A short history of Buddhism it is difficult to believe in their depravity or degeneracy. But what had ceased was the creative impulse. The Buddhists had nothing new to say any more. By analogy with what happened in the first and sixth centuries, a new outburst of creative activity was due in the eleventh, and was necessary to the rejuvenation of the religion. It failed to take place. What had of course happened was that in the course of 1,700 years of co-existence the Hindus had taken over a great deal from the Buddhists and the Buddhists likewise from the Hindus. In consequence the division between them had increasingly diminished and it was no great thing for a Buddhist to be absorbed into the largely Buddhified Hindu fold. The Buddha and some Buddhist deities were incorporated into the Hindu pantheon. The philosophy of Nagarjuna had been absorbed into the Vedanta by Gaudapada, Sankara’s teacher, just as the Vaishnavas of later times were greatly indebted to the Buddhists. The Buddhist Tantras had provoked their Hindu counterparts, which abound with references to Mahāyāna deities. There had been a constant assimilation in the iconography and mythology of the two religions. It is a law of history that the co-existence of rival views must lead to some form of eclecticism. This is merely the reproduction of the effects of osmotic pressure in the intellectual field. So it was in the Greco-Roman world with the philosophical systems, and so with the political parties in England in the fifties, their main difficulty being to find something to disagree on. The same happened to Hinduism and Buddhism. The separate existence of Buddhism no longer served a useful purpose. Its disappearance thus was no loss to anyone. We must also not forget the Buddhist conviction that this is a period of religious decline. In Orissa the Buddhists said 1
Vedanta, thánh kinh của đạo Hindu Tức là thập kỷ 50 của thế kỷ 20
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