The Hindus (83 page)

The antigods are destroyed because they abandon their antigod
sva-dharma
in order to join the new religious movement. The great deluder, whose defense of nonviolence (
ahimsa
) is here regarded as part of the great lie, is both a Jaina (with peacock feathers) and a Buddhist (in ocher robes); sometimes he is said to be “the Buddha, the son of the Jina.”
³²
His argument about one man’s eating for another is a standard Hindu satire on the heresy of Materialist satire on the Hindu rite of feeding the dead ancestors (
shraddha
); the same argument is used against the Vedas in the Tamil
Nilakeci
(tenth or eleventh century), and the remark about the sacrificer’s killing his own father correctly quotes a real argument in a Buddhist Jataka text.
³³
Another version of the myth says that Vishnu founded the Materialist and similar sects “for the seeking of liberation through eating flesh, drinking wine, and so forth,”
³⁴
a policy that seems more Tantric than Materialist.

But the conversion of humankind to Buddhism (or Jainism, or Materialism, or Tantrism, or any other heresy) is merely an unfortunate side effect of Vishnu’s attack on the antigods, a kind of theological fallout; and the fact that the doctrine is directed against the antigods indicates the degree of anti-Buddhist sentiment that motivated the author of this myth. It is the demonization of Buddhism (as well as the Buddhification of demons). As an unfortunate bit of collateral damage from the wars in heaven, the earth is left with human Buddhists when the gods have succeeded in turning the antigods into Buddhists, like the eucalyptus trees or cane toads that people introduced into new continents in order to destroy something else, not realizing that they would then be stuck with too many eucalyptus trees and cane toads. Similarly, a fierce Hindu goddess (sometimes named Kali) is from time to time created to kill antigods, and she does, but then sometimes she begins to kill the people who created her.
³⁵
There is also a Sanskrit saying: “Like the king’s men” (
raja-purusha-nyaya
), referring to the fact that when you call in the soldiers to get rid of bandits who are bothering you, the bandits do go away, but then you are stuck with the often even worse depredations of the soldiers. The corruption of the Buddhists/ antigods is stated in terms of orthopraxy (people are made to stop sacrificing), but there is also a touch of orthodoxy: Teach them the wrong belief, and they will do the wrong things.

Yet the spirit of the narrative is more like a playful satire on Buddhism and Jainism than a serious attack. And some of the later Puranas, and other Sanskrit texts of this period, put a positive spin on the Buddha avatar. The
Bhagavata Purana
says that Vishnu became the Buddha in order to protect us from lack of enlightenment and from fatal blunders.
³⁶
The
Varaha Purana
advises the worshiper to worship Kalki when he wants to destroy enemies and the Buddha when he wants beauty.
³⁷
The
Matsya Purana
describes the Buddha as lotus-eyed, beautiful as a god, and peaceful.
³⁸
Kshemendra’s eleventh-century “Deeds of the Ten Avatars”
³⁹
and Jayadeva’s tenth-century
Gita Govinda
tell the story of the Buddha avatar in a straight, heroic tale based on the standard episodes of Gautama’s life as related in the Pali canon, and Jayadeva says that Vishnu became the Buddha out of compassion for animals, to end bloody sacrifices.
⁴⁰
The
Dashavatara-stotra,
attributed (most probably apocryphally) to Shankara (who was often accused of being a crypto-Buddhist), praises the Buddha avatar.
⁴¹
The
Devibhagavata Purana
offers homage to Vishnu, “who became incarnate as the Buddha in order to stop the slaughter of animals and to destroy the sacrifices of the wicked,”
⁴²
adding a moral judgment to Jayadeva’s more neutral statement; although the last phrase might be translated “to destroy wicked sacrifices” or taken to imply that all sacrifices are wicked, it is also possible that only wicked (or demonic, or proto-Buddhist) sacrificers, not virtuous Hindu sacrificers, are condemned. These texts may express a Hindu desire to absorb Buddhism in a peaceful manner, both to win Buddhists to the worship of Vishnu and to account for the fact that such a significant heresy could prosper in India.
⁴³
They may also reflect the rising sentiment against animal sacrifice
within Hinduism.
Yet Kabir, in the fifteenth century, mocking the avatars, says, “Don’t call the master Buddha/he didn’t put down devils.”
⁴⁴
And in some texts and visual depictions, the Buddha is left out of the list of ten avatars; often Balarama, Krishna’s brother, takes the Buddha’s place.
^is
Hindus spoke in many voices about the Buddha, some positive, some negative, and some indifferent or ambivalent.

The myth of Vishnu as Buddha then ricocheted back into Buddhism in India. For many centuries, Hindus worshiped as a Hindu god the image of the Buddha at the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar (where the Buddha is said to have become enlightened, a major pilgrimage site for Buddhists).
⁴⁵
And a legend apparently originating in medieval Sri Lanka refers to ten bodhisattvas, one of whom is Vishnu,
⁴⁶
who is also represented as one of the ten bodhisattvas in Sinhalese temples, notably at Dambulla,
⁴⁷
and becomes the protector of Buddhism throughout Sri Lanka.
⁴⁸

We can trace these shifting attitudes through three broad stages. First, Buddhism was assimilated into Hinduism in the Upanishads,
Ramayana,
and
Mahabharata.
This was a period of harmony (sometimes competitive, but always civil) among Hindus and Buddhists and Jainas, in actual history, and between gods and humans (the first alliance), in mythology. Then, in the second stage, around the turn of the millennium and after, the Buddhists (in history) became more powerful and were sometimes seen as a threat. The first set of Puranic myths about the Buddha were composed at this time (the Gupta period), when Hinduism was still fighting a pitched battle against Buddhism, Jainism, and other heresies; the scars of the battle may be seen in these Puranic stories that contemptuously denounce the
shastras
of delusion (i.e., the Buddhist and Jaina scriptures) and the people who use them,
⁴⁹
assimilating this conflict into the pattern of second alliance myths of the corruption of the virtuous antigods.
⁵⁰

But then, in the third stage, when Buddhism, though still a force to be reckoned with in India, was waning, the texts have a more conciliatory attitude, and the Hindus once again acknowledged their admiration of Buddhism. In mythology, the texts revise the myth of Vishnu as the Buddha to make it generous and tolerant.
⁵¹
A Kashmiri king of the tenth century had a magnificent frame made for “an image of the Buddha Avatara,” and the image that he used was a Buddha figure that had probably been under worship by Buddhists; this frame may have been made for the Buddhist figure in order to “Hinduize” it,
⁵²
just as the doctrine of the Buddha was placed in the “frame” of Puranic mythology to Hinduize it and as Hindu temples were built on Buddhist stupas and, later, Muslim mosques on Hindu temples.

Kalki, usually listed as the final avatar, is the only one yet to come in the future, the messiah who will appear at the end of the present Kali Age, to destroy barbarians and atheists (Nastikas). The myth may represent a reaction against the invasion of India by Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Kushanas, and Huns, but it owes its own conception to those very invaders. For Kalki may have been inspired in part by the future Buddha Maitreya, who will reinstate the norms of Buddhist belief and behavior,
⁵³
though both Kalki and Maitreya might have developed from the image of the purifying savior that the Parthians may have brought into India in the first centuries CE.
⁵⁴
The idea of the final avatar may have entered India at this time, when millennial ideas were rampant in Europe and Christians were proselytizing in India; the Hindu rider on the white horse may have influenced, or been influenced by, the rider on the white horse in Christian apocalyptic literature,
⁵⁵
his cloak soaked in blood, sent to put the pagans to the sword. The circularity of historical influence is such that Kalki’s purpose is to destroy the barbarian invaders, to raze the wicked cities of the plain that have been polluted by foreign kings, the same horsemen who may have brought the myth of Kalki into India.

Kalki appears first in the
Mahabharata,
after a long description of the horrors of the Kali Age. Then: “A Brahmin by the name of Kalki Vishnuyashas will be born, impelled by Time, in the village of Shambhala.” He will be a king, and he will annihilate all the barbarians and destroy the robbers and make the earth over to the twice born at a great horse sacrifice.
⁵⁶
Nothing is said here about his being an avatar of Vishnu, except that he is named Fame of Vishnu (Vishnu-yashas), and nothing is said about a horse, except for his horse sacrifice. The point about the avatar, but not about the horse, is somewhat clarified in the
Vishnu Purana:

The transition between the end of the Kali Age and the beginning of the Winning Age is usually a cosmological upheaval, fire and flood. Here it is translated into a political upheaval: The barbarians and Dasyus (the old enemies of the Vedic people) are put to the sword. In both cases, however, all the bad people are destroyed and a remnant of good people survives to begin the new world. The doomsday Shaiva mare, with her fire and flood, seems to vanish from the junction of the ages, but at the very end of the passage, the text casually remarks: “Vishnu is the horse’s head that lives in the ocean, devouring oblations.” So she is there after all.

The Buddha and Kalki appear together in sequence in many of the Puranic lists of avatars and on reliefs of the ten avatars from the Gupta period onward.
⁵⁹
Vishnu first initiates the Kali Age when he becomes the Buddha to destroy the antigods and make them into heretics, and then, at the end of the Kali Age, he becomes Kalki to destroy both heretics and barbarians. One late Purana makes this connection explicit and sets both Buddha and Kalki in the past, the right time for the Buddha but the wrong time for Kalki:

Kalki comes, as usual, to counteract the doctrines of the Buddhists and Jainas and barbarians. But as time has now passed—the
Kalki Purana
may be as late as the eighteenth century—the barbarians (
mlecch"s
)
⁶¹
may be Christians or even Muslims. Whoever they are, Kalki teaches their women the three paths of karma,
jnana,
and bhakti, the paths of the
Bhagavad Gita
. This late bhakti text assumes that the women, with their special gift for bhakti, can still be redeemed, if the men cannot. The incarnate Kali Age escapes, because it is inevitable that, after the Winning Age that Kalki here introduces, time will inevitably degenerate, and the Kali Age will be with us again.

Eventually Kalki as or with a stallion replaced the underwater mare as the doomsday horse; in later texts, Kalki is said to ride on a horse
⁶²
(a swift horse that the gods give him),
⁶³
and, later still, he himself is said to be a horse or horse-headed. When the Muslim sect of the Imam Shahis reworked the stories of the avatars, Kalki, the tenth avatar, became the imam, who rides on a horse.
⁶⁴
The horse head may be the result of merging Kalki with earlier equine myths about good horse heads, such as the head of the Upanishadic sacrificial horse and the horse head through which the Vedic Dadhyanch tells the secret of soma to the Ashvins. There is also another good horse-headed Vishnu, Hayagriva (“horse-necked”),
^iu
who is sometimes regarded as a separate, minor avatar of Vishnu.
⁶⁵
In the
Mahabharata
(12.335.1-64), Vishnu takes this form to dive into the ocean to retrieve the Vedas from two antigods who have stolen them; Puranic retellings of the story say that when he resumed his own form, he left the horse head in the ocean, where it becomes our old friend the head of the submarine mare, though now devouring oblations instead of water.
⁶⁶