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KARIN PREISENDANZ
39
not considered relevant enough to the advancement of the Nyāya tradition to be studied, repeatedly copied and spread for the purpose of study and therefore were not preserved. This proposed development should be seen in the light of the fact that about a hundred years after Udayana's time the long-lasting and fertile controversy with the Buddhist epistemologists had come to an end.38 As is well known, the completion of the conquest of northern and eastern India towards the end of the twelfth century and the turn of the thirteenth by the Afghan-Turkish Ghurids brought an end to Buddhist learning. which was mainly located in the large monastic universities; especially Muhammad Bakhtyar Kilji's conquest of Bihar and Bengal, that is, of regions where Buddhism had previously been generously sup-. ported by the Päla dynasty, must have had disastrous effects on Buddhist scholarship. Only in remote Kashmir, next to Nepal a major refuge for Buddhist scholars, did Buddhist monastic communities continue to foster Buddhist learning until the middle of the fourteenth century.40 Even though central philosophical positions of the former Buddhist opponents were still controversially discussed in South Asia, owing to historical-political changes these opponents had ceased to be living rivals with ever novel and sharp criticism of fundamental Nyaya presuppositions and especially pointed attacks on religious beliefs, such as those in the existence of the Self and God. The new major living adversaries of the Naiyayikas were from then onwards the scholars of medieval Mimämsä and the adherents of the various branches of Vedänta philosophy, both groups within the fold of astikya as opposed to the nastikya of the Buddhists. It appears that in spite of their radically different metaphysics and epistemology the
38 Chintaharan Chakravarti, on the other hand, blames the Buddhist dominance under the preceding Pāla rule for causing an alleged decline of Brahminical scholarship during this period. According to him, the effect of the Palas' sponsoring of Buddhist scholarship was so severe that even after the revival of Brahmanism under the Sena dynasty no philosophical literature was produced in Bengal. Cf. Chakravarti (1929-1930: 247-248). Monmohan Chakravarti's opinion is less extreme; he presumes that Sanskrit Studies were not much attended to up to the time of Sena rule on account of Buddhist influences (cf. Chakravarti, 1906: 157).
39 Cf. Wink (1999: 135-149, 334-351). This does not mean, however, that Buddhism did not continue in some popular form in Bengal after these events; cf., e.g., Chakravarti (1930: 24).
40 Cf. Naudou (1980: 242-258). Orissa also provided a place of refuge for Buddhist monks from the north and was the home of Buddhist communities with now less generous, fluctuating royal support for the building of temples and upkeep of monasteries at least up to the sixteenth century (cf. Mitra, 1980: 224, 226). However, scholarly works by Buddhists living in this area of South Asia after the Muslim conquests in the north have not come down to us.