Encountering Buddhism and Islam in Premodern Central and South Asia

Blain Auer, Ingo Strauch

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110629866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'India e dell'Asia meridionale

This volume brings together a variety of historians, epigraphists, philologists, art historians and archaeologists to address the understanding of the encounter between Buddhist and Muslim communities in South and Central Asia during the medieval period. The articles collected here provoke a fresh look at the relevant sources. The main areas touched by this new research can be divided into five broad categories: deconstructing scholarship on Buddhist/Muslim interactions, cultural and religious exchanges, perceptions of the other, transmission of knowledge, and trade and economics. The subjects covered are wide ranging and demonstrate the vast challenges involved in dealing with historical, social, cultural and economic frameworks that span Central and South Asia of the premodern world. We hope that the results show promise for future research produced on Buddhist and Muslim encounters. The intended audience is specialists in Asian Studies, Buddhist Studies and Islamic Studies.

List of Contributors

• Abhishek Amar, Associate Professor at Hamilton College
• Blain Auer, Professor at Université de Lausanne
• Sara Cappelletti, Università di Pisa
• Bart Dessein, Professor at Ghent University
• Minoru Inaba, Faculty Member at Kyoto University
• Annette Schmiedchen, Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Tamara Sears, Associate Professor at Rutgers University
• Walter Slaje, Professor at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle Wittenberg
• Ingo Strauch, Professor at Université de Lausanne
• Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark

Notes

1

Take, for example, the important collection of essays in Gilmartin / Lawrence 2000.

2

Fogelin 2015: 218–224.

3

Padmanabh Jaini used this work as a starting point to compare Buddhism with Jainism (Jaini 1980: 81–91).

4

Sarao 2012. Also see Hazra 1995.

5

Wink 1997, 2: 349. D. MacLean highlights the economic factors in the decline in Buddhism and notes that “Muslims displaced Buddhists as the dominant, urban, mercantile class in Sind” (MacLean 1989: 72).

6

Duka 1904: 136.

7

Duka 1904: 134.

8

Saliba 2015: 113.

9

Bulliet 1976: 140.

10

van Bladel 2018.

11

On these sources, see MacLean 1989: 7–10.

12

Bhatia 2002: 177–178.

13

Gimaret 1969; Smith 1973; Waardenburg 1999.

14

Waardenburg 1999: 33.

15

Jahn 1956; Jahn 1980.

16

Melville 1990.

17

Schopen 1982.

18

van der Kuijp 2006.

19

Newman 1998: 315.

20

Newman 1998: 331.

21

Newman 1998: 320–323; Berzin 2010: 191.

22

Roerich (trans.) 1959: esp. xviii–xxii.

23

Chimpa / Chattopadhyaya 1990.

1

Quoted in Moon (ed.) 1987: 232–233.

2

Elverskog 2010: 2.

3

Harvey 2013: 194. According to a survey run by Stephen C. Berkwitz in December 2014, about one-fifth of professors who teach an introduction to Buddhism course use Harvey’s Introduction to Buddhism. Berkwitz 2015: 13.

4

For recent attempts to answer this question, see Ahir 2005; Omvedt 2003: 149–185; Sarao 2012; Verardi 2011.

5

For example, Arthur McKeown analyzes the Indian Buddhist intellectual Śāriputra, who lived from 1335 to 1426. See McKeown 2010. Kim and Pal discuss the 1446 illustrated Kālacakratantra manuscript produced in a village in Bihar. Kim 2013: 250; Pratapaditya Pal 1965: 103–111. Some Buddhists lived in Orissa and Bengal as late as the sixteenth century. Verardi, 2011: 378. See further references in McKeown 2010: 18 n.33.

6

As McKeown has noted, there have long been dissenters from this standard view, but they have “failed to have the impact their dissent warranted” (2010: 3).

7

The most common date is 1193, working on the assumption that Muḥammad b. Bakhtiyār attacked Nālandā shortly following the sack of Biharsharif dated to 1193 in ’s Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī. Charles S. Prebish and Damien Keown give the date of Nālandā’s destruction as 1197 (Prebish / Keown 2010: 94). Also see Goyal 2003: 212; and Berkwitz 2010: 141. Harvey gives the date of 1198 (2013: 194), as does Donald W. Mitchell (2008: 158). Steven Darian puts the destruction at “around 1200” (1971: 346). Richard Eaton gives the date of circa 1202 (2000: table 10.1). Sankalia gives the date as 1205–6 (1934: 213). Some scholars simply give a range of dates. For example, Hartmut Scharfe says that Muḥammad b. Bakhtiyār attacked Nālandā between 1197 and 1206 (2002: 150). The variety of dates indicates the lack of a clear historical record that Nālandā was sacked by Turkish raiders.

8

Sankalia 1934: 208.

9

For example, Ahir 2005: 48–61; Berkwitz 2010: 140–141; Cantwell 2010: 3 and 143; Goyal 2003: 212–213; Harvey 2013: 194–196; Mitch...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Situating the Encounter between Buddhist and Muslim Communities in South Asia
• The Power of the Islamic Sword in Narrating the Death of Indian Buddhism
• Reassessing the Muslim Attacks and the Decline of Buddhist Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century Magadha
• The Narratives on the Bāmiyān Buddhist Remains in the Islamic Period
• Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Buddhists: Monuments, Memory, and the Materiality of Travel
• Buddhism and Islam in Kashmir as Represented by Rājataraṅgiṇī Authors
• The Avatāra in Medieval South Asian Contexts: Dynamic Translation Across Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic Traditions in the Ghaznavid Period
• Buddhists, Hellenists, Muslims, and the Origin of Science
• Medieval Endowment Cultures in Western India: Buddhist and Muslim Encounters – Some Preliminary Observations
• List of Contributors
• Index