominated society of India, with for example, Anandagarbha making passionate arguments for why Buddhist homavidhis were more valid that the Vedic version and so on.

Anyway I agree, Islam doesn't usually outright slaughter/force-convert a population historically (besides in Central Asia). It works more slowly and insidiously most of the time, by what Nassim Taleb calls the minority rule:

...For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by the purists simply because these were more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis, founders of Saudi Arabia, were the ones who destroyed the shrines, and to impose the maximally intolerant rule, in a manner that was later imitated by “ISIS” (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant). Every single accretion of Sunni Islam seems to be there to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.

Yes, much like American politics on the right.