The Resident Buddhist's Long Complaint against Islam
OP - March 11, 2012, 06:33 PM
I now am interested in the teachings of Shantarishika, the great Buddhist scholar who united Mind-only and Total Emptiness Great Vehicle Buddhism. He was from Bangladesh, in the time when Bangladesh was Buddhist. Of course, the Muslim invaders destroyed Buddhism in Northern India by killing all of the bhikkhus whom they came upon and destroying the manuscripts. When they came to Nalanda in 1197, the Muslims found a university of Buddhist studies over 800 years old. Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Shantarishika, Dharmakirti, Dignaga, Shantideva, and many other great Buddhist philosophers, were associated with Nalanda, either as teachers or as students. The Muslims destroyed Nalanda, killing all of the Bhikkhus living therein, and destroyed its manuscript collection. It took a week to destroy the manuscripts, which were irreplaceable. In the 1930s, an Indian convert to Buddhism brought back from Tibet some manuscripts that had originated in Nalanda, hundreds of miles away. It took twenty-five donkeys to bring these “mere fragments” to India. As a result, I, when studying Nagarjuna, must rely on critical editions based on the Chinese translations rather than the original Sanskrit. Similarly, many Buddhist teachings that interest me are only available in Tibetan translations that must be translated into English. If they had been translated from Sanskrit into English, they would be much more accurate I am sure.
Now, I must affiliate myself with Tibetan Buddhism, which I regard as a degenerate form of Buddhism hopelessly mixed with Bon traditions and Tantric rites (which seem to have originated in Hinduism hundreds of years after the Buddha) in order to gain access to texts whose Sanskrit versions have been destroyed by Muslims.
The Muslim destruction wrought upon Buddhism extended to central Asia as well as to Northern India, where it took more or less the same form: killing all the Bikkhus, destroying all the manuscripts. Without instructors in Buddhism, the people were easily converted to Islam or reverted to Hinduism (in Northern India only). Yet this great slaughter and disruption transformed Buddhism in a very negative way. Reeling from losses, Buddhist mystics wrote texts such as the Kalachakra Tantra, which discusses the history of the world in distinctly apocalyptic terms. Apocalypticism is a dangerous form of religious thought that revels in violence and persecution at the end times, to say nothing of a bloody extermination of the unrighteous in the end times. This is found in the Bible, in the Hadith, and in the Shiite traditions about the Mahdi. Yet, this sort of thought was alien to Buddhism before the coming of Islam and its destruction. The Dalai Lama, who to his credit is trying to reform many of the corrupt practices of Tibetan Buddhism (even while engaging in his own corruption), has been reduced to the old standby of “it is all an allegory” when he initiates people into the Kalachakra Tantra. Given the damage that Islam has inflicted upon Buddhism both physically and in terms of doctrines, I cannot help but feel bitter about Islam and fearful of what it may bring in the future due to the tendencies of so many of its members to take its commands literally and act accordingly. After all, Hindus and other religions have also been targeted, and I try to develop compassion for all living beings. Therefore, it is my hope that all Muslims can be educated about the bloody history, doctrines, and fundamental absurdity of their religion so that they can be induced to abandon their religion and drain support from those of them who choose to follow the +ran’s commandments (to say nothing of the commandments of the Hadiths) that encourage the killing of non-believers. If I were to advocate killing them (which I do not) I would be = not worthy of holding the five Precepts and the three Jewels as my guides in life.
Topic: The Resident Buddhist's Long Complaint against Islam