I mean India is literally obsessed with China and constantly wants war with China. The obvious threat is that they claim all of Tibet as part of Akhand Bharat in part because Dalai Lama sold Tibet to India. Aside from that they claim of Chinese culture as Indian so of course we would see India as a threat. BTW buddhism is not an Indian religion but Nepalese and since a good chuck of Nepal is Sino Tibetan we have a stronger claim to it than India ever does.
I never had the chance to post this. So for knowledge sake I would like to share this with SDF on the decline of Buddhism in India. Its written by an Indian too so they can't use that as an excuse.
Why Buddhism Declined in India
Buddhism’s decline had begun in the second half of the first millennium. Xuanzang had already noticed its slide in the 7th century, and that trend accelerated in the centuries ahead. I think there are five key reasons for the decline of Buddhism in the land of its birth.
First, there had long been a competitive and hostile dynamic between Brahminism and Buddhism, mainly over three things: funding, followers, and ideology. The Chinese monks have recorded frequent and often bitter conflicts between Buddhist monks and Brahmins. Xuanzang reported a failed plot in which 500 Brahmins had hired a killer to assassinate emperor Harsha, because they were jealous and resentful of his ‘excessive’ patronising of Buddhism. Centuries earlier, the grammarian Patanjali had himself compared the animosity between the Brahmins and Shramanas to that between the snake and the mongoose.
Sometimes kings took sides in these battles too. In the 6th century, the Hun ruler Mihirakula, a Shaivite, destroyed stupas, monasteries, and killed monks in the northwest. According to Xuanzang, Shashanka of Bengal, a Brahminical king, ‘slandered the religion of the Buddha’ and raided and ‘cut down the Bodhi tree’, ‘burnt it with fire’ and destroyed the monasteries around it. There are many such stories. In short, Brahminical hostility was a major factor in the demise of Buddhism. Their conflicts appear in sculpture too. For instance, in the site museum at Nalanda, we see Buddhist Tantric deities trampling Brahminical gods, like Trailokya Vijaya trampling Shiva and Gauri, or Aparajita trampling Ganesh. They come from Buddhism’s waning centuries and seem like desperate attempts to signal their religious superiority to lay people.
Second, in the early centuries of Buddhism, its clergy had earned its living by relying on common people, exchanging religious services for donations of food, clothes, or money. But centuries of royal patronage had reduced their dependence on ordinary people. As their needs were taken care of by the royals, the monks reduced their contact with the lay public. They no longer needed the public to earn a living. They began retreating into walled, gated monasteries and grew self-absorbed in their academic and personal quests. As they abandoned the public, the public returned the favour. Lay Buddhists who didn’t care much for abstract theological differences, began shifting to rival religious orders with similar modes of worship. So the funding by the royals turned out to be a very mixed blessing indeed.
Third, between the 7th to 10th centuries, profound changes occurred in the Indian religious landscape. Like the rise of Brahminical orthodoxy, led by Adi Shankara, and the emergence of Bhakti, or mystical devotionalism, in south India. One could say that there was a big churn in the religious market, and more satisfying products were turning up. Buddhism was one of the losers, partly because it was a more sober and austere faith, and partly because Brahminical Hinduism had more cleverly appropriated folk beliefs and practices. It had embraced popular features of Buddhism too, such as monastic orders and stopping animal sacrifices; it had even declared the Buddha as the 9th Avatar of Vishnu. As a business major might say today, this reduced Buddhism’s USP [i.e., unique selling proposition].
Fourth, with declining followers for Buddhism, the kings of the period began shifting to an exclusively Brahminical ideology, and this set in a vicious spiral for Buddhism. Funding for its monasteries began drying up. Its last great royal patrons were the Palas of Bengal. They were followed by the Sena dynasty of Bengal in the 12th century, whose Brahminical kings actively persecuted Buddhist monks. Many monks fled south. On the eve of the Turko-Persian invasions around 1200, Buddhism had vanished from everywhere except isolated pockets in eastern and southern India and the western Himalayas.
And
fifth, with Indian Buddhism already on life-support by the late 12th century, the final blow was delivered by the Turks, who finished off its last few, barely-functioning monasteries. But even this was not as black and white, or as dramatic, as many think it is. The popular belief that Nalanda was destroyed by the invader Bakhtiar Khilji (in the 1190s), is not supported by historical evidence. Nalanda was still going in 1234–36, patronized by king Buddhasena of Bodh Gaya, when Dharmasvamin, a monk from Tibet, studied there. Rather than a dramatic final end, Nalanda continued its long phase of decay and depopulation for decades after Khilji’s death (1206).
Buddhism Vanishes From Public Memory
So the decline of Buddhism had many causes, although both British colonisers and Hindu nationalists, for their own convenient reasons, blamed it on Turko-Persian invasions, which was in fact a minor cause. As Buddhism dwindled over time, its sites were either abandoned, destroyed, or converted mostly into Brahminical sites, and a minority into Islamic sites. Even the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya was turned into a Shiva temple. Buddhist texts and artifacts were wiped out. Except in the western Himalayas, Buddhism practically vanished from India and its public memory. By the early colonial period, Indians knew nothing of Ashoka or his edicts or the Sanchi stupa. It’s hard to believe, but Indians even forgot that a man called the Buddha, the founder of a major world religion, had ever existed in their past!
It’s often said that ancient Indians were not interested in history, that their accounts of the past are inseparable from myth. Such accounts are indeed common but they’re not the whole story. Pali chronicles from Sri Lanka suggest that Indian Buddhists had a much stronger tradition of writing history than the Brahmins, so the loss of Buddhism was a major setback for Indian self-knowledge. And when Buddhism disappeared from India, its texts disappeared with it, leaving a deep Brahminical bias in the surviving records. It was only in the 19th century that Indians rediscovered Nalanda and their Buddhist heritage through archaeology, texts that survived in foreign lands, the accounts of these Chinese monks, and other sources.
But Buddhism wasn’t the only casualty of the new political-religious churning in the latter half of the first millennium. Other profound changes were also happening. In the next episode, I’ll take you to a very different setting in central India … the amazing temple town of Khajuraho, and a major historical site where Indians happily combined erotica with religion. See you next time!
TL;DR Indians/Brahmins did it to themselves. The whole Muslims destroyed it is an overstated convenient excuse. They chose to ditch it. So Indians trying to reclaim it for clout purposes when they chose to abandon it in the first place seems rather shameless.
