Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Annual Address Delivered to the Asiatic Society of Bengal: Caluctta, 2nd February, 1898
India, the land of their home, When in the course of time, in con sequence oi the change of religious tendencies which already began to operate in the seventh century a.d., at the time of the celebrated Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, the recruitment of their order declined; and when, later on, the pressure of the spiritual opposition of the great Brahmanic orders. Founded in the ninth century Al). By Q'ankaracarya and his disciples, increased and when finally, in the twelvth and thirteenth centuries a.d., the storm of the iconoclastic Muhammadan conquest swept over India, and, as related in the histories of Tarauath and Minhaju-d-din, in?icted wholesale massacre on the few still surviving monastic settlements, Buddhism simply collapsed; it utterly disappeared. Having maintained no inseparable bond with the head strata of the secular life of the people, it had no chance of recruitment, it could neither maintain, nor recover itself. The lay-fol lowers of Buddhism, having lost their monks to whom no paramount interest bound them, by a most natural process relapsed into Brahmanism, in which they again found, as they had done before the advent of Bud dhism, not only their priests, but also their spiritual directors. Some small portions only of the former Buddhist laity, here and there, especial l y in Bengal, preferred to keep aloof, maintaining a caricatured form of Buddhism without Buddha and his Order, in which itis only with great difficulty that one can recognize the distorted traces of the once ?ourish ing system of Buddha. The discovery of these caricatured survivals of Buddhism in Bengal is mainly due to the researches of our J oint-philo loirical Secretary, Pandit Hara Prasad Shastri, who has unearthed them as it were in the followers of Dharma, one of the well-known units of the Buddhist Trinity, and published an account of them in the Journal of our Society for 1895. From them Dharmtolla Street takes its name, and their Dharma temple still stands in the modern Jaun Bazar Street.
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