Jain/Buddhist Temples destroyed to build Hindu Temples? – UPDATED

oh come on !!! Are we repairing centuries of history through the moral standards of the day ? It’s history because it’s replete with mistakes … else we wouldn’t have learnt from it.

Which is why I am torn between the alacrity of having Ram Janma Bhoomi finally and this troublesome thought that we settled scores on a deed 500 years old.

Dear Shantanu, Salil Tripathy is a person who says that Wendy Doniger goes “as far as facts take” her. Wendy Doniger’s work is just a collection of conspiracy theories (as opposed to, say, Romila Thapar’s work – although Romila Thapar has her biases, she does put into use methods of serious academic history). Doniger’s clarity of thought is very much represented by her comment “Her (Sarah Palin’s) greatest hypocrisy is that she is a woman”).

I don’t think it is possible to argue with such a person. People like him evaluate truth solely based on subscription to fashionable ideology. I strongly advise you to avoid him like plague.

You are correct.
There is no record. The voiceofdharma.org website is a treasure-trove of books.
A corollary:
Similar points were raised by some misguided sikhs during the early 80s. When pressed, even basic substantiation could not be provided.

Salil is repeating the fabrication about Kashmir’s Harsha, so let me quote from this article by Koenraad Elst that illustrates how less than scholarly was Romila Thapar’s reading of Rajatarangini :
Harsha was a fellow-traveller: not yet a full convert to Islam (he still ate pork, as per Rajatarangini 7:1149), but quite adapted to the Islamic ways, for “he ever fostered with money the Turks, who were his centurions” (7:1149). There was nothing Hindu about his iconoclasm, which targeted Hindu temples, as if a Muslim king were to demolish mosques rather than temples. All temples in his kingdom except four (enumerated in 7:1096-1098, two of them Buddhist) were damaged. This behaviour was so un-Hindu and so characteristically Islamic that Kalhana reports: “In the village, the town or in Srinagara there was not one temple which was not despoiled by the Turk king Harsha.” (7:1095)

So there you have it: “the Turk king Harsha”. Far from representing a separate Hindu tradition of iconoclasm, Harsha of Kashmir was a somewhat peculiar (viz. fellow-traveller) representative of the Islamic tradition of iconoclasm.

Similarly, read this article, where Koenraad Elst takes on Professor Richard Eaton from University of Arizona, says (about Eaton, who was supporting the Thapar gang) :
He admits that during the Hindu re-conquest of Muslim-occupied territories: “Examples of mosque desecrations are strikingly few in number.” Yet, in his opinion, Hindus had been practicing their own very specific form of iconoclasm in earlier centuries. Though they themselves seem to have lost the habit by Shivaji’s time, it was this Hindu tradition which the Muslim invaders copied: “The form of desecration that showed the greatest continuity with pre-Turkish practice was the seizure of the image of the defeated king’s state deity and its abudction to the victor’s capital as a trophy of war.”

Then Koenraad Elst goes on to demolish this last statement, and as regards that I refer you to his article, since secular Eaton’s admission is enough to kick Salil’s comments into the trash can. So there goes crashing down (and thanks to his own secular fellow-traveler at that) Salil’s unfounded just-for-political-correctness assertion that that kind of destruction was something that conquering armies those days routinely indulged in.

The latter part of Salil’s comment is COMPLETE STRAWMAN. Shantanu (and quite likely most/all commenters here too) NEVER sought to justify victimizing today’s Muslim community for what marauding Muslim invaders during medieval times did. These are all cheap diversionary tactics, and perhaps nefarious too, for they try to implicitly portray those who disagree with Salil as Islamophobics.

Salil wrote:
“My point is that conquering armies routinely loot and destroy whatever they may get their hands on.”
__

Salil:

But we’re not discussing “whatever they may get their hands on.” The discussion is specific to temples (Hindu, Jain, Buddhist) or mosques, which undeniably have a greater significance to many, than money or other loot.

Besides, you’ve only given 2 or 3 examples – and those too inconclusive – whereas the destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas not so long ago is proof enough as to which ideology routinely destroyed other people’s temples and sacred places, and finds them intolerable to this day.

This topic is under debate for few years in various forums and typically, I have seen such debates being turned into polemics by the devotees of R Thapar and her gangs of “secular” historians. Following are the supposed examples of HIndu persecution by Buddhism:
1. Pushyamitra Sunga and his supposed violence upon Buddhists
2. Shashanka and supposed destruction of Bodhi tree
3. Harsha in Kashmir
4. Brahminic smartness in adopting Buddhism thereby making it a part of Hinduism – namely Gita having a Buddhist origin, adopting Buddha as an avatara, the concept of non-violence, vegetarianism etc.

On these topics, the responses are:

1. “froginthewell” already placed a link to Elst’s article on this topic.
2. Both Goyal and Est wrote pretty long articles examining claims about Shashanka. Due to lack of time, I am only posting the link that discusses relevant details from another forum:
http://www.indiadivine.org/audarya/hinduism-forum/184703-did-shaivite-king-persecute-buddhists.html
3. “froginthewell” already placed a link to Elst’s article on this topic.
4. Brahmin adoption of Buddhist practices are really mere speculations. As far as speculations go, I can speculate that Buddhist adopeted the practice of building monastery and universities (Nalanda/Taxilla) based on Ashrams of the Hindu sages.

According to Buddhist doctrines, Buddha originated the practices. He was trying to popularise a way of life based on his philosophy, not a theology (according to Buddhist lore, His disciple asked Him if God exists or not, His answer was that the question itself was insignificant). It is his followers who tried to push an organised religion after His death and made Him into a deity. The moment an organised structure comes in place, a group does not have any choice but need money to handle expenses and need royal protection from hostility. Therefore Buddhism began to depend on state sponsorships forever. So whenever this state sponsorship was stopped, as some stories in Avadana (Buddhist purana) state, Buddhism declined in terms of it’s popularity. This is a weakness every organised religion share; the rapid decline of Christian doctrine in secular Europe is a living proof (or destruction of Christianity in sixteenth century Japan or current status of Islam in Commie China and Buddhist Burma). It is also this lack of organisation in our Dharma that helped us to sustain the period of extreme hostility from political powers that assumed that destroying temples would destroy our Dharma.

It was sometimes speculated that faced with organised structure of Buddhist monastery, Hindu elites began to construct bigger temples to attract younger generations thereby giving rise to temple based religious practices. The fact that basic structure of Dharma does not lend itself well to an imposed organised structure forced the elites to change direction of Hinduism towards more hierarchical structures based on Varna and Jati. Mere speculations yes, but Thapar clan did not do any better than this.

Note: In the past, I have seen mentioning Elst (and Goyal) sometimes made our “secular” friends nervous because they claim that these are Hindutva propaganda. Please remember that Prof. Thapar and most of the intellectuals of her clan are Marxist according to their own declaration and therefore all of their articles can be a good candidate for propaganda as well. Instead of terming each other’s references as propaganda, if we compare relative merits of the arguments at both sides, we can enrich ourselves.

That Hindus too did desecrate Jain and Buddhist Temples caught my interest and was worthy to be looked upon. I scurried to get information to this effect but did not succeed in finding any valuable references. Gooogle and Wiki were the next options, and after having gone through hundreds of data available on the net, I could not find anywhere a relationship of a menacing act coming from ancient Hindu Kings. The last line from a detailed article by Nikhat Kazmi, the para of which is quoted below, is interesting. Please read……

QUOTE:
JAIN TEMPLE IN FATEHPUR SIKRI
By Nikhat Kazmi

ASI had any policy on“ripping apart” ancient monuments which were part of the national heritage. “We all know that India is a rich and ancient country, built on layers and layers of civilisation. There could be a temple beneath the Taj Mahal too. Will the ASI dig that up too?” he queried.

Sharma however insisted, the effort was not to destroy the present heritage but only to find out the truth. “We are here to correct the interpretation of palaces and monuments, not to rip apart monuments,” he elucidated. But the fact thet the matter had already become politicised was evident, when the Chairman of the Indian Archaeological Society, S P Gupta, circulated a paper on the excavations which concludes: “There is ample proof of (a) the destruction of the Jain temple, (b) the sculptures being vandalised without exception. There is no evidence of Hindu vandalism at the site. What is the other language of this destruction if not`demolishing temples’ by the Muslims.”

UNQUOTE:

Hence, there appears no direct references to either any vandalism or desecration of Jain Temples by Hindus over the centuries. This is after extensive research. I too would be happy to be educated if at all there has occurred a dark chapter in Hinduism reflecting a hitherto unknown violent side of intolerance.

@Anonymous (#15),
I do not know of any Shaivite or Vaishnavite temples destroyed by Vaishnavite or Shavite community respectively. But there was a time both the communities were hostile to each other in various parts of northern India. It is this hostility that prompted Tulsidas to highlight the fact that Shri Rama worshiped Shiva for strength (in Ramcharitmanas). The hostility died later, but, like caste, it weakened Hindu society in North India.

I also want to use this opportunity to make an appeal to readers here. Please do support Voice of India and people like Koenraad Elst. I have been personally involved with both and it breaks my heart every time I see him go around asking for help. So, even small contributions of $50 or $100 by hundreds will go a long way in sustaining these very few and brave “intellectual” warriors and true defenders of Sanatana Dharma.
Sadly, I did not find more than a handful willing to give any financial help to him over 10 years. A sorry state of affairs in Hindu Samaj and pro-Hindu circles.

@Jayant,
go to voi.org and find the link for donation on the right hand side.

Jayant,
They can also be contact point to offer any help to K Elst as well.
Thanks a lot.

I would like to respond to the point raised by Salil on the ‘destruction’ of Buddhist places of worship by Cholas in Anuradhapura. Buddhist places of worship in Anuradhapura were not destroyed by the Cholas. They fell into disuse and became ruined over time as the Cholas did not patronize Buddhism as much as the Sinhalese rulers used to. Please refer this book on the history of Sri Lanka. It says “Vijayabahu I concentrated on rebuilding the Buddhist temples and monasteries that had been neglected during Chola rule.” It must be noted that though Cholas did not patronize Buddhism they still built the Vihara at Nagapattinam for the use of traders from the Sri Vijaya kingdom.

There is plenty of material in Tamil literature that shows the level of enmity between Saivites, Jains and Buddhists. Works like Periya Puranam and Thevaram suggest that there were heated debates between the religions. But none suggest that Buddhist or Jain temples/viharas were destroyed to build Hindu temples.