Hinduism and Buddhism in ancient India
Of all the religions that have developed on South Asian soil, Hinduism and Buddhism have been the most often compared and their interrelations the most often studied. The cultural plurality that assumes such interrelation is evidenced already in the earliest Sanskrit literature (1200 BCE onward), but it becomes especially prominent in early Buddhist and Jain literature as well as in the Upaniṣads and then with considerable force in the Sanskrit epics and much subsequent Sanskrit and vernacular literature. This pluralism is expressed continually in religious and ethnic terms, with perhaps its strongest representation being in the development of Hinduism and Buddhism and interrelations between the two. In the earliest period of this interaction, perhaps 400–250 BCE, evidence of relations between the Buddha and members of the Brahman class can be observed primarily in the Buddhist Pali canon (composed 300 BCE–100 CE) but not in the Upaniṣads (600 BCE–100 CE)– the final stratum of vedic literature and one of the precursor texts for what came to be called Hinduism. No certain dates exist here and the dating of the Buddha’s life is usually now given as the 5th century BCE, not the 6th century BCE as previously thought.
No doubt the authors of the large body of Buddhist literature perceived groups they defined as other than themselves in a particular light, and in the so-called early historic period (200 BCE–200 CE) a concern with developing a particular class identity seems to have been emerging that was important in gaining access to patronage deriving from different socioeconomic levels. While the Brahmans as a distinct social group (after 200 BCE) were attempting to mold a set of ideas and practices into a socioreligious system – one that scholars only called Hinduism in the 19th century – they implicitly recognized the presence of other groups who could not easily be assimilated into this new system that they were theorizing, and they reacted against these groups. Yet in the early historic period, new texts like the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa do not name these groups with any specificity, so it is never easy to tell toward whom the critiques made in the texts are directed.
In scholarly literature, there has been a tendency to focus on the relations between representatives of Hinduism and Buddhism as defined primarily by conflict. However, this dramatically simplifies the range of possible interrelations, and A. Malinar’s recommendation in this regard is a salutary one: "While competition and conflict cannot be denied, the situation may have been far more complex, not only allowing more harmonious interactions, but also varying over the subcontinent" (Malinar, 2007, 257).
Evidence of conflict is much easier to locate than that of cooperation and complementarity, yet given the length of time (approx. 400 BCE–1400 CE) during which Buddhism flourished in India, peaceful coexistence must have been the prominent defining feature of interrelations between Buddhists and Hindus, as it is today in most Asian countries where these two groups live together. Moreover, where conflict has occurred, it is more likely to have been among intellectuals whose views are often represented in literature, which barely reflects the religious interactions of the lower and less literate classes.
Neither religion developed in a broad cultural or religious vacuum, and much that is central in Hinduism involves the borrowing and adaptation of ideas and practices commonly found in other religions, principally Buddhism and Jainism, and the ubiquitous, if difficult to define, folk religion associated with worship of fertility goddesses and protective deities. This plurality of religion and culture in early historic India responded successfully to social, economic, and lifestyle demands pertinent to different socioeconomic levels, and out of these, Hinduism developed as a specific cultural complex strongly profiling religious and social dimensions. Hinduism as a religious and social system did not exist prior to the emergence of Buddhism and Jainism. Arguably, what can retrospectively be called Hinduism emerges when the three fundamental behavioral/textual practices associated with ritualism, asceticism, and devotion become incorporated into what A. Malinar has defined as “cosmological monotheism,” including the worship of village-protective deities and mother goddesses:
"[It] combines features of a polytheistic and monotheistic understanding of the world and its beyond. Whilst the cosmos is thought of in polytheistic terms as the realm of the many, its cause and transcendence are located only in the 'one.'…. This allows for acknowledging the existence of other gods as constituents of the created world and partial manifestations of the 'one.'" (Malinar, 2007, 238).
Buddhism, too, is not so easy to define except to say that on the monastic level, most monks exercise varying degrees of separation from wider society, perform the fortnightly prātimokṣa ritual involving the confession of faults in conduct, and accept the four noble truths – the assertion that there exists “dis-ease” (duḥkha), there is the arising of “dis-ease,” there is the cessation of “dis-ease,” and there is the path leading to the cessation of “dis-ease” – as foundational in their belief system. In more technical terms, they accept the dhamma, the Buddha’s teachings, and the vinaya, his precepts relating to conduct. In addition, a clear difference between the laity and the monks/nuns has always been a defining feature of Buddhism – in contrast with Hinduism, where such a distinction is present in the social contrasts between the renouncer and householder, especially when Hinduism becomes well developed (Malinar, 2011, 117-121), though not so much in the figure of the Brahman who does not leave society. Textual evidence, especially from the Dīghanikāya, suggests that the monks saw the Brahmans as their functional equals and as the group against whom they measured themselves, though this may have applied to the Jains as well.
At the lay level of Buddhism and at the non-Brahmanical level in the case of Hinduism, most Hindus and Buddhists have traditionally been very similar in behavior and belief and especially in terms of what they expect to receive from their ritual and devotional practices. But laypeople are still very much involved in their respective religions, and even the Brahmans – the main theorists of Hinduism – could be regarded as lay followers, except where functioning as professional priests. In the early historic period, the Brahmans were gradually developing a distinctive view of what became Hinduism and promoted this initially in the two epics and the Dharmaśāstra literature, in particular the Mānavadharmaśāstra (or Manusmṛti). Of these, the epics were the best communicative devices for the new, synthesized view of religion with its social concomitants, and it is likely that their effectiveness was enhanced by their recitation in vernacular languages as well as in Sanskrit, thus making them accessible to a wide population at a time when Sanskrit was no longer a spoken language. When the first Purāṇas were being composed and disseminated, probably in the 4th century CE and later, the devotional side of Hinduism had become dominant and was successfully tying together all of the other, disparate elements making up the religion, allowing them to function as one integrated element within a family of other such elements.
While it may appear quite simple to study the interaction between Hinduism and Buddhism, this assumes a clear demarcation between the two religions where such a distinction has rarely existed in practice. However, any kind of distinction is not just a fiction created by Western scholars that assumes that these are two distinctive religions with overlapping ideas, because both Hindu and Buddhist texts are aware of the existence of traditions other than, and antithetical to, themselves. These traditions did not have easily definable boundaries, even if, at an intellectual level, they could be regarded as being easily distinguishable in respect of certain central doctrines.
A well-known example of a text – one taken from the Mahābhārata and cited below – that may well be criticizing Buddhist monks uses several nouns that designate types of holy men (bhikṣu[ka], muṇḍa, abuddhi, sādhu ) and even uses verbs such as pari + vraj-, which could imply the activity of a Buddhist monk:
"The Vedas and food are the never-varying fundamental substance of the strictly righteous people in this world. If the giver shall not give, how could there be any who seek absolute freedom? In this world, householders come from food, and mendicants (bhikṣavas) come from them. Life arises from food, so the giver of food would be the giver of life. Those who have withdrawn from householders have come right back to householders. And those self-controlled ones sit bad-mouthing their source and their foundation."
"One cannot say that a man is a monk (bhikṣukam) just from his having renounced, nor from his having a shaved head, nor from his begging. Rather, when an upright man relinquishes wealth, understand that that happy man is a monk (bhikṣukam). O lord of the earth, that man is Absolutely Free, who, though he is unattached, goes about like someone who is attached; he has no attachments, he has untied all the bonds, he is the same toward enemies and friends. The bald ones (muṇḍāḥ) in their ochre robes are bound by many kinds of fetters. They travel about (parivrajanti) in order to receive gifts, piling up idle enjoyments. Lacking understanding (abuddhayaḥ), they abandon the three Vedas and their livelihoods, and then they abandon their children and take up the triple staff for holding the water pot and the robe. Realize that the ochre robe on one who is not free from passion serves that person’s interests; it serves as a livelihood for those bald ones (muṇḍānām) who merely display the flag of law, in my opinion."
"Great king, having conquered your senses, conquer heavenly worlds by supporting holy men (sādhūn), whether they wear their hair piled on their heads or are bald, whether they are clad in ochre robes, antelope skins, or rags, or are naked" (MBh. 12.18. 27–35; trans. [slightly modified] Fitzgerald, 2004, 203).
Here there is a clear sense of different religious goals, practices, and certainly beliefs and an accompanying skepticism of some, but not others, in an address given to Yudhiṣṭhira – the eldest of the five Pāṇḍava brothers – who wanted to become an ascetic. Appreciating the level of difference given in this representative text requires questioning any idea of a monolithic view of Hinduism or Buddhism and suggests that as religious systems, they were successful because of their ability to bring together beliefs and practices divergent from what is found in the theological/philosophical streams operative within these religions. Above all they have demonstrated a capacity to attach a sophisticated superstructure of ideas to a wide range of practices directly associated with more pragmatic religious and social goals.
In the study of Buddhism, the figure of the Buddha looms very large, sometimes to the neglect of the majority of less well-known monks and nuns, whose careers are only treated in the puranic-type Avadāna literature produced in the early centuries of the Common Era and containing long narratives describing the lives of prominent monks. As a reactive response, the Buddha’s teachings and the renunciatory life ideal of the monks are as much a personal demonstration against the overtly social values of the Brahmans and the materialistic goals associated with this as they are a positive adaptation to the new urbanism that had probably been consolidating when the Buddha was first developing his doctrines. Overwhelmingly, however, Buddhism is seen as a reaction to certain aspects of the teachings of Brahmans seen as a group advancing common interests; these teachings are associated substantially with the performance of the sacrifice and the belief in a permanent self, irrespective of what this belief and associated practice develop into in later centuries. This has always brought with it the danger of focusing excessively on the interaction between elite representatives of each religion, omitting the equally important role of the much larger number of lay followers, without which neither religion would have survived.
R. Gombrich (2006, ch. 2) and J. Jurewicz (2000) argue that certain Buddhist doctrines were developed as a direct response to teachings presented in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad. R. Gombrich focuses on karman , some fundamental innovative doctrines in late vedic tradition, and ontological beliefs pertaining to the belief in a permanent self and the Buddha’s reinterpretation of this. It is one measure of the Buddha’s comprehensive knowledge of upanishadic thought that he was able to reinterpret technical terms in the Upaniṣads in a metaphorical sense, whereby he proposes a distinctive ethical interpretative principle: "we see the Buddha reacting to Upaniṣadic teachings by shifting attention away from what the world is, ontology, to how we should behave: morally, and in particular kindly" (Gombrich, 2006, 40).
J. Jurewicz argues persuasively that the pratītyasamutpāda – the fundamental theory of causality pertaining to the development of a karmically based individuality and defined in the second noble truth – is based on a reworking of a cosmogonic myth found initially in the Nāsadīyasūkta (ṚV. 10.129) and then reworked in some of the early Upaniṣads, including the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad. She points to the polemical tone in this doctrine, arguing that the Buddha "formulated the pratītyasamutpāda as a polemic against Vedic thought. Through the identification of the creative process with the process that leads only to suffering, he rejected the Brāhmaṇic way of thinking in a truly spectacular way" (Jurewicz, 2000, 78).
It is to be expected that such reworkings of fundamental themes should have occurred as the Buddha must have been in contact with teachers who knew the Upaniṣads, after he renounced the social world at the age of 29. But the publications of R. Gombrich and J. Jurewicz provide evidence that he actually knew the contents of specific Upaniṣads, and that his objections should be seen as objections not to a specific religion but to a particular understanding of how the world works.
Recognition of the Buddha’s knowledge of the Upaniṣads has sometimes been used to suggest that Buddhism arose as an offshoot of and a reaction against Hinduism. This assumes that Hinduism existed as an identifiable entity in the 5th century BCE and even that Buddhism as an institution existed, which is highly unlikely, as even after the Buddha’s death, it probably only consisted of sets of wanderers subsequently developing into a formal sangha, the name for the institutionalized order of monks. Against this, J. Bronkhorst (2007) has asserted that Buddhism developed substantially independently of any major Brahmanical influence and that it represents one of the most prominent examples of a substantially independent Magadhan culture that after the 5th century BCE spread out from the northeast into other parts of India. This was a culture in which asceticism and meditation were central aspects of the religious life of a renunciatory Śramaṇa tradition, a tradition radically different from the sacrificial tradition associated with the northwest and central regions of India. Emphasis was placed on a life of quietism and performance of ascetic exercises to eradicate the effect of past karman and to prevent the arising of new karman. Rationalistic forms of medical diagnosis were part of this cultural perspective, as was rejection of the efficacy of the sacrifice and the subordination of metaphysical inquiry to empirical observation. But some of these features are also found in conjunction with the thinkers who composed the Upaniṣads – people who identified themselves within the vedic tradition and saw continuity with earlier doctrines as central to that tradition. Considerable skepticism has been expressed about J. Bronkhorst’s reconstruction, with K. Klaus (2009) arguing strongly that many Brahmans were already living in Magadha during the Buddha’s time, an opinion supported by Buddhist literature itself, and that Buddhist’s accepted certain aspects of the magico-ritualist worldview.
Like a number of other scholars from as early as the late 19th century (Fitzgerald, 2004, 114–123), J. Bronkhorst (2011, 72) finds the reign of Aśoka Maurya (269–232 BCE) functioning as a huge stimulant causing Brahmanism to reinvent and reposition itself. In part this was because of Aśoka’s assumed strong support of Buddhism and the patronage he gave to the sangha. He argues that the Brahmans were primarily a social group, not just a religious one, as the sangha might be seen. From the 2nd century BCE onward, the Brahmans were tightening up their image as a distinctive social class, whose status was not dependent just on ownership of property; this tightening up may have been partially a result of the conspicuousness of the sangha as a distinctive social institution, whose success was measured by the rapid expansion of the order after 200 BCE.
J. Bronkhorst has argued that Brahmanism eventually outflanked Buddhism because it offered a distinctive sociopolitical program, expressed especially in the Arthaśāstra and the Mahābhārata, indicating an involvement in practical affairs rather than a concern “with the higher realities of spiritual life, downgrading ordinary reality” (Bronkhorst, 2011, 173). This was difficult to match by the Buddhist monks, whose bearing was directed away from the social and political world in favor of a more contemplative lifestyle. Yet those of a strongly spiritual bent can offer advice to political elites precisely because they are looking at society from outside, and, further, his argument overlooks the massive expansion of the Buddhist order across India during the early historic period and its support at various levels of society even during the following several centuries. Given the sangha’s heavy involvement in many local economies, it is likely that it may have been perceived by people living near monastic institutions as being a serious agent in the workings of local economies and trade (Shaw, 2007, ch. 14, 259–261).
The material bases of Hinduism and Buddhism are now being studied on the basis of a wider range of sources rather than only literary texts. An important new book by J. Shaw (2007) may necessitate a revision of received opinions of the religious and economic development in early historic India and especially of religious change. In studying Buddhist monumental architecture – especially the locations of stūpas, large brick structures containing the relic of a Buddha or a text, and vihāras, monastic structures built for housing groups of monks and nuns – within their wider spatial environment around Sanchi and the occurrence of Hindu images and ritual structures, J. Shaw has shown that the local Buddhist sangha was tied so closely to the short- and long-term workings of local economies, especially in relation to water storage, that the sangha was perceived as having not only a religious function but also a crucial economic one. This relates to the question of the distinction between royal and other patronage and modes of acquiring more secure forms of income than that simply coming from patronage, and it lies at the crux of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism after 200 BCE. For both Hinduism and Buddhism to have been successful in surviving through the centuries, they had to appeal to the needs of both the elite and the ordinary people in intellectual and practical terms, and it was necessary for Hinduism to provide a unifying role in the culture where it has survived for so long.
Recent work by M. Willis (2009) has expanded on the work of J. Shaw by analyzing the ritual activities of late Gupta kings in Vidisha and the extent to which Buddhist monks and Hindu court chaplains functioned as advisers in the imperial courts. The importance of such roles could not be underestimated because of the association of political power and religious influence marketed at a broad social level and the consolidation of whatever patronage systems had been in existence for some time before the ruling dynasty took control. But the signs of such influence have always been muted and often difficult to read through the texts. Earlier work by R. Davidson (2002, ch. 3) and R. Inden (2000) – historians working on the period between 200 CE and 1200 CE – has anticipated J. Shaw in analyzing Hindu–Buddhist interactions, specifically in the realm of many dynasties across India. R. Inden showed how Brahmans belonging to the Pāñcarātra school used the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa to assert the preeminence of Pāñcarātra ritual in public and private spheres and how this text positions itself in relation to the Buddhists in northwest India, albeit in a very muted way.
In the last ten years, scholars have extended the realm of Hindu–Buddhist interrelations by looking at the worship of deities and sacred figures in both religions, arguing that these can easily slide off into common ground, such that in the medieval period, any differences between Hindu and Buddhist deities were perceived by lay worshippers as being virtually nonexistent. Both R. DeCaroli (2004, 122) and D. Seyfort-Ruegg (2008) have demonstrated how close the connection was between the sangha and the populace, owing to the monks’ ability to perform rituals to appease and render harmless the various yakṣas and nāgas whose power was believed to be so important in guaranteeing rain and hence the fertility of the soil. It was a question of maintaining a peaceful coexistence with these deities, and it explains why images of these spirit deities are found so often in Buddhist art. It also reveals another avenue of connection between the monks and the laity.
Finally, a recent publication by N. McGovern (2011) argues that a direct influence of Buddhism on the development of Hinduism existed, asserting that an initial Brahmanical synthesis was developed around the god Brahmā – a synthesis criticized in the Pali canon and largely abandoned in the Mahābhārata and subsequent Hindu literature. It was replaced by cults developed around Viṣṇu and Śiva as a Hindu reaction – a second synthesis – to the criticism undertaken by the Buddhists and other ascetic groups. This is a striking and original argument, though it tends to simplify a little the complexity of religious belief and practice on the ground, where veneration of fertility deities and mother goddesses was always fundamentally important and definitely tied up with the development of cults centered on Viṣṇu and Śiva.
Of the literary evidence, the early Pali texts show an intense interest in the beliefs of other groups outside of themselves, reporting on Jains, Ājīvikas, and especially the Brahmans as a social group, the latter defined by a penchant for knowledge and ritual performance. There are, for example, many suttas in the second and third volume of the Majjhimanikāya and the first volume of the Dīghanikāya dealing with Brahmans and their beliefs and behaviors and many passages where the god Brahmā is shown in a deferential position in relation to the Buddha (McGovern, 2011). In these suttas, the Brahmans are portrayed as being arrogant because of their self-proclaimed status defined by knowledge of the Vedas and associated ritual and material wealth and by the claim to an identifiable lineage reaching back several generations. While it would be incorrect to speak of a depiction of Hinduism in its mature form in the early Buddhist texts, emphasis is placed on one important aspect of it, the ritual tradition – expressed as performance of the small-scale agnihotra ritual – based on vedic knowledge, which is transformed in an altered form into one of the three strands of classical Hinduism: ritual activity, asceticism, and devotion. Suttas such as the Samaññaphalasutta and the early Suttanipāta provide evidence that the Buddha/Buddhists took other lifestyles and occupations very seriously and sometimes critiqued them. This level of seriousness continues in later literature as well, especially in the Jātakas and the two Kāvyas of Aśvaghoṣa, in all of which reference is pointedly made to the two Hindu epics.
Turning to Hindu literature, the same concern with other groups is present, but it is heavily concealed, and the identity of these groups is often veiled by the use of code words such as nāstika, a word whose meaning can differently include liars, thieves, the lazy, those who do not believe in the Vedas or in the performance of rituals, and those who exhibit ignorance of dharma . Buddhists are conspicuous by their absence in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa – the earliest texts of Hinduism – especially because there is so much other evidence of their presence. Assuming a 400-year period of composition (200 BCE–200 CE) for both, the religious landscape in ancient India must have become more complex, with differences between Hindu and non-Hindu becoming more precisely profiled, by the end of the period. Both of these texts, especially the Mahābhārata, reflect this complexity, and the kind of class identity formation with which it can be seen to be associated overwhelms a concern with dealing with the specifics of the beliefs of non-Hindu groups. Both of the texts were composed when the Buddhist sangha was reaching the height of its expansion in South Asia.
Because of the capacity of certain groups to market their own interests better than other groups did – in part because of the former’s possession of literacy – it is possible to overemphasize the extent of interaction or connection between the different religions. Those who have produced the textual sources appear to have a far greater impact on later scholarly interpretations of the meeting between the two religions. Yet the living religion resides in its practitioners as much as it does in the texts. Ethnographic studies have thrown much light on the living religion over the past hundred years, though this has applied mainly to the situation in Buddhist countries, and it is especially pertinent in countries such as Nepal (von Rospatt, 2004, 199–234) and Sri Lanka (Gombrich & Obeyesekare, 1998), where both religions exist side by side. A. von Rospatt, for example, has shown how an ordination ceremony for Buddhist boys in Kathmandu, of a type that was originally a Buddhist ordination ritual, subsequently came to parallel the Hindu upanayana/vratabandha ritual, the principal ritual of initiation for males into adulthood. It is not possible to extrapolate exactly from the contemporary situation in both countries back to the past, yet studies of lay involvement in Buddhist rituals and the ethnographic accounts of worship of Buddhist/Hindu deities in Sri Lanka can surely provide some guidance on similar activity in the four hundred years (200 BCE–200 CE) during which Buddhism expanded so rapidly in South Asia and interacted most forcefully with the emerging Hinduism. Like epigraphic evidence, ethnographic studies highlight the importance of non-elite lay followers in providing financial and material patronage to the sangha and individual monks as well as engaging in Buddhist-sanctioned life-cycle rituals.
Finally, archaeological evidence is becoming increasingly important in the study of Hindu–Buddhist interrelations. Excavation work in the 19th century focused mainly on monumental architecture and the classification of sites, especially the excavation and study of stūpas. It pointed to the importance of the sangha in particular areas such as Taxila, Sanchi, Bharhut, and Amaravati, without filling in the gaps between these celebrated sites and tending to ignore their relationship with the immediate surrounding landscape, on the one hand, and the wider region, on the other. Looking at these sites in isolation does not tell us how the people who occupied them functioned in relation to laypeople in the immediate surroundings (given that the sites can be accurately dated), nor does it tell us of the economic functions they performed that enabled them to survive through the centuries.
What characterizes the Pali texts’ treatment of Brahmanical doctrines and practices is their mild polemical flavor. Most of the polemics are put on the lips of the Buddha, in large measure to build up his image as a calm, serene figure who is at home at rebutting and reinterpreting central Brahmanical doctrines such as the ātman theory and the idea of gift giving to monks as a substitute for the sacrifice and because of the authority it confers on his rebuttals. Certainly the Buddha knew the Brahmans’ principal doctrines, but his is a critique of how they used these doctrines and their ritualist prerogatives to advance their own class interests. Thus it is a mixture of questioning class behavior as well as of conduct, all the passages collectively implying that the Buddha held a certain apprehensiveness about the Brahmans’ status and prominence in communicating a specific view of culture. It cannot, however, be said at this stage that they were opponents when it comes to acquiring resources or converts, yet the early texts certainly portray them as confident and strongly aspirational.
Brahmans who have knowledge of the Vedas are depicted in the guise of wealthy landlords who seem to have had some economic power. What is given is a
"multi-faceted image of the brahmin as a figure who was a man of learning as well as a caster of spells and a reader of horoscopes, as the Brahmajålasutta, the first sutta in the Dīgha Nikāya, tells us in such great detail. Some brahmins engage in trade and in many cases become rich, while others follow despised callings like hunting. Such secular brahmins, though they might (as nowadays) be technically qualified by their brahmin birth to officiate at rituals, had frequently lost touch with the sacred techniques and knowledge pertaining to their lineage" (Bailey & Mabbett, 2003, 115).
This was also a period of considerable socioeconomic change with state formation and rising urbanism in much of north and central South Asia; these developments began in the previous period, with corresponding effects on the appearance of the built landscape, though it is impossible to learn how people responded to them at the time they were experiencing them. Given the likely expansion of the sangha during this period, patterns of elite patronage were being developed of a kind that would aid the expansion of the sangha in the next period and provoke a more determined call by the Brahmans to have their ritual activities underwritten by kings. Financial support for the sangha was coming from trading guilds in urban areas, guilds that were responding positively to the collective organization represented by the sangha, which had itself organizationally adapted to the changing times. This was in contrast to the Brahmans, who had not developed any unitary institution and who still clung to a village environment rather than placing themselves within a framework of urbanism. Buddhist monks may have lived outside of towns and villages, but they did enter them for the purposes of fundraising and ritualized begging as well as engaging in teaching and healing activities.
The reign of King Aśoka, the third of the Maurya rulers, has been regarded as pivotal in the spread of the Buddhist order and – paradoxically – through its success, as a stimulant to the development and expansion of Hinduism, but the reigns of his two predecessors must also have been a significant causal factor, even if just by virtue of the length of their reigns. He laid the conditions for the geographical expansion of the sangha, because he freed up travel routes and provided royal patronage to the Buddhist order. It was a period of consolidation for the sangha, one in which there was a rationalization of modes of patronage and of raising money and acquiring land. Widespread construction of stūpas and early forms of monastic accommodation took place during his reign, with much of this occurring in the Deccan (Morrison, 1995), Madhya Pradesh (Shaw, 2007), and Andhra Pradesh.
Evidence of lay support for Buddhist monumental construction is provided in many short inscriptions from Sanchi and Bharhut dating from the 1st century BCE. Buddhist art especially flourished during the first four hundred years of the early historic period from 200 BCE onwards. In contrast, it is only in about the 1st century BCE and thereafter that Hindu art began to develop at various locations, partially as a consequence of the development of devotional forms of religion in which worship ( pūjā ) of the deity was the central performative aspect of religious practice, and the act of gazing ( darśana ) on the deity was a fundamental part of this practice. There had to be easily accessible opportunities for gazing on the deity in a religious context. Similarly, Buddhists, and this included Buddhist monks, performed acts of pūjā, as many inscriptions – including the following one from Mathura – indicate, “(This is) the gift of the Monk Buddhapāla (which is made) as an act of pūjā for his parents and all beings” (Schopen, 1985, 35).
Royal patronage for Buddhism, and increasingly for Hinduism, was as significant a source of funding as lay and small business in financing the construction of monumental structures, and it continued well after 200 CE, with the inscriptions of the Satavahanas in the Deccan showing them as prominent royal patrons of the sangha and also financial supporters of large Brahmanical sacrifices (Ray, 1986, 36). Leaving aside the fact that certain Satavahana queens (Ray, 1986, 181) were active lay Buddhists, it is not always clear why this patronage was so widespread; H.P. Ray thinks that the granting of land for monasteries may have established a conflict-free zone for the king. No texts exist informing us whether Buddhist monks performed advisory roles in royal courts, although this may have been acceptable (though problematic) in practice, as the Buddha himself provided a precedent, when he was approached by kings and political elites for guidance. Brahmans often inhabited royal courts, whether as the king’s ritual specialist (purohita), an instructor (ācārya), a tantric master giving magical advice about the defeat of enemies, or simply an ascetic who was on hand to give more general advice (Willis, 2009, ch. 3).
The elites of both religions functioned in the intellectually orientated realm and in the lay realm, which was more centered on ritual activity, and any attempt to dilute one level from the other certainly offers a serious simplification of a rich and highly complex socioreligious system. Despite the emphasis in early Buddhist literature on the Buddha’s confrontation with Brahmans, epigraphical sources from Sanchi (and Bharhut) indicate clearly the extent to which people from all classes interacted with the sangha as donors to it. In addition, the placement of monasteries and stūpas in the vicinity of villages and on trade routes must have brought the monks constantly into the presence of laypeople from all classes of society. It is the conspicuousness of the monk, dressed in saffron robes, that is important here, complementing the deliberate placement of Buddhist material structures to achieve maximum visibility. In equal measure, they point to the importance of a cult of the “monastic dead,” which operates as a significantly different mode of disposal of the dead from what is found in Hinduism where cremation and scattering of the ashes is the preferred mode (except for saṃnyāsins).
What becomes apparent from the archaeological evidence across much of central India is that by the middle point of this period, the members of the sangha had in many cases localized themselves very successfully in microeconomies. J. Shaw suggests that this might have happened in the following way:
"Additional evidence…for the saṅgha’s monopolisation of the rain-making business supports the impression of a religious institution deeply embedded in the rural infrastructure. That the nāgas which provided the ritual channel for the saṅgha’s rain-making activities were placed next to the reservoirs – the ultimate symbol of the effects of timely rainfall on the one hand and of skilful water-storage techniques on the other – would have helped further to build up trust between the saṅgha and local farming communities" (Shaw, 2007, 192).
Such a concern with fertility is expressed in the common appearance of yakṣa images at Buddhist sites, leading G. Samuel to suggest, when dealing with Buddhist iconography, the following: "All this iconographic material points to a religion of fertility and auspiciousness that gives full recognition to the female aspect of the procreative process and which finds its full expression in the early Buddhist sites that I have just mentioned" (Samuel, 2008, 109).
In sum, during this third period, between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE, the sangha had maintained a high level of text production – the scholastic Abhidhamma literature dealing with the classification of psychological states, the Jātakas, and Buddhist Sanskrit literature – but it was also involved with the nonreligious aspects of life, even if just as an employer of labor and supervisor of slaves.
It is also the crucial period for the development of Hinduism, which emerged as an extremely rich and inclusive socioreligious system partially in response to the material and institutional success of Buddhism and because of the need to tie together a diverse set of religious practices under Brahmanical hegemony and an increasingly hierarchical social system. Following T. Lubin’s (2005) analysis of the Brahmans’ lack of a specific organizational institution, along the lines of the Buddhist sangha, and the manner in which they overcame what might have been a potential disadvantage, G. Samuel helps explain why the Brahmans might have eventually become more successful than the Buddhists:
"[T]he Brahmins remained relatively decentralised, with a firm base at the village level. They never developed the degree of centralisation in large monasteries in or near cities that was characteristic of the Buddhist and Jaina pattern, and which was eventually to lead to the vulnerability of those traditions to loss of state support. Brahmins became court ritualists, often associated with spectacular and wealthy temples, and they became royal administrators and bureaucrats, but they also built up a solid base of family land-holdings within South Asian villages that enabled them to survive the loss of power and support at the centre during the long periods of Muslim and British domination" (Samuel, 2008, 165).
At the same time, the rapid expansion of the sangha in the early historic period could not have escaped the notice of the Brahmans who were pressing forward the Brahman view of society, based on the idealized division of varṇāśrama. A response to Buddhism’s conspicuous success was seemingly matched by the delineation of a specific Brahman social order, explicitly laid out in the various Dharmasūtras (3rd cent. BCE onward), which were presented as a detailed set of prescribed lifestyle and life-cycle rules applicable mainly to the upper levels of society. The extent of direct causality between this success and the codification of a Brahmanical view of the world is impossible to verify on the basis of the available debate, and it remains a hypothesis. Codification refers to the formulation of specific lifestyle prescriptions effecting a transformation of vedic ritual practices, often expensive to run and only effectively performed by royalty after 200 BCE, into household ritual and integrating this with mild ascetic practices and an imperative to the devotional worship of individual deities elevated to a universal practice. This was a codification incorporating a series of very rich practices and beliefs deriving from various regions of India into a framework where the Brahmans would have a steering influence on its transmission throughout the country and, through the use of Sanskrit, would inculcate it at all higher levels of society. All of the existing practices associated with multifarious worship of fertility deities; the extravagant cults surrounding holy men, vedic gods, and pastoral deities; and the performance of vedic rituals and the engagement with devotional festivals could now be brought under one umbrella.
The Brahmans had used the Dharmasūtras to lay down a formal set of rules governing everyday life and the stages of life over the lifetime of an adult male. In this, the social life of the male was fully encompassed, as was the demeanor of the Brahman as presenting a moderate ascetic pose even when involved in daily affairs. Purity and impurity come to play a central role in distinguishing the Brahmans from the polluting functions of daily life, making them not unlike the monks living in a monastic environment partially removed from society. G. Samuel summarizes this:
"purity and spirituality become part of a hierarchical construction of society in which the purity of the Brahmin was counterposed to the impurity and this-worldly orientation of lower orders of society. At the same time, everyday life was systematically structured through a series of sacramental rituals, the saṃskāra, performed by Brahmin priests" (Samuel, 2008, 188).
But it was not enough just to codify these lifestyle prescriptions in highly elliptical texts that were increasingly unread because they were composed in Sanskrit and needed prose commentaries to render them comprehensible. In order for these ideas to be communicated beyond the upper-class, Sanskrit-literate person, other modes of communication were needed. Available were the two Sanskrit epics, both of them dominated by extended narrative plots involving individual quests, battles, gender complexities, and constant interaction between laypeople and holy figures. In the Mahābhārata, in particular, there were embedded interpretative passages composed in homiletic style, some of which also occur in the Mānavadharmaśāstra, and which are concentrated in book 12 of the Mahābhārata, where they define normative relations between Brahmans and kings, plus a lot of philosophical material that attempted to cover the whole gamut of existing metaphysical positions, such as Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Some of this material has direct literal correspondences (Bailey, 2011) in Pali literature, and there are certainly other intertextual references to Buddhist doctrines and texts.
In the various schools of Buddhism, the Brahmans had to confront a successful institution that was both highly centralized and decentralized; on the one hand, it was centralized since wandering monks would stay at distant monasteries and maintain a flow of information, based on a fount of commonly shared knowledge – political as well as religious and social; on the other hand, it was decentralized because the monasteries were very much involved with local communities. The monks also had a common religious foundation in the Buddha’s teachings – which permitted some variance at the side – and a rigorous system of conduct, the details of which would not have been known by laypeople, except to the extent that it was known that there did exist a set of rules requiring more disciplined conduct from monks and thereby differentiating them from laypeople, whose conduct was determined by less stringent requirements. Against this, the Brahmans had to bring together a strong set of heterogeneous practices and beliefs under a framework that would never have a formal institutional centrality along the lines of the sangha. The problem is, as K. Chakrabarti explains, this:
"Brahmanism is a polytheistic religion with no hierarchically regulated monastic organization, nor a single revealed text of inviolable authenticity. Therefore it was all the more necessary to try and construct for itself an unambiguous self-identity which would mark it out from other religious communities. Out of this necessity were born the three fundamental points of reference: the infallibility of the Vedas, the social and ritual superiority of the brāhmaṇas, and preservation of the varṇāśramadharma" (Chakrabarti, 2001, 147).
While these themes operated as a kind of superstructure, the doctrines associated with them pervaded all Hindu literature from the Mahābhārata onward.
Hinduism could not have developed without its incorporation of bhakti in a systemic sense as both practice and doctrine. Whether its formalized formulation was a response to cults of devotion that had developed around the Buddha/bodhisattvas and prominent monks cannot be confirmed and remains a matter of speculation. Viṣṇu appears as the center of a devotional Bhāgavata cult by around 150 BCE; devotional doctrines around Kṛṣṇa are certainly systematized in the Bhagavadgītā and around Nārāyaṇa elsewhere in the Mahābhārata by the beginning of the Common Era (Malinar, 2007) and around Śiva in the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad by the 1st or 2nd century CE (Oberlies, 1988). It is more than likely that the Brahmans could not ignore the many localized devotional cults, especially since some were extending their horizon by connecting themselves with deities like Viṣṇu and Śiva. Where the new bhakti cults differed sharply from other forms of veneration of fertility deities and mother goddesses was that it was believed that the deity at the center of the cult could confer on the devotee both good merit and an end to rebirth – something adopted from the various ascetic groups, who were all united in their desire to achieve an end to rebirth. Veneration of fertility deities related to pragmatic concerns, whereas that of bhakti deities encompassed both pragmatic and transcendental goals (see Malinar, 2007, 237f.).
In writing mainly of the Harivaṃśa and the Bhagavadgītā, but with clear relevance to the Mahābhārata more generally, A. Couture suggests that the kind of monotheism associated with devotional texts arises as a response to the fragmentation of culture:
"These texts are clearly not prone to contestation or revolution, but try, it seems to me, to adjust themselves with the greatest possible flexibility to a diversifying social context. The model which seems to have been put in place towards the fourth or third century before our era gives to a fragmenting population the consciousness of being able to address itself to the same god. This new universalism could have been a typically Hindu response to an India which has been urbanised and which finds itself more and more difficult, in truth impossible, to respect the ritual prescriptions that it judges, in part at least, to have lapsed" (Couture, 2005, 175).
Similar are A. Malinar's views on the emergence of what she has called “cosmological monotheism” the paradigmatic model of Hindu theologies which allows the accommodation not only of different gods and goddess, but also different methods of gaining “liberation” within the hierarchy of a cosmos created by a “highest,” ultimately transcendent god (such as Kṛṣṇa or Śiva). It is a paradigm
"that could serve to reject any one-sided emphasis on ascetic renunciation, while at the same time accommodating it together with Vedic polytheism, Upaniṣadic thoughts on the cosmic 'one' and the values of social-ritual life. It is arguable these developments mirror, albeit contrastively, the 'monotheistic/polytheistic' tendencies in the development of the Bodhisattva doctrine, which dates to the same time as the later portions of the Mahābhārata" (Malinar, 2007, 237-241).
The Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa were probably both quickly reworked in truncated forms in vernacular languages, guaranteeing a much wider audience than anticipated by those who had initially composed and disseminated them. In the Buddhist Jātaka tales (1st cent. CE), both epics are alluded to, and some aspects of the plot of the Mahābhārata are treated in a condemnatory manner. Given that the Jātaka tales were popular tales then and remain so today, their partially critical reception of the Mahābhārata may be considered a sign of the popularity of that text. What this meant on the ground and especially for those classes beyond the Brahmans can only be guessed at in the absence of other evidence.
Up until 200–250 CE, Buddhism interacted with Hinduism as its chief competitor, at least for material resources and the dissemination of ideas, even if most people that could have been included under the broad umbrella of Hinduism would not have seen this in competitive terms. By about 250 CE, both religions had substantially consolidated. To what extent Buddhism engaged in conversional activity – a very prominent theme in early Buddhist literature – is simply impossible to say. Hindus normally do not engage in such activity. It is likely that most laypeople gave alms to wandering bhikkhus, attended Buddhist festivals, worshipped Hindu gods, and venerated Hindu ascetics, especially those regarded as charismatic. And in that kind of environment, conversion meant very little, unless a lay Hindu, especially a Brahman, became a monk and adopted the partially renunciatory lifestyle associated with that. Similarly, it cannot be ascertained how much Buddhist and Brahman intellectuals engaged in each other’s work, though in the writings of Śaṅkara (788–820 CE), among others, there is certainly a sense that Hindu philosophers were criticizing developments in Buddhist philosophy, and, as R. Davidson (2002, 102–105) has shown, Buddhist philosophers were increasingly adopting the epistemological positions of Hindu philosophical schools in attempting to validate the veracity of the Buddha’s word.
Continuities between the third and fourth period are legion, though the further the fourth period proceeded, the less influence the sangha seems to have exercised. The task of the Brahmans to determine the framework of society had been substantially successful, the groundwork having already been completed in the third period, and their capacity to sustain this guiding role in the absence of material wealth to back up their power demonstrated the extent to which they had obtained the support of the wealthy at a microlevel. And because most Brahmans were directly involved in everyday socioeconomic life, they had probably become much closer to the general population than were the Buddhist monks, who tended to work through intermediaries and isolated themselves in monasteries. From the perspective of patronage, certain dynasties (Satavahanas, Palas, and some Kashmiri dynasties) still patronized Buddhist monasteries and continued to provide money for the upkeep of cave sites such as Ajanta and monastic universities like Nalanda.
An important new religious development during this period was the rise and popularization of Tantra. Both Buddhist and Hindu forms of Tantrism had developed by the 4th century CE, often taught in difficult texts, composed in Sanskrit, and utilizing a complex liturgical procedure. In terms of doctrine and practice, Tantrism was not markedly different in either religion. Because of the richness of Tantrism both textually and ritually, it is extremely difficult to define it precisely, but in G. Samuel’s words:
"We have a body of ritual practices and traditions in both Buddhist and Śaiva sources, that present themselves as sophisticated and elevated means for the attainment of exalted spiritual goals, yet contain reference to practices that seem deliberately transgressive and bizarre: night-time orgies in charnel grounds, involving the eating of human flesh, the use of ornaments, bowls and musical instruments made from human bones, sexual relations while seated on corpses and the like" (Samuel, 2008, 232–233).
In both Buddhist and Hindu Tantra, rituals were developed involving rigorous meditation and aimed at the envisioning of deities in order to obtain liberating insight. How much these went beyond narrow circles of devotees cannot easily be ascertained, though it is likely that some monasteries in northeastern India were renowned centers of tantric practice by the 8th–9th centuries CE.
R. Davidson (2002, 105–106) has argued that after the 7th century CE, the Indian political landscape was no longer characterized by large dynastic lineages giving generously to the sangha but had dissolved into feudatories, weakening the larger urban centers and the guilds that they had supported for so long. In this kind of environment, the surviving monasteries had to align themselves with the local feudal power and functioned like feudal centers themselves, as did Hindu monasteries with increasing success (Malinar, 2011). They provided education in the local area – as they had always done – and functioned like feudal lords centered around and owing allegiance to a central monastery. The internalizing of the feudalistic values on the part of the abbots and senior monks was made all the more serious because of the collapse in lay support, which had in the previous period been so crucial in the maintenance of monastic activities and the sangha’s building program.
R. Davidson further points out that:
"Buddhist institutions could not effectively compete for patronage from militaristic princes, who increasingly found that they were best represented by Śaiva values and rhetoric. Śaiva systems made allowance for forms of behaviour that Buddhist syntheses could not support, since even the most syncretic Buddhist systems were not as open to negotiation about issues of violence, power and self-aggrandizement as were the medieval Śaiva representatives" (Davidson, 2002, 86).
To properly adjust to the new political dispensation would have required a compromise of Buddhist ethical values that their rules of conduct (vinaya) translated into specific forms of conduct consistent with the Buddha’s teachings. For the Brahmans and the great majority of lower-class Hindus, this would not have been a problem, because their survival did not depend on the preservation of a particular monastic institution such as the sangha, even if the local ruler was supposed to oversee the maintenance of class boundaries. Moreover the continuing growth of Hindu monastic organizations seems in part to have been a consequence of their capacity to deal effectively with royal and other political elites (Malinar, 2011, 119).
A final indication of the decline of Buddhism in a famous site like Sanchi is reflected in the discovery (Shaw, 2007, 176) over the last ten years of 32 new Buddhist sculptures dating from between the late 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE and 10 dating from between the 2nd and 12th centuries CE. In contrast, no Brahmanical sculptures have been found from the period between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE, and 1,197 have been found dating from between the 2nd and the 12th centuries CE. These are very telling statistics that need to be confirmed by detailed listings from other sites.
It can be assumed that monks would have interacted with people from all classes, irrespective of their socioreligious background. In a monastic setting, especially where it was associated with a well-patronized stūpa, from a very early period interaction would have occurred with all classes and would have been both formal and informal. For most people, contact would have been in the manner of acceptance rather than contestation. The question then concerns the extent to which meetings with monks became an everyday event that was accepted as normal and the extent to which Buddhism was simply part of the habitual religious landscape. In saying this, there is an assumption that Hinduism (in all its forms) was the default backdrop into which other religions fitted or against which they became visible. Of course, this remains an assumption for the very reason that Buddhist monasteries and monks may have been so common in certain areas that the dominant religious background was Buddhism, even where folk forms of Hinduism were also everywhere in evidence. J. Shaw’s study of Sanchi suggests this might have been the case there, yet much of the textual evidence – highly tendentious, as it is – indicates a multiplicity of practices, with religious pragmatism dominating at the social level, where intellectual practices were not emphasized by using Sanskrit as the basic linguistic medium.
It is easy to overinterpret the extent of conflict and contrast, if reliance is simply placed on the textual accounts to draw a picture of Hindu–Buddhist relations in the early historic period. After the 4th century CE, when both Hindu and Buddhist philosophers had laid down their scholastic positions on broad philosophical questions, from the perspective of their own traditions, there emerged considerable debate but within a rather narrow and conciliatory
No doubt the authors of the large body of Buddhist literature perceived groups they defined as other than themselves in a particular light, and in the so-called early historic period (200 BCE–200 CE) a concern with developing a particular class identity seems to have been emerging that was important in gaining access to patronage deriving from different socioeconomic levels. While the Brahmans as a distinct social group (after 200 BCE) were attempting to mold a set of ideas and practices into a socioreligious system – one that scholars only called Hinduism in the 19th century – they implicitly recognized the presence of other groups who could not easily be assimilated into this new system that they were theorizing, and they reacted against these groups. Yet in the early historic period, new texts like the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa do not name these groups with any specificity, so it is never easy to tell toward whom the critiques made in the texts are directed.
In scholarly literature, there has been a tendency to focus on the relations between representatives of Hinduism and Buddhism as defined primarily by conflict. However, this dramatically simplifies the range of possible interrelations, and A. Malinar’s recommendation in this regard is a salutary one: "While competition and conflict cannot be denied, the situation may have been far more complex, not only allowing more harmonious interactions, but also varying over the subcontinent" (Malinar, 2007, 257).
Evidence of conflict is much easier to locate than that of cooperation and complementarity, yet given the length of time (approx. 400 BCE–1400 CE) during which Buddhism flourished in India, peaceful coexistence must have been the prominent defining feature of interrelations between Buddhists and Hindus, as it is today in most Asian countries where these two groups live together. Moreover, where conflict has occurred, it is more likely to have been among intellectuals whose views are often represented in literature, which barely reflects the religious interactions of the lower and less literate classes.
Terminology
Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is a monolithic socioreligious system, yet the constant use of these two names since the early 19th century may give the impression that they are monolithic and easily defined in words, when in truth they have always been rather porous/inclusive cultural entities. The term “Hinduism” can really only be applied retrospectively to a synthesis of religious practices and ideas first found in the Mahābhārata (whose composition covers 200 BCE–200 CE), with the word itself not being used before about 1780 CE. Historically, any encounter between Buddhism and Hinduism, understood as the socio-religious system described below, must be seen as an encounter initially between representatives of Hinduism’s intellectual precursors – the various Brahman ritualist and ascetic groups – and other practitioners of what became the various strands of Hinduism when it became a semi-unified religious system.Neither religion developed in a broad cultural or religious vacuum, and much that is central in Hinduism involves the borrowing and adaptation of ideas and practices commonly found in other religions, principally Buddhism and Jainism, and the ubiquitous, if difficult to define, folk religion associated with worship of fertility goddesses and protective deities. This plurality of religion and culture in early historic India responded successfully to social, economic, and lifestyle demands pertinent to different socioeconomic levels, and out of these, Hinduism developed as a specific cultural complex strongly profiling religious and social dimensions. Hinduism as a religious and social system did not exist prior to the emergence of Buddhism and Jainism. Arguably, what can retrospectively be called Hinduism emerges when the three fundamental behavioral/textual practices associated with ritualism, asceticism, and devotion become incorporated into what A. Malinar has defined as “cosmological monotheism,” including the worship of village-protective deities and mother goddesses:
"[It] combines features of a polytheistic and monotheistic understanding of the world and its beyond. Whilst the cosmos is thought of in polytheistic terms as the realm of the many, its cause and transcendence are located only in the 'one.'…. This allows for acknowledging the existence of other gods as constituents of the created world and partial manifestations of the 'one.'" (Malinar, 2007, 238).
Buddhism, too, is not so easy to define except to say that on the monastic level, most monks exercise varying degrees of separation from wider society, perform the fortnightly prātimokṣa ritual involving the confession of faults in conduct, and accept the four noble truths – the assertion that there exists “dis-ease” (duḥkha), there is the arising of “dis-ease,” there is the cessation of “dis-ease,” and there is the path leading to the cessation of “dis-ease” – as foundational in their belief system. In more technical terms, they accept the dhamma, the Buddha’s teachings, and the vinaya, his precepts relating to conduct. In addition, a clear difference between the laity and the monks/nuns has always been a defining feature of Buddhism – in contrast with Hinduism, where such a distinction is present in the social contrasts between the renouncer and householder, especially when Hinduism becomes well developed (Malinar, 2011, 117-121), though not so much in the figure of the Brahman who does not leave society. Textual evidence, especially from the Dīghanikāya, suggests that the monks saw the Brahmans as their functional equals and as the group against whom they measured themselves, though this may have applied to the Jains as well.
At the lay level of Buddhism and at the non-Brahmanical level in the case of Hinduism, most Hindus and Buddhists have traditionally been very similar in behavior and belief and especially in terms of what they expect to receive from their ritual and devotional practices. But laypeople are still very much involved in their respective religions, and even the Brahmans – the main theorists of Hinduism – could be regarded as lay followers, except where functioning as professional priests. In the early historic period, the Brahmans were gradually developing a distinctive view of what became Hinduism and promoted this initially in the two epics and the Dharmaśāstra literature, in particular the Mānavadharmaśāstra (or Manusmṛti). Of these, the epics were the best communicative devices for the new, synthesized view of religion with its social concomitants, and it is likely that their effectiveness was enhanced by their recitation in vernacular languages as well as in Sanskrit, thus making them accessible to a wide population at a time when Sanskrit was no longer a spoken language. When the first Purāṇas were being composed and disseminated, probably in the 4th century CE and later, the devotional side of Hinduism had become dominant and was successfully tying together all of the other, disparate elements making up the religion, allowing them to function as one integrated element within a family of other such elements.
While it may appear quite simple to study the interaction between Hinduism and Buddhism, this assumes a clear demarcation between the two religions where such a distinction has rarely existed in practice. However, any kind of distinction is not just a fiction created by Western scholars that assumes that these are two distinctive religions with overlapping ideas, because both Hindu and Buddhist texts are aware of the existence of traditions other than, and antithetical to, themselves. These traditions did not have easily definable boundaries, even if, at an intellectual level, they could be regarded as being easily distinguishable in respect of certain central doctrines.
A well-known example of a text – one taken from the Mahābhārata and cited below – that may well be criticizing Buddhist monks uses several nouns that designate types of holy men (bhikṣu[ka], muṇḍa, abuddhi, sādhu ) and even uses verbs such as pari + vraj-, which could imply the activity of a Buddhist monk:
"The Vedas and food are the never-varying fundamental substance of the strictly righteous people in this world. If the giver shall not give, how could there be any who seek absolute freedom? In this world, householders come from food, and mendicants (bhikṣavas) come from them. Life arises from food, so the giver of food would be the giver of life. Those who have withdrawn from householders have come right back to householders. And those self-controlled ones sit bad-mouthing their source and their foundation."
"One cannot say that a man is a monk (bhikṣukam) just from his having renounced, nor from his having a shaved head, nor from his begging. Rather, when an upright man relinquishes wealth, understand that that happy man is a monk (bhikṣukam). O lord of the earth, that man is Absolutely Free, who, though he is unattached, goes about like someone who is attached; he has no attachments, he has untied all the bonds, he is the same toward enemies and friends. The bald ones (muṇḍāḥ) in their ochre robes are bound by many kinds of fetters. They travel about (parivrajanti) in order to receive gifts, piling up idle enjoyments. Lacking understanding (abuddhayaḥ), they abandon the three Vedas and their livelihoods, and then they abandon their children and take up the triple staff for holding the water pot and the robe. Realize that the ochre robe on one who is not free from passion serves that person’s interests; it serves as a livelihood for those bald ones (muṇḍānām) who merely display the flag of law, in my opinion."
"Great king, having conquered your senses, conquer heavenly worlds by supporting holy men (sādhūn), whether they wear their hair piled on their heads or are bald, whether they are clad in ochre robes, antelope skins, or rags, or are naked" (MBh. 12.18. 27–35; trans. [slightly modified] Fitzgerald, 2004, 203).
Here there is a clear sense of different religious goals, practices, and certainly beliefs and an accompanying skepticism of some, but not others, in an address given to Yudhiṣṭhira – the eldest of the five Pāṇḍava brothers – who wanted to become an ascetic. Appreciating the level of difference given in this representative text requires questioning any idea of a monolithic view of Hinduism or Buddhism and suggests that as religious systems, they were successful because of their ability to bring together beliefs and practices divergent from what is found in the theological/philosophical streams operative within these religions. Above all they have demonstrated a capacity to attach a sophisticated superstructure of ideas to a wide range of practices directly associated with more pragmatic religious and social goals.
Previous Scholarship
Interest in the interaction between Hinduism and Buddhism goes back almost to the beginning of Indology in the West in the early 19th century, and if early Buddhist literature itself is included, it dates back to the 3rd century BCE. Accordingly, an enormous amount has been written on this subject, even if it is only incidental to the religions’ interrelations and their development as individual and related religions. Scholarship has focused on causal factors in the development of Buddhism out of Hinduism, commonalities between Buddhist and Hindu thought, responses of Brahmans to Buddhist expansion, philosophical debates between Buddhist and Hindu thinkers, patronage given to Hindus and Buddhists, and ethnographic studies of contemporary Hindu/Buddhist rituals. Following a modern tendency to clearly differentiate Hinduism from Buddhism, there has often been a tendency to view Buddhism as somehow derivative of Hinduism or as one component different from, but encompassed within, Hinduism. However, European scholars, the latest being Bronkhorst 2007, over the last century have seen Buddhism introducing a marked element of rationality and ethics into the brahmanical precursor to Hinduism where a magico-ritualistic universe was dominant.In the study of Buddhism, the figure of the Buddha looms very large, sometimes to the neglect of the majority of less well-known monks and nuns, whose careers are only treated in the puranic-type Avadāna literature produced in the early centuries of the Common Era and containing long narratives describing the lives of prominent monks. As a reactive response, the Buddha’s teachings and the renunciatory life ideal of the monks are as much a personal demonstration against the overtly social values of the Brahmans and the materialistic goals associated with this as they are a positive adaptation to the new urbanism that had probably been consolidating when the Buddha was first developing his doctrines. Overwhelmingly, however, Buddhism is seen as a reaction to certain aspects of the teachings of Brahmans seen as a group advancing common interests; these teachings are associated substantially with the performance of the sacrifice and the belief in a permanent self, irrespective of what this belief and associated practice develop into in later centuries. This has always brought with it the danger of focusing excessively on the interaction between elite representatives of each religion, omitting the equally important role of the much larger number of lay followers, without which neither religion would have survived.
R. Gombrich (2006, ch. 2) and J. Jurewicz (2000) argue that certain Buddhist doctrines were developed as a direct response to teachings presented in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad. R. Gombrich focuses on karman , some fundamental innovative doctrines in late vedic tradition, and ontological beliefs pertaining to the belief in a permanent self and the Buddha’s reinterpretation of this. It is one measure of the Buddha’s comprehensive knowledge of upanishadic thought that he was able to reinterpret technical terms in the Upaniṣads in a metaphorical sense, whereby he proposes a distinctive ethical interpretative principle: "we see the Buddha reacting to Upaniṣadic teachings by shifting attention away from what the world is, ontology, to how we should behave: morally, and in particular kindly" (Gombrich, 2006, 40).
J. Jurewicz argues persuasively that the pratītyasamutpāda – the fundamental theory of causality pertaining to the development of a karmically based individuality and defined in the second noble truth – is based on a reworking of a cosmogonic myth found initially in the Nāsadīyasūkta (ṚV. 10.129) and then reworked in some of the early Upaniṣads, including the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad. She points to the polemical tone in this doctrine, arguing that the Buddha "formulated the pratītyasamutpāda as a polemic against Vedic thought. Through the identification of the creative process with the process that leads only to suffering, he rejected the Brāhmaṇic way of thinking in a truly spectacular way" (Jurewicz, 2000, 78).
It is to be expected that such reworkings of fundamental themes should have occurred as the Buddha must have been in contact with teachers who knew the Upaniṣads, after he renounced the social world at the age of 29. But the publications of R. Gombrich and J. Jurewicz provide evidence that he actually knew the contents of specific Upaniṣads, and that his objections should be seen as objections not to a specific religion but to a particular understanding of how the world works.
Recognition of the Buddha’s knowledge of the Upaniṣads has sometimes been used to suggest that Buddhism arose as an offshoot of and a reaction against Hinduism. This assumes that Hinduism existed as an identifiable entity in the 5th century BCE and even that Buddhism as an institution existed, which is highly unlikely, as even after the Buddha’s death, it probably only consisted of sets of wanderers subsequently developing into a formal sangha, the name for the institutionalized order of monks. Against this, J. Bronkhorst (2007) has asserted that Buddhism developed substantially independently of any major Brahmanical influence and that it represents one of the most prominent examples of a substantially independent Magadhan culture that after the 5th century BCE spread out from the northeast into other parts of India. This was a culture in which asceticism and meditation were central aspects of the religious life of a renunciatory Śramaṇa tradition, a tradition radically different from the sacrificial tradition associated with the northwest and central regions of India. Emphasis was placed on a life of quietism and performance of ascetic exercises to eradicate the effect of past karman and to prevent the arising of new karman. Rationalistic forms of medical diagnosis were part of this cultural perspective, as was rejection of the efficacy of the sacrifice and the subordination of metaphysical inquiry to empirical observation. But some of these features are also found in conjunction with the thinkers who composed the Upaniṣads – people who identified themselves within the vedic tradition and saw continuity with earlier doctrines as central to that tradition. Considerable skepticism has been expressed about J. Bronkhorst’s reconstruction, with K. Klaus (2009) arguing strongly that many Brahmans were already living in Magadha during the Buddha’s time, an opinion supported by Buddhist literature itself, and that Buddhist’s accepted certain aspects of the magico-ritualist worldview.
Like a number of other scholars from as early as the late 19th century (Fitzgerald, 2004, 114–123), J. Bronkhorst (2011, 72) finds the reign of Aśoka Maurya (269–232 BCE) functioning as a huge stimulant causing Brahmanism to reinvent and reposition itself. In part this was because of Aśoka’s assumed strong support of Buddhism and the patronage he gave to the sangha. He argues that the Brahmans were primarily a social group, not just a religious one, as the sangha might be seen. From the 2nd century BCE onward, the Brahmans were tightening up their image as a distinctive social class, whose status was not dependent just on ownership of property; this tightening up may have been partially a result of the conspicuousness of the sangha as a distinctive social institution, whose success was measured by the rapid expansion of the order after 200 BCE.
J. Bronkhorst has argued that Brahmanism eventually outflanked Buddhism because it offered a distinctive sociopolitical program, expressed especially in the Arthaśāstra and the Mahābhārata, indicating an involvement in practical affairs rather than a concern “with the higher realities of spiritual life, downgrading ordinary reality” (Bronkhorst, 2011, 173). This was difficult to match by the Buddhist monks, whose bearing was directed away from the social and political world in favor of a more contemplative lifestyle. Yet those of a strongly spiritual bent can offer advice to political elites precisely because they are looking at society from outside, and, further, his argument overlooks the massive expansion of the Buddhist order across India during the early historic period and its support at various levels of society even during the following several centuries. Given the sangha’s heavy involvement in many local economies, it is likely that it may have been perceived by people living near monastic institutions as being a serious agent in the workings of local economies and trade (Shaw, 2007, ch. 14, 259–261).
The material bases of Hinduism and Buddhism are now being studied on the basis of a wider range of sources rather than only literary texts. An important new book by J. Shaw (2007) may necessitate a revision of received opinions of the religious and economic development in early historic India and especially of religious change. In studying Buddhist monumental architecture – especially the locations of stūpas, large brick structures containing the relic of a Buddha or a text, and vihāras, monastic structures built for housing groups of monks and nuns – within their wider spatial environment around Sanchi and the occurrence of Hindu images and ritual structures, J. Shaw has shown that the local Buddhist sangha was tied so closely to the short- and long-term workings of local economies, especially in relation to water storage, that the sangha was perceived as having not only a religious function but also a crucial economic one. This relates to the question of the distinction between royal and other patronage and modes of acquiring more secure forms of income than that simply coming from patronage, and it lies at the crux of the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism after 200 BCE. For both Hinduism and Buddhism to have been successful in surviving through the centuries, they had to appeal to the needs of both the elite and the ordinary people in intellectual and practical terms, and it was necessary for Hinduism to provide a unifying role in the culture where it has survived for so long.
Recent work by M. Willis (2009) has expanded on the work of J. Shaw by analyzing the ritual activities of late Gupta kings in Vidisha and the extent to which Buddhist monks and Hindu court chaplains functioned as advisers in the imperial courts. The importance of such roles could not be underestimated because of the association of political power and religious influence marketed at a broad social level and the consolidation of whatever patronage systems had been in existence for some time before the ruling dynasty took control. But the signs of such influence have always been muted and often difficult to read through the texts. Earlier work by R. Davidson (2002, ch. 3) and R. Inden (2000) – historians working on the period between 200 CE and 1200 CE – has anticipated J. Shaw in analyzing Hindu–Buddhist interactions, specifically in the realm of many dynasties across India. R. Inden showed how Brahmans belonging to the Pāñcarātra school used the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa to assert the preeminence of Pāñcarātra ritual in public and private spheres and how this text positions itself in relation to the Buddhists in northwest India, albeit in a very muted way.
In the last ten years, scholars have extended the realm of Hindu–Buddhist interrelations by looking at the worship of deities and sacred figures in both religions, arguing that these can easily slide off into common ground, such that in the medieval period, any differences between Hindu and Buddhist deities were perceived by lay worshippers as being virtually nonexistent. Both R. DeCaroli (2004, 122) and D. Seyfort-Ruegg (2008) have demonstrated how close the connection was between the sangha and the populace, owing to the monks’ ability to perform rituals to appease and render harmless the various yakṣas and nāgas whose power was believed to be so important in guaranteeing rain and hence the fertility of the soil. It was a question of maintaining a peaceful coexistence with these deities, and it explains why images of these spirit deities are found so often in Buddhist art. It also reveals another avenue of connection between the monks and the laity.
Finally, a recent publication by N. McGovern (2011) argues that a direct influence of Buddhism on the development of Hinduism existed, asserting that an initial Brahmanical synthesis was developed around the god Brahmā – a synthesis criticized in the Pali canon and largely abandoned in the Mahābhārata and subsequent Hindu literature. It was replaced by cults developed around Viṣṇu and Śiva as a Hindu reaction – a second synthesis – to the criticism undertaken by the Buddhists and other ascetic groups. This is a striking and original argument, though it tends to simplify a little the complexity of religious belief and practice on the ground, where veneration of fertility deities and mother goddesses was always fundamentally important and definitely tied up with the development of cults centered on Viṣṇu and Śiva.
Sources
Because of the overwhelming number of Buddhist and Hindu texts, textual sources have always been mainly relied on for an analysis of the interconnections between Hinduism and Buddhism with other religions. These literary sources can be extended to include contemporary ethnographic studies (and 19th-cent. travelers’ reports), where the contemporary extends across the past two hundred years. To this can be added epigraphy – also a form of literary text that is, however, much easier to date than literary texts transmitted orally or on bark and one whose social basis is sometimes easier to determine. Finally, there are the remains of monasteries and funerary monuments (stūpas) and small memorial monuments (caityas) for dead monks and prominent lay people, very often deliberately located (Schopen, 2006) in areas where they are highly visible to the naked eye. Even though the great majority of these are in ruins now, they must have been spectacular when they were first built. It is their sheer number that is significant and the ease with which they could be accessed by the general population. Construction of these began sometime around 250 BCE, if not earlier, and contrasts with the extensive building of temples on Hindu ground occurring only from the 4th century CE onward, with the exception of some early apsidal shrines in Mathura dating from the 1st century BCE (Singh, 2004).Of the literary evidence, the early Pali texts show an intense interest in the beliefs of other groups outside of themselves, reporting on Jains, Ājīvikas, and especially the Brahmans as a social group, the latter defined by a penchant for knowledge and ritual performance. There are, for example, many suttas in the second and third volume of the Majjhimanikāya and the first volume of the Dīghanikāya dealing with Brahmans and their beliefs and behaviors and many passages where the god Brahmā is shown in a deferential position in relation to the Buddha (McGovern, 2011). In these suttas, the Brahmans are portrayed as being arrogant because of their self-proclaimed status defined by knowledge of the Vedas and associated ritual and material wealth and by the claim to an identifiable lineage reaching back several generations. While it would be incorrect to speak of a depiction of Hinduism in its mature form in the early Buddhist texts, emphasis is placed on one important aspect of it, the ritual tradition – expressed as performance of the small-scale agnihotra ritual – based on vedic knowledge, which is transformed in an altered form into one of the three strands of classical Hinduism: ritual activity, asceticism, and devotion. Suttas such as the Samaññaphalasutta and the early Suttanipāta provide evidence that the Buddha/Buddhists took other lifestyles and occupations very seriously and sometimes critiqued them. This level of seriousness continues in later literature as well, especially in the Jātakas and the two Kāvyas of Aśvaghoṣa, in all of which reference is pointedly made to the two Hindu epics.
Turning to Hindu literature, the same concern with other groups is present, but it is heavily concealed, and the identity of these groups is often veiled by the use of code words such as nāstika, a word whose meaning can differently include liars, thieves, the lazy, those who do not believe in the Vedas or in the performance of rituals, and those who exhibit ignorance of dharma . Buddhists are conspicuous by their absence in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa – the earliest texts of Hinduism – especially because there is so much other evidence of their presence. Assuming a 400-year period of composition (200 BCE–200 CE) for both, the religious landscape in ancient India must have become more complex, with differences between Hindu and non-Hindu becoming more precisely profiled, by the end of the period. Both of these texts, especially the Mahābhārata, reflect this complexity, and the kind of class identity formation with which it can be seen to be associated overwhelms a concern with dealing with the specifics of the beliefs of non-Hindu groups. Both of the texts were composed when the Buddhist sangha was reaching the height of its expansion in South Asia.
Because of the capacity of certain groups to market their own interests better than other groups did – in part because of the former’s possession of literacy – it is possible to overemphasize the extent of interaction or connection between the different religions. Those who have produced the textual sources appear to have a far greater impact on later scholarly interpretations of the meeting between the two religions. Yet the living religion resides in its practitioners as much as it does in the texts. Ethnographic studies have thrown much light on the living religion over the past hundred years, though this has applied mainly to the situation in Buddhist countries, and it is especially pertinent in countries such as Nepal (von Rospatt, 2004, 199–234) and Sri Lanka (Gombrich & Obeyesekare, 1998), where both religions exist side by side. A. von Rospatt, for example, has shown how an ordination ceremony for Buddhist boys in Kathmandu, of a type that was originally a Buddhist ordination ritual, subsequently came to parallel the Hindu upanayana/vratabandha ritual, the principal ritual of initiation for males into adulthood. It is not possible to extrapolate exactly from the contemporary situation in both countries back to the past, yet studies of lay involvement in Buddhist rituals and the ethnographic accounts of worship of Buddhist/Hindu deities in Sri Lanka can surely provide some guidance on similar activity in the four hundred years (200 BCE–200 CE) during which Buddhism expanded so rapidly in South Asia and interacted most forcefully with the emerging Hinduism. Like epigraphic evidence, ethnographic studies highlight the importance of non-elite lay followers in providing financial and material patronage to the sangha and individual monks as well as engaging in Buddhist-sanctioned life-cycle rituals.
Finally, archaeological evidence is becoming increasingly important in the study of Hindu–Buddhist interrelations. Excavation work in the 19th century focused mainly on monumental architecture and the classification of sites, especially the excavation and study of stūpas. It pointed to the importance of the sangha in particular areas such as Taxila, Sanchi, Bharhut, and Amaravati, without filling in the gaps between these celebrated sites and tending to ignore their relationship with the immediate surrounding landscape, on the one hand, and the wider region, on the other. Looking at these sites in isolation does not tell us how the people who occupied them functioned in relation to laypeople in the immediate surroundings (given that the sites can be accurately dated), nor does it tell us of the economic functions they performed that enabled them to survive through the centuries.
Historical Interconnections
A historical survey of the interconnections and interrelations between Hinduism and Buddhism is more revealing than a thematic study. These interconnections can roughly be classified into four somewhat overlapping historical stages. Continuities and differences exist between all of these, and they are chosen primarily in reflection of the origin, rise, and decline of Buddhism in relation to the origin and flourishing of Hinduism. Usually the Buddhist texts are more open about their interrelations with other groups, such interrelations having to be inferred from the Hindu sources.Buddhism and Its Origins
The period of the beginnings of Buddhism in relation to its Brahmanical precursor, what G. Samuel (2008, 99) intelligently terms a “generic Indo-Aryan cultural tradition,” covers the years 500–250 BCE and encompasses the life of the Buddha and the early development of the sangha. It is not certain whether the early Pali texts were composed during the life of the Buddha, but they do focus – albeit retrospectively – mostly on this period, and it is very difficult to develop more than approximate chronologies. It is likely they are reflecting back into the past their composers’ experience of the emergence of the Brahmans as a distinct social class, which was certainly increasing in momentum from the 2nd century BCE onward. These texts, however, remain the prime source on interreligious relations during this period, as the Brahmanical texts (they cannot be called Hindu yet) mention almost nothing outside of what occurs in a Brahmanical context.What characterizes the Pali texts’ treatment of Brahmanical doctrines and practices is their mild polemical flavor. Most of the polemics are put on the lips of the Buddha, in large measure to build up his image as a calm, serene figure who is at home at rebutting and reinterpreting central Brahmanical doctrines such as the ātman theory and the idea of gift giving to monks as a substitute for the sacrifice and because of the authority it confers on his rebuttals. Certainly the Buddha knew the Brahmans’ principal doctrines, but his is a critique of how they used these doctrines and their ritualist prerogatives to advance their own class interests. Thus it is a mixture of questioning class behavior as well as of conduct, all the passages collectively implying that the Buddha held a certain apprehensiveness about the Brahmans’ status and prominence in communicating a specific view of culture. It cannot, however, be said at this stage that they were opponents when it comes to acquiring resources or converts, yet the early texts certainly portray them as confident and strongly aspirational.
Brahmans who have knowledge of the Vedas are depicted in the guise of wealthy landlords who seem to have had some economic power. What is given is a
"multi-faceted image of the brahmin as a figure who was a man of learning as well as a caster of spells and a reader of horoscopes, as the Brahmajålasutta, the first sutta in the Dīgha Nikāya, tells us in such great detail. Some brahmins engage in trade and in many cases become rich, while others follow despised callings like hunting. Such secular brahmins, though they might (as nowadays) be technically qualified by their brahmin birth to officiate at rituals, had frequently lost touch with the sacred techniques and knowledge pertaining to their lineage" (Bailey & Mabbett, 2003, 115).
The Early Spread of Buddhism
The period of the spread of the Buddhist order from northeastern India (400 BCE–270 BCE) and its meeting with other cultures, especially the generic Indo-Aryan cultural tradition, itself spreading southeast and south and being modified in the process, this modification creating the conditions out of which Hinduism would eventually arise, is difficult to describe with any degree of certainty, as is the development of the traditions against which Buddhist monks might have measured themselves. The sangha was developing in size and was moving into southwest India (the present-day states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh) and southeast India (Andhra Pradesh and Orissa). Simultaneously, it can be inferred from textual evidence that the Brahmans had already moved from north-central India and brought their culture of social stratification and ritual activity with them. Both Buddhists and Brahmans, however, were required to come to terms with the fertility deities – often mother goddesses – they would encounter on their travels as a ubiquitous substratum of belief and practice. Such fertility deities – yakṣas, nāgas, and various kinds of mother goddesses – occur frequently in early Buddhist and Jain literature but surface in Hindu literature mainly in the Mahābhārata and beyond.This was also a period of considerable socioeconomic change with state formation and rising urbanism in much of north and central South Asia; these developments began in the previous period, with corresponding effects on the appearance of the built landscape, though it is impossible to learn how people responded to them at the time they were experiencing them. Given the likely expansion of the sangha during this period, patterns of elite patronage were being developed of a kind that would aid the expansion of the sangha in the next period and provoke a more determined call by the Brahmans to have their ritual activities underwritten by kings. Financial support for the sangha was coming from trading guilds in urban areas, guilds that were responding positively to the collective organization represented by the sangha, which had itself organizationally adapted to the changing times. This was in contrast to the Brahmans, who had not developed any unitary institution and who still clung to a village environment rather than placing themselves within a framework of urbanism. Buddhist monks may have lived outside of towns and villages, but they did enter them for the purposes of fundraising and ritualized begging as well as engaging in teaching and healing activities.
Expansion of Buddhism and the Initial Development of Hinduism
The crucial period for the expansion of Buddhism, signaled most prominently as a strong institutional presence in the form of the sangha and the visible success that it achieved in patronage and material presence, encompasses the 450 years following the reign of Aśoka Maurya (269/268–232/231 BCE). The conspicuous presence of the sangha and the transformation of vedic tribal ritual centered on the Śrauta sacrifice into royal rituals associated with particular dynasties and regions provoked the Brahmans to develop an ultimately successful effort to define a new social/cultural/religious synthesis that brings together vedic religious continuities, the village substratum, and domesticized asceticism.The reign of King Aśoka, the third of the Maurya rulers, has been regarded as pivotal in the spread of the Buddhist order and – paradoxically – through its success, as a stimulant to the development and expansion of Hinduism, but the reigns of his two predecessors must also have been a significant causal factor, even if just by virtue of the length of their reigns. He laid the conditions for the geographical expansion of the sangha, because he freed up travel routes and provided royal patronage to the Buddhist order. It was a period of consolidation for the sangha, one in which there was a rationalization of modes of patronage and of raising money and acquiring land. Widespread construction of stūpas and early forms of monastic accommodation took place during his reign, with much of this occurring in the Deccan (Morrison, 1995), Madhya Pradesh (Shaw, 2007), and Andhra Pradesh.
Evidence of lay support for Buddhist monumental construction is provided in many short inscriptions from Sanchi and Bharhut dating from the 1st century BCE. Buddhist art especially flourished during the first four hundred years of the early historic period from 200 BCE onwards. In contrast, it is only in about the 1st century BCE and thereafter that Hindu art began to develop at various locations, partially as a consequence of the development of devotional forms of religion in which worship ( pūjā ) of the deity was the central performative aspect of religious practice, and the act of gazing ( darśana ) on the deity was a fundamental part of this practice. There had to be easily accessible opportunities for gazing on the deity in a religious context. Similarly, Buddhists, and this included Buddhist monks, performed acts of pūjā, as many inscriptions – including the following one from Mathura – indicate, “(This is) the gift of the Monk Buddhapāla (which is made) as an act of pūjā for his parents and all beings” (Schopen, 1985, 35).
Royal patronage for Buddhism, and increasingly for Hinduism, was as significant a source of funding as lay and small business in financing the construction of monumental structures, and it continued well after 200 CE, with the inscriptions of the Satavahanas in the Deccan showing them as prominent royal patrons of the sangha and also financial supporters of large Brahmanical sacrifices (Ray, 1986, 36). Leaving aside the fact that certain Satavahana queens (Ray, 1986, 181) were active lay Buddhists, it is not always clear why this patronage was so widespread; H.P. Ray thinks that the granting of land for monasteries may have established a conflict-free zone for the king. No texts exist informing us whether Buddhist monks performed advisory roles in royal courts, although this may have been acceptable (though problematic) in practice, as the Buddha himself provided a precedent, when he was approached by kings and political elites for guidance. Brahmans often inhabited royal courts, whether as the king’s ritual specialist (purohita), an instructor (ācārya), a tantric master giving magical advice about the defeat of enemies, or simply an ascetic who was on hand to give more general advice (Willis, 2009, ch. 3).
The elites of both religions functioned in the intellectually orientated realm and in the lay realm, which was more centered on ritual activity, and any attempt to dilute one level from the other certainly offers a serious simplification of a rich and highly complex socioreligious system. Despite the emphasis in early Buddhist literature on the Buddha’s confrontation with Brahmans, epigraphical sources from Sanchi (and Bharhut) indicate clearly the extent to which people from all classes interacted with the sangha as donors to it. In addition, the placement of monasteries and stūpas in the vicinity of villages and on trade routes must have brought the monks constantly into the presence of laypeople from all classes of society. It is the conspicuousness of the monk, dressed in saffron robes, that is important here, complementing the deliberate placement of Buddhist material structures to achieve maximum visibility. In equal measure, they point to the importance of a cult of the “monastic dead,” which operates as a significantly different mode of disposal of the dead from what is found in Hinduism where cremation and scattering of the ashes is the preferred mode (except for saṃnyāsins).
What becomes apparent from the archaeological evidence across much of central India is that by the middle point of this period, the members of the sangha had in many cases localized themselves very successfully in microeconomies. J. Shaw suggests that this might have happened in the following way:
"Additional evidence…for the saṅgha’s monopolisation of the rain-making business supports the impression of a religious institution deeply embedded in the rural infrastructure. That the nāgas which provided the ritual channel for the saṅgha’s rain-making activities were placed next to the reservoirs – the ultimate symbol of the effects of timely rainfall on the one hand and of skilful water-storage techniques on the other – would have helped further to build up trust between the saṅgha and local farming communities" (Shaw, 2007, 192).
Such a concern with fertility is expressed in the common appearance of yakṣa images at Buddhist sites, leading G. Samuel to suggest, when dealing with Buddhist iconography, the following: "All this iconographic material points to a religion of fertility and auspiciousness that gives full recognition to the female aspect of the procreative process and which finds its full expression in the early Buddhist sites that I have just mentioned" (Samuel, 2008, 109).
In sum, during this third period, between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE, the sangha had maintained a high level of text production – the scholastic Abhidhamma literature dealing with the classification of psychological states, the Jātakas, and Buddhist Sanskrit literature – but it was also involved with the nonreligious aspects of life, even if just as an employer of labor and supervisor of slaves.
It is also the crucial period for the development of Hinduism, which emerged as an extremely rich and inclusive socioreligious system partially in response to the material and institutional success of Buddhism and because of the need to tie together a diverse set of religious practices under Brahmanical hegemony and an increasingly hierarchical social system. Following T. Lubin’s (2005) analysis of the Brahmans’ lack of a specific organizational institution, along the lines of the Buddhist sangha, and the manner in which they overcame what might have been a potential disadvantage, G. Samuel helps explain why the Brahmans might have eventually become more successful than the Buddhists:
"[T]he Brahmins remained relatively decentralised, with a firm base at the village level. They never developed the degree of centralisation in large monasteries in or near cities that was characteristic of the Buddhist and Jaina pattern, and which was eventually to lead to the vulnerability of those traditions to loss of state support. Brahmins became court ritualists, often associated with spectacular and wealthy temples, and they became royal administrators and bureaucrats, but they also built up a solid base of family land-holdings within South Asian villages that enabled them to survive the loss of power and support at the centre during the long periods of Muslim and British domination" (Samuel, 2008, 165).
At the same time, the rapid expansion of the sangha in the early historic period could not have escaped the notice of the Brahmans who were pressing forward the Brahman view of society, based on the idealized division of varṇāśrama. A response to Buddhism’s conspicuous success was seemingly matched by the delineation of a specific Brahman social order, explicitly laid out in the various Dharmasūtras (3rd cent. BCE onward), which were presented as a detailed set of prescribed lifestyle and life-cycle rules applicable mainly to the upper levels of society. The extent of direct causality between this success and the codification of a Brahmanical view of the world is impossible to verify on the basis of the available debate, and it remains a hypothesis. Codification refers to the formulation of specific lifestyle prescriptions effecting a transformation of vedic ritual practices, often expensive to run and only effectively performed by royalty after 200 BCE, into household ritual and integrating this with mild ascetic practices and an imperative to the devotional worship of individual deities elevated to a universal practice. This was a codification incorporating a series of very rich practices and beliefs deriving from various regions of India into a framework where the Brahmans would have a steering influence on its transmission throughout the country and, through the use of Sanskrit, would inculcate it at all higher levels of society. All of the existing practices associated with multifarious worship of fertility deities; the extravagant cults surrounding holy men, vedic gods, and pastoral deities; and the performance of vedic rituals and the engagement with devotional festivals could now be brought under one umbrella.
The Brahmans had used the Dharmasūtras to lay down a formal set of rules governing everyday life and the stages of life over the lifetime of an adult male. In this, the social life of the male was fully encompassed, as was the demeanor of the Brahman as presenting a moderate ascetic pose even when involved in daily affairs. Purity and impurity come to play a central role in distinguishing the Brahmans from the polluting functions of daily life, making them not unlike the monks living in a monastic environment partially removed from society. G. Samuel summarizes this:
"purity and spirituality become part of a hierarchical construction of society in which the purity of the Brahmin was counterposed to the impurity and this-worldly orientation of lower orders of society. At the same time, everyday life was systematically structured through a series of sacramental rituals, the saṃskāra, performed by Brahmin priests" (Samuel, 2008, 188).
But it was not enough just to codify these lifestyle prescriptions in highly elliptical texts that were increasingly unread because they were composed in Sanskrit and needed prose commentaries to render them comprehensible. In order for these ideas to be communicated beyond the upper-class, Sanskrit-literate person, other modes of communication were needed. Available were the two Sanskrit epics, both of them dominated by extended narrative plots involving individual quests, battles, gender complexities, and constant interaction between laypeople and holy figures. In the Mahābhārata, in particular, there were embedded interpretative passages composed in homiletic style, some of which also occur in the Mānavadharmaśāstra, and which are concentrated in book 12 of the Mahābhārata, where they define normative relations between Brahmans and kings, plus a lot of philosophical material that attempted to cover the whole gamut of existing metaphysical positions, such as Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Some of this material has direct literal correspondences (Bailey, 2011) in Pali literature, and there are certainly other intertextual references to Buddhist doctrines and texts.
In the various schools of Buddhism, the Brahmans had to confront a successful institution that was both highly centralized and decentralized; on the one hand, it was centralized since wandering monks would stay at distant monasteries and maintain a flow of information, based on a fount of commonly shared knowledge – political as well as religious and social; on the other hand, it was decentralized because the monasteries were very much involved with local communities. The monks also had a common religious foundation in the Buddha’s teachings – which permitted some variance at the side – and a rigorous system of conduct, the details of which would not have been known by laypeople, except to the extent that it was known that there did exist a set of rules requiring more disciplined conduct from monks and thereby differentiating them from laypeople, whose conduct was determined by less stringent requirements. Against this, the Brahmans had to bring together a strong set of heterogeneous practices and beliefs under a framework that would never have a formal institutional centrality along the lines of the sangha. The problem is, as K. Chakrabarti explains, this:
"Brahmanism is a polytheistic religion with no hierarchically regulated monastic organization, nor a single revealed text of inviolable authenticity. Therefore it was all the more necessary to try and construct for itself an unambiguous self-identity which would mark it out from other religious communities. Out of this necessity were born the three fundamental points of reference: the infallibility of the Vedas, the social and ritual superiority of the brāhmaṇas, and preservation of the varṇāśramadharma" (Chakrabarti, 2001, 147).
While these themes operated as a kind of superstructure, the doctrines associated with them pervaded all Hindu literature from the Mahābhārata onward.
Hinduism could not have developed without its incorporation of bhakti in a systemic sense as both practice and doctrine. Whether its formalized formulation was a response to cults of devotion that had developed around the Buddha/bodhisattvas and prominent monks cannot be confirmed and remains a matter of speculation. Viṣṇu appears as the center of a devotional Bhāgavata cult by around 150 BCE; devotional doctrines around Kṛṣṇa are certainly systematized in the Bhagavadgītā and around Nārāyaṇa elsewhere in the Mahābhārata by the beginning of the Common Era (Malinar, 2007) and around Śiva in the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad by the 1st or 2nd century CE (Oberlies, 1988). It is more than likely that the Brahmans could not ignore the many localized devotional cults, especially since some were extending their horizon by connecting themselves with deities like Viṣṇu and Śiva. Where the new bhakti cults differed sharply from other forms of veneration of fertility deities and mother goddesses was that it was believed that the deity at the center of the cult could confer on the devotee both good merit and an end to rebirth – something adopted from the various ascetic groups, who were all united in their desire to achieve an end to rebirth. Veneration of fertility deities related to pragmatic concerns, whereas that of bhakti deities encompassed both pragmatic and transcendental goals (see Malinar, 2007, 237f.).
In writing mainly of the Harivaṃśa and the Bhagavadgītā, but with clear relevance to the Mahābhārata more generally, A. Couture suggests that the kind of monotheism associated with devotional texts arises as a response to the fragmentation of culture:
"These texts are clearly not prone to contestation or revolution, but try, it seems to me, to adjust themselves with the greatest possible flexibility to a diversifying social context. The model which seems to have been put in place towards the fourth or third century before our era gives to a fragmenting population the consciousness of being able to address itself to the same god. This new universalism could have been a typically Hindu response to an India which has been urbanised and which finds itself more and more difficult, in truth impossible, to respect the ritual prescriptions that it judges, in part at least, to have lapsed" (Couture, 2005, 175).
Similar are A. Malinar's views on the emergence of what she has called “cosmological monotheism” the paradigmatic model of Hindu theologies which allows the accommodation not only of different gods and goddess, but also different methods of gaining “liberation” within the hierarchy of a cosmos created by a “highest,” ultimately transcendent god (such as Kṛṣṇa or Śiva). It is a paradigm
"that could serve to reject any one-sided emphasis on ascetic renunciation, while at the same time accommodating it together with Vedic polytheism, Upaniṣadic thoughts on the cosmic 'one' and the values of social-ritual life. It is arguable these developments mirror, albeit contrastively, the 'monotheistic/polytheistic' tendencies in the development of the Bodhisattva doctrine, which dates to the same time as the later portions of the Mahābhārata" (Malinar, 2007, 237-241).
The Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa were probably both quickly reworked in truncated forms in vernacular languages, guaranteeing a much wider audience than anticipated by those who had initially composed and disseminated them. In the Buddhist Jātaka tales (1st cent. CE), both epics are alluded to, and some aspects of the plot of the Mahābhārata are treated in a condemnatory manner. Given that the Jātaka tales were popular tales then and remain so today, their partially critical reception of the Mahābhārata may be considered a sign of the popularity of that text. What this meant on the ground and especially for those classes beyond the Brahmans can only be guessed at in the absence of other evidence.
Hinduism’s Expansion and Buddhism’s Decline
Buddhism’s internationalization and eventual decline, contrasted with Hinduism’s expansion (100CE–1400 CE), forms the fourth historical stage and encompasses the so-called medieval period, always very difficult to define in the Hindu context. It covers the rise of the imperial Guptas (320 CE) and finishes roughly around 1400 CE, at a time when powerful Islamic sultanates have long been established in North India. Usually its finishing point is taken to correspond to a time when Buddhist monastic life had declined to such an extent that it was isolated in West Bengal, even as Buddhism was flourishing in Sri Lanka and elsewhere outside of South Asia, often in conjunction with Hinduism – as was especially the situation in Southeast Asia.Up until 200–250 CE, Buddhism interacted with Hinduism as its chief competitor, at least for material resources and the dissemination of ideas, even if most people that could have been included under the broad umbrella of Hinduism would not have seen this in competitive terms. By about 250 CE, both religions had substantially consolidated. To what extent Buddhism engaged in conversional activity – a very prominent theme in early Buddhist literature – is simply impossible to say. Hindus normally do not engage in such activity. It is likely that most laypeople gave alms to wandering bhikkhus, attended Buddhist festivals, worshipped Hindu gods, and venerated Hindu ascetics, especially those regarded as charismatic. And in that kind of environment, conversion meant very little, unless a lay Hindu, especially a Brahman, became a monk and adopted the partially renunciatory lifestyle associated with that. Similarly, it cannot be ascertained how much Buddhist and Brahman intellectuals engaged in each other’s work, though in the writings of Śaṅkara (788–820 CE), among others, there is certainly a sense that Hindu philosophers were criticizing developments in Buddhist philosophy, and, as R. Davidson (2002, 102–105) has shown, Buddhist philosophers were increasingly adopting the epistemological positions of Hindu philosophical schools in attempting to validate the veracity of the Buddha’s word.
Continuities between the third and fourth period are legion, though the further the fourth period proceeded, the less influence the sangha seems to have exercised. The task of the Brahmans to determine the framework of society had been substantially successful, the groundwork having already been completed in the third period, and their capacity to sustain this guiding role in the absence of material wealth to back up their power demonstrated the extent to which they had obtained the support of the wealthy at a microlevel. And because most Brahmans were directly involved in everyday socioeconomic life, they had probably become much closer to the general population than were the Buddhist monks, who tended to work through intermediaries and isolated themselves in monasteries. From the perspective of patronage, certain dynasties (Satavahanas, Palas, and some Kashmiri dynasties) still patronized Buddhist monasteries and continued to provide money for the upkeep of cave sites such as Ajanta and monastic universities like Nalanda.
An important new religious development during this period was the rise and popularization of Tantra. Both Buddhist and Hindu forms of Tantrism had developed by the 4th century CE, often taught in difficult texts, composed in Sanskrit, and utilizing a complex liturgical procedure. In terms of doctrine and practice, Tantrism was not markedly different in either religion. Because of the richness of Tantrism both textually and ritually, it is extremely difficult to define it precisely, but in G. Samuel’s words:
"We have a body of ritual practices and traditions in both Buddhist and Śaiva sources, that present themselves as sophisticated and elevated means for the attainment of exalted spiritual goals, yet contain reference to practices that seem deliberately transgressive and bizarre: night-time orgies in charnel grounds, involving the eating of human flesh, the use of ornaments, bowls and musical instruments made from human bones, sexual relations while seated on corpses and the like" (Samuel, 2008, 232–233).
In both Buddhist and Hindu Tantra, rituals were developed involving rigorous meditation and aimed at the envisioning of deities in order to obtain liberating insight. How much these went beyond narrow circles of devotees cannot easily be ascertained, though it is likely that some monasteries in northeastern India were renowned centers of tantric practice by the 8th–9th centuries CE.
R. Davidson (2002, 105–106) has argued that after the 7th century CE, the Indian political landscape was no longer characterized by large dynastic lineages giving generously to the sangha but had dissolved into feudatories, weakening the larger urban centers and the guilds that they had supported for so long. In this kind of environment, the surviving monasteries had to align themselves with the local feudal power and functioned like feudal centers themselves, as did Hindu monasteries with increasing success (Malinar, 2011). They provided education in the local area – as they had always done – and functioned like feudal lords centered around and owing allegiance to a central monastery. The internalizing of the feudalistic values on the part of the abbots and senior monks was made all the more serious because of the collapse in lay support, which had in the previous period been so crucial in the maintenance of monastic activities and the sangha’s building program.
R. Davidson further points out that:
"Buddhist institutions could not effectively compete for patronage from militaristic princes, who increasingly found that they were best represented by Śaiva values and rhetoric. Śaiva systems made allowance for forms of behaviour that Buddhist syntheses could not support, since even the most syncretic Buddhist systems were not as open to negotiation about issues of violence, power and self-aggrandizement as were the medieval Śaiva representatives" (Davidson, 2002, 86).
To properly adjust to the new political dispensation would have required a compromise of Buddhist ethical values that their rules of conduct (vinaya) translated into specific forms of conduct consistent with the Buddha’s teachings. For the Brahmans and the great majority of lower-class Hindus, this would not have been a problem, because their survival did not depend on the preservation of a particular monastic institution such as the sangha, even if the local ruler was supposed to oversee the maintenance of class boundaries. Moreover the continuing growth of Hindu monastic organizations seems in part to have been a consequence of their capacity to deal effectively with royal and other political elites (Malinar, 2011, 119).
A final indication of the decline of Buddhism in a famous site like Sanchi is reflected in the discovery (Shaw, 2007, 176) over the last ten years of 32 new Buddhist sculptures dating from between the late 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE and 10 dating from between the 2nd and 12th centuries CE. In contrast, no Brahmanical sculptures have been found from the period between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE, and 1,197 have been found dating from between the 2nd and the 12th centuries CE. These are very telling statistics that need to be confirmed by detailed listings from other sites.
Conclusion
Because of the nature of the sources available for dealing with the interaction between Hinduism and Buddhism, much of what can be said is only inference on the basis of texts that are loath to be critical of alien beliefs or that do not recognize the sharp differences among religions that Western scholars often strive to find. Nor do the texts give detailed descriptions of actual forms of interaction, conflict, cooperation, or difference or, most of all, of the common respect that laypeople most likely would have had for most holy people of any religion or sectarian group.It can be assumed that monks would have interacted with people from all classes, irrespective of their socioreligious background. In a monastic setting, especially where it was associated with a well-patronized stūpa, from a very early period interaction would have occurred with all classes and would have been both formal and informal. For most people, contact would have been in the manner of acceptance rather than contestation. The question then concerns the extent to which meetings with monks became an everyday event that was accepted as normal and the extent to which Buddhism was simply part of the habitual religious landscape. In saying this, there is an assumption that Hinduism (in all its forms) was the default backdrop into which other religions fitted or against which they became visible. Of course, this remains an assumption for the very reason that Buddhist monasteries and monks may have been so common in certain areas that the dominant religious background was Buddhism, even where folk forms of Hinduism were also everywhere in evidence. J. Shaw’s study of Sanchi suggests this might have been the case there, yet much of the textual evidence – highly tendentious, as it is – indicates a multiplicity of practices, with religious pragmatism dominating at the social level, where intellectual practices were not emphasized by using Sanskrit as the basic linguistic medium.
It is easy to overinterpret the extent of conflict and contrast, if reliance is simply placed on the textual accounts to draw a picture of Hindu–Buddhist relations in the early historic period. After the 4th century CE, when both Hindu and Buddhist philosophers had laid down their scholastic positions on broad philosophical questions, from the perspective of their own traditions, there emerged considerable debate but within a rather narrow and conciliatory
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