Great. Thanks.

Anonymous above is me by the way. Damn Keyboard.

I was hesitant to use wiki but the article I linked to is sourced from Library of Congress Country Studies. U.S. Library of Congress, thanks for noticing though. I appreciate it.

Your argument while deserving of the sweet sounds of a viola solo, is flawed fundamentally due to the fact that there was in fact plenty of violence during your so-called era of “argumentation”. If you are naive enough to believe that buddhism and hinduism were not political bastions back then you are kidding yourself. Again, if you think somehow that all the Hindus and Buddhists “back then” were somehow too spiritual to have conflict then you live in a world where history is not based in reality but the whoring out of Indian history by special interest idealogues.

What’s annoying is your belief that glib condescension constitutes an argument. You might need to review your notes on points and counterpoints. “Nuh uh!” stopped being an accepted discussion tactic sometime in elementary school, and it wasn’t especially persuasive even back then. How about using some of that prodigious historical knowledge you claim to possess and try actually, like, arguing the point instead of content-free flames?

Buddhism is today almost non-existent in the land where it originated

The reason for this is not in the history books, it is in philosophy books. But since your primary source is Wikipedia, it would be too much to expect of you to read philosophy.

India’s move from Hinduism to Buddhism and back is the only known instance where an entire population changed from one religion to another, and then back, based on argumentation. This episode is the larger frame of India’s non-violent rejection of colonialism. These three non-violent rejections (Hinduism, Buddhism, Colonialism) is at the core of why India is respected.

Factual history just plays out philosophy’s script.

In India archaeological research and history have followed unrelated paths.

Till recently.

From an interview with the author, a little sideways shot at the ‘party’ historians.

There’s ideology even in professional history, and it has results as insidious as, if more innocuous than those of fear. “This comes back to my experience as a teacher,” says Singh: “Ideologies have a way of permeating down into the level of the classroom in subtle ways. What students end up doing — even if you’re not told to — [is] parroting what they think is the dominant view or the dominant line in history.”

The ideological “straitjacket” of the teacher “gets passed on to countless individuals who I think then in the long run may lose the ability to think beyond that ideology. I want this book,” she goes on, “to break through this kind of impasse.”

Absurd analysis. Friend, you need to get a better handle on that brain-finger-keyboard thing. You seem far too comfortable with with the notion that you are educated about things you are pulling out of your ass. Its annoying.

No religion has ever been extirpated by Hindus. Not one. Anywhere.

I think they missed the memo. You should teach for a living.

Buddhism thrived side by side with Hinduism throughout India for centuries. They argued and perhaps sometimes fought. Buddhists and Hindus are only human. But Asoka’s well known, and well documented, religious tolerance was typical of all Hindu and Buddhist leaders throughout history. The main difference is that Asoka had the wisdom to literally write down his thoughts on religious tolerance and diversity in stone!

I suppose that infantile analysis explains why Buddhism is today almost non-existent in the land where it originated. By the way, reading your scribble is taxing and exhausting, try to elevate your writing to above high-school level and in that process pick up a good history book or two and read. Your basic problem is that like yoga fire (or whatever the f) you seem to be very insecure in your thinking.

I mean, the two closest justifications you would ever find for an argument that Hindus systematically oppressed Buddhists and Jains would be the supposedly hard times faced by Buddhism under Pushyamitra Sunga and the occasional fight between Hindu kingdoms and Buddhist ones in the South, primarily around the Cholas. First of all, that we only really see two individuals in all of Indian history to justify this theory kind of indicates how much of a stretch it is. Secondly, even the evidence for it is tenuous. Pushyamitra Sunga likely a bit of an asshole, he did rise to power through a bloody coup after all. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he went after Buddhist monks. The Sangha was proficient about record keeping and running itself as a para-statal organization. It makes sense on the face of it to assume that there would have been some conflict between the Sangha and anyone trying to consolidate power in areas under their sway. We’ve seen it elsewhere in conflicts between the Sangha and temporal governments in Tibet, Bhutan, and Japan. In Tibet the monks won, in Bhutan the king won, and in Japan the emperor coopted the monks and turned it into an organ of the state. So we can speculate all day about whether Sunga was actually committing genocide against Buddhists or simply consolidating power and breaking any eggs he needed to along the way in the same way the military juntas would assassinate Catholic Bishops in Latin America for opposing them. That’s a valid debate the have. We need to keep in mind, however, that solid evidence about what exactly happened under the Sunga empire is pretty scant. So trying to take such idle speculation and elevate it to the level of historical fact is outright bullshit and is always put forward by folks with an agenda. Pretty much all we actually know from primary sources is that they got less money from the state than they did under Ashoka and some various records about some stupas being torn down with no attendant explanation as to why (maybe they were dilapitated? Maybe nobody was using them?). Romila Thapar claims that Pushyamitra Sunga put a bounty on the head of each monk, but I cannot, for the life of me, find a primary source citation for that. Legitimate historians, however, will tell you that our information about the Sunga dynasty is “Meager to the extreme” so trying to draw any sweeping conclusions from such limited information is disingenuous at best.

Moreover, I learned just now as I looked for that link that Buddhism didn’t actually do half bad during the Sunga empire.

On the death of Asoka in 232 B.C. the Empire of the Mauryas rapidly fell to pieces: the central power declined, the outlying provinces asserted their in dependence, and about the year 185 B.C. the throne of Magadha passed to the Sungas. Of this dynasty our knowledge is meagre in the extreme. Its founder was Pushyamitra, who had murdered Brihadratha, the last of the Mauryas, and it appears from Kalidasa’s drama the ‘Malavikagnimitra’ that during Pushyamitra’s reign his son, Agnimitra, was ruling as Viceroy over the Western dominions, with Vidisa as his Capital. Pushyamitra himself is reputed by later writers to have persecuted the Buddhist church, but his successors must have been more tolerant; for an epigraph on the gate way of the Buddhist stupa at Bharhut records its erection ‘during the supremacy of the Sungas,’ and it is to the period of their supremacy, also, that several of the most important monuments at Sanchi probably belong, namely: the Second and Third Stupas with their balustrades (but not the gateway of the latter), the ground balustrade and stone casing of the Great Stupas, which had originally been of brick and of much smaller dimensions, and pillar No. 25. The sculpture of these and other monuments of the Sunga period is full of promise, but still in much the same primitive and undeveloped stage in which the sculpture of Greece was at the beginning of the 6th century B.C.

Note how he points out that most accounts of Pushyamitra Sunga being an oppressor come from non-contemporaries?

As for the Cholas, they actually were dicks as I mentioned before. But even the Hindu kings and priests of the time thought they were assholes. So trying to say they’re emblematic of a Hindu desire to persecute non-Hindus makes no sense. It’s not even like they destroyed the idols they spirited away. They took the idols and installed them elsewhere. If this is on par with shattering idols and destroying temples, then any tour of the Smithsonian would imply that Americans are are absolutely heinous.

talk about deflection

Forgetting the absolutely trashy speculation that passes off for history…

yes, it is the maoists and the “barbarians” that did it all… that’s the solid history. i love how evidence to the contrary must clearly be agenda driven