Editing India (section)

== Buddhism in India ==

Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born and lived in the Himalayan foothills of a region now shared between India and Nepal. The monastic and lay community that formed around his teaching flourished across the subcontinent for roughly a thousand years, gaining significant royal patronage, most famously under the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, and producing major centers of learning such as the Nalanda monastic university. From roughly the seventh century CE onward Buddhism entered a prolonged decline on the subcontinent. It had effectively disappeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries, owing mainly to the loss of royal and mercantile patronage to a resurgent Hinduism.

For over six centuries after the decline, Buddhism existed in India mostly as an object of antiquarian interest. Ober qualifies this picture. He marshals evidence of continuous but diminished and marginalized practice into the colonial period: Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley, Buddhism in Chittagong, the persecutions in sixteenth-century Odisha (which imply a population to persecute), bronzes from Nagapattinam, and a wandering tantric figure named Buddhagupta-natha.<ref name="Ober2023">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, pp. 19–64.</ref> His point concerns degree and geography. Survival was marginal, and it was not continuous mainstream practice.

The nineteenth century then rediscovered Buddhism as a subject. Lancelot Wilkinson published the ''Vajrasuchi'', an anti-caste Sanskrit tract attributed to Ashvaghosha, in 1839, with a Brahman pandit's rebuttal appended, and the tract became reading for later anti-caste activists. Raja Sivaprasad's Hindi schoolbook of 1864–74 compared the Buddha's anti-caste message with Lincoln's abolitionism. The Asiatic Society, the short-lived Buddhist Text Society (1892), and the Archaeological Survey, which located Buddhist sites, institutionalized the field.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 38–105 (the ''Vajrasuchi'' at pp. 38–64; Sivaprasad at p. 70).</ref> The first Buddhist voluntary associations followed. According to Ober, the Chittagong Buddhist Association (1887) was the first, and the Bengal Buddhist Association (Calcutta, 1892) was founded by Kripasaran (1865–1926); a Bangladeshi source gives 1897 for the Chittagong body, and the discrepancy is unresolved. The [[Maha Bodhi Society]], founded in 1891 by the Sri Lankan layman Anagarika Dharmapala (see [[Sri Lanka]]), became the leading institution of the revival and the setting for much of what follows.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', chs. 2–3 (Chittagong Buddhist Association: pp. 121–123; Kripasaran: pp. 128–135).</ref>

According to the 2011 census, India's Buddhist population stands at approximately 8.4 million, and the great majority, some three-quarters of the national total, are Marathi Buddhists concentrated in Maharashtra and overwhelmingly converts or descendants of converts from Ambedkar's movement. Significant populations also exist in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and among the older, ethnically distinct Himalayan Buddhist communities of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Darjeeling, whose practice predates and remains largely separate from the Ambedkarite revival. This division, a small continuous Himalayan population beside a much larger recently converted Dalit population, remains a structural feature of Indian Buddhism.