Integrity Score 570
No Records Found
No Records Found
But times are and were never the same. It so happened in Bodh Gaya as well. The glory of the site diminshed from bad to worse in the intervening years that followed the rule of the Pala kings of Bengal. Over the years, the times had changed. The royal patronage gradually disappeared. The older traditional Vedic faith had resurged among the masses in India, owing to the efforts of the Shankaracharya and other religious leaders of those times. The Buddha was accepted as an incarnation of Vishnu and became a part of the Hindu fold.
The now reduced numbers of followers in India, of the old path of the Buddha, faced severe persecution at the hands of several foreign invaders who made their foray into India, and were even forced to abandon their faith. Monasteries after monasteries from Afghanistan on the north-west of India to Bengal in the east were destroyed by the invaders, and the inmates were put to the sword. The Universities of Takshashila, Nalanda and Vikramshila were ransacked and burnt.
The atrocities on the Buddhists continued to an extent that the faith disappeared altogether from the land of its origin. No monument of the former testimony remained and practically all sites of Buddhist pilgrimage were wiped off the tourist map. The broken and mutilated statues in the Archaeological Museum of Bodh Gaya bear testimony to those troubled phases of history. The conditions gradually became so dismal that even the old memories of the Buddha having received enlightenment at Bodh Gaya were erased from common memory. The place still continued to be called as Bodh Gaya, but the significance was lost.
To be continued...