When Hiuen Tsang travelled India in the 7th century, he observed that his religion was in slow decay and even had ominous premonitions of forthcoming demise of Nalanda. Decline of Buddhism in India Buddhism had steadily lost popularity in India with the laity and thrived, thanks to royal patronage, only in the monasteries of Bihar and West Bengal and Bangladesh. By the time of the Pala Dynasty, the traditional Mahayana Buddhism and Hinayana Buddhism were imbued with Tantric practices involving secret rituals and magic. Rise of Hindus in India The rise of Hindu philosophies in the subcontinent and the waning of the Buddhist Pala dynasty after the 11th century meant that Buddhism was hemmed in on multiple fronts, political, philosophical, and moral. The final blow was delivered when its still-flourishing monasteries, the last visible symbols of its existence in India, were overrun during the Muslim invasion that swept across Northern India at the turn of the 13th century. Decline of Nalanda in Medieval India In around 12th Century, Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkic chieftain out to make a name for himself, was in the service of a commander in Awadh. The Persian historian, Minhaj-i-Siraj in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri, recorded his deeds a few decades later. Khilji was assigned two villages on the border of Bihar which had become a political no-man's land. Sensing an opportunity, he began a series of plundering raids into Bihar and was recognised and rewarded for his efforts by his superiors. Emboldened, Khilji decided to attack a fort in Bihar and was able to successfully capture it, looting it of a great booty. Bakhtiyar Khilji threw himself into the postern of the gateway of the place, and they captured the fortress, and acquired great booty. The greater numbers of the inhabitants of that place were Brahmans, and the whole of those Brahmans had their heads shaven; and they were all slain. There were a great number of books there; and, when all these books came under the observation of the Muslims, they summoned a number of Hindus that they might give them information respecting the import of those books; but the whole of the Hindus had been killed. Fleeing of Nalanda Chancellor The last Chancellor of Nalanda, Shakyashribhadra fled to Tibet in 1204 at the invitation of the Tibetan translator Tropu Lotsawa. In Tibet, he started an ordination ancestry of the Mulasarvastivada lineage to complement the two existing ones. |