Persecution of Buddhists
Mahendravarma Pallava under Appar, a reformed Saivite saint destroyed Sramana monuments and wrote Mattavilasaprahasana, a comic play on the heretical (non Vedic) sects of the time including Buddhism.
The note states that 'he rescued the Perfection of Wisdom, incomparable Mother of the Omniscient' from falling into the hands of unbelievers (who according to Camillo Formigatti were most probably people of Brahmanical affiliation).
During excavation a green marble relic casket was discovered from Dharmarajika stupa which contained Buddha's ashes was subsequently thrown into Ganges river by Jagat Singh according to his Hindu faith.
[17] Similarly, Paul Williams states that the persecution claims with alleged dates of Buddha's nirvana (400 BCE) and the subsequent Pusyamitra reign, as depicted in the Mahasanghika school of early Buddhism are the "most far fetched of all the arguments and hardly worth of any further discussion".
Mahendravarma Pallava under Appar, a reformed Saivite saint destroyed Sramana monuments and wrote Mattavilasaprahasana, a comic play on the heretical (non Vedic) sects of the time including Buddhism.
[21] The Kalmyk Khanate was founded in the 17th century with Tibetan Buddhism as its main religion, following the earlier migration of the Oirats from Dzungaria through Central Asia to the steppe around the mouth of the Volga River.
[24] Several instances of Buddhist shrines being destroyed by the advancing Muslims are recorded though the religion continued to survive in some places for a considerable period of time.
Similarly, Buddhism continued to exist in other places like Old Bukhara, Simingan in southern Tukharistan, Bamiyan and Kabul with suburbs inhabited by "Indians" which were also home to Buddhists.
The historian Al-Baladhuri notes a decision by Muhammad bin Qasim in relation to a Buddhist vihara and Aror that after conquering the city through a treaty (sulh) he agreed not to kill the people and enter their temple, in addition to imposing kharaj on them.
[39] Per sources, when the Shah submitted to al-Ma'mun, he sent his crown and bejeweled throne, later seen by the Meccan historian al-Azraqi to the Caliph who praised Fadl for "curbing polytheists, breaking idols, killing the refractory" and refers to his successes against Kabul's king and ispahabad.
[44] One of Qutb-ud-Din's generals, Ikhtiar Uddin Muhammad Bin Bakhtiyar Khilji, who later becomes the first Muslim ruler of Bengal and Bihar, invaded Magadha and destroyed the Buddhist shrines and institutions at Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri, which declined the practice of Buddhism in East India.
[55] The Mongol ruler Ghazan called on Buddhists to convert to Islam or leave the Ilkhanate and ordered their temples to be destroyed, but he later adopted a slightly less severe position.
[64] Accounts of the battles waged by the invading Muslims upon the indigenous Buddhists takes up most of the Taẕkirah with descriptions such as "blood flows like the Oxus", "heads litter the battlefield like stones" being used to describe the murderous battles over the years until the "infidels" were defeated and driven towards Khotan by Yusuf Qadir Khan and the four Imams, but the Imams were assassinated by the Buddhists prior to the last Muslim victory so Yusuf Qadir Khan assigned Khizr Baba, who was born in Khotan but whose mother originated from western Turkestan's Mawarannahr, to take care of the shrine of the four Imams at their tomb and after Yusuf Qadir Khan's conquest of new land in Altishahr towards the east, he adopted the title "King of the East and China".
[65] Due to the Imams deaths in battle and burial in Khotan, Altishahr, despite their foreign origins, they are viewed as local saints by the current Muslim population in the region.
The Karakhanid Turkic Muslim writer Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote a poem on the conquest: We came down on them like a flood, We went out among their cities, We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head!
Muslims have hostile attitude toward idol-worship and his personal faith may have influenced Bai to take action against the statues of deities in the temples and the superstitious practices rampant in China.
[89] The enormous statues, the male Salsal ("light shines through the universe") and the (smaller) female Shamama ("Queen Mother"),[90] as they were called by the ignorant locals, did not fail to fire the imagination of Islamic writers in centuries past.
[106] In Bangladesh, the persecution of the indigenous tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tracts such as the Chakma, Marma, Tripura and others who are mainly Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Animists, has been described as genocidal.
The perpetrators of are the Bangladeshi military and the Bengali Muslim settlers, who together have burned down Buddhist and Hindu temples, killed many Chakmas, and carried out a policy of gang-rape against the indigenous people.
In response Bangladesh government sent tens of thousands of military personnel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts to protect the Muslim settlers and fight the indigenous resistance movement named Shanti Bahini.
[119] Bangladesh Army and Muslim settlers attacked indigenous Buddhist villages of Golakpatimachara, Kalanal, Soto Karmapara, Shantipur, Mirjibil, Hetarachara, Pujgang, Logang, Hathimuktipara, Sarveshwarpara, Napidpara and Dewan Bazar.
[128] Indigenous people who are detained in military camps and cantonments are subjected to severe beating, electrocution, water boarding, hanging upside down, shoving burning cigarettes on bodies etc.
[130] During the 2012 Ramu violence a 25,000-strong mob set fire to at least five temples and dozens of homes throughout the town and surrounding villages after seeing a picture of an allegedly desecrated Quran, which they claimed had been posted on Facebook by Uttam Barua, a local Buddhist man.
[163] Buddhist murals at the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves were damaged by local Muslim population whose religion proscribed figurative images of sentient beings, the eyes and mouths in particular were often gouged out.
[183] In 2006, according to the Asia Times, "Lee also sent a video prayer message to a Christian rally held in the southern city of Busan in which the worship leader prayed feverishly: 'Lord, let the Buddhist temples in this country crumble down!
'"[185] Further, according to an article in Buddhist-Christian Studies: "Over the course of the last decade [1990s] a fairly large number of Buddhist temples in South Korea have been destroyed or damaged by fire by misguided Christian fundamentalists.
Four days prior to the Attack on Pearl Harbor, 347 Japanese individuals were arrested and the majority of Buddhist leaders in the initial roundup were not simply a panicked reaction to a sudden military emergency, but the enactment of an already considered contingency plan.
The Army also gave preferential treatment to Christians, despite the tens of thousands of Japanese-American Buddhists who served in the armed services during World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters.
[209][211] Among the charges made against them were preaching a new faith, converting Hindus, encouraging women to renounce and thereby undermining family life and writing books in Nepal Bhasa.
[213][214] The Khmer Rouge, under its policy of state atheism,[215] actively imposed an atheistic agrarian revolution, resulting in the persecution of ethnic minorities and Buddhist monks during their reign from 1975 to 1979.
