The spread of Hindu thought

India may has stopped discussing about its past, but other countries have not stopped discussing their Hindu past. For example, Cambodia and Thailand cannot stop talking about their ancestral legacy. They are ready to go to war to defend their history and links with Hindutva.

The spread of Hindutva was unlike the colonial encounters where religion was imposed top-down, irrespective of what the colonizers wanted. People organically accepted Hindu and Buddhist thought. They accepted it because it offered the best answers for their day to day problems. Indian thought (whether Hindu Buddhist or Jain) was a philosophy about the world, not mere religion or self-abnegation towards an imperious God. Indian thought was spiritual, which aims at recovering the inner divinity. There is none to worship in the external world, but if you turn inwards a subjective internal universe emerges. This is common to both Hindu and Buddhist thought.

Hindu temples extend from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. Buddhism of course captured China, Japan, Korea etc. Buddhism is an offshoot of Hindu thought that borrows almost its entire core principles from Vedic ideas (outside the Anatman idea). Gautama Buddha himself was a great Vedic scholar and a frequent debater about Vedic ideas. He was taught by atleast two Vedic scholars and practitioners. Hence, to say that Gautama Buddha was not profoundly influenced by the Vedas is sheer nonsense. The gulf that emerged was a construct of later Buddhists like Nagarjuna. All the greatest Buddhist scholars of all time emerged from India, whether it be Nagarjuna, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Buddhaghosa, Dignaga or Dharmakirti. It is interesting that not a single non-Indian scholar exist in this list. It makes one wonder what happened to the great Indian thinkers? Why have they stopped thinking?

India's capture of the Asian thought spectrum was intellectual, logical and with no military power to accompany it. It was an early demonstration of soft power diplomacy. Xuan Zhang was dispatched by the Tangg emperors to India so that the original essence of Buddhism could be recovered from Bihar, since the Chinese interpretations were completely corrupted.

I highly recommend you watch this movie - Xuan Zang made by the Chinese government, but paints ancient India in such glowing terms, that it is remarkable. It was the Chinese official entry to the Oscars in 2016, showing how important this episode was to the making of Chinese consciousness even today. The movie paints Indian universities, that existed 600 years before the first European universities. as a mythical Valhalla, a heaven of dreams. The Chinese accounts paint Nalanda as the source of the highest knowledge. Again, there was no reason for anyone to make such a fawning movie unless it really was the blunt truth.