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This struggle is psychologically probable enough but the origin of the story, which is exhaustively discussed in Windisch's Buddha und Mâra, seems to lie not so much in any account which the Buddha may have given of his mental struggles as in amplifications of old legends and in dramatizations of metaphors which he may have used about conquering death. The Bodhi-tree is still shown at Bodh-Gaya.
Whatever title it may have to the reverence of the faithful rests on lineage rather than identity, for the growth which we see at Bodh-Gaya now cannot claim to be the branches under which the Buddha sat or even the trunk which Asoka tended.
At Bodh-Gaya I have been told that Hindu pilgrims are taken by their guides to venerate the Bodhi-tree but not the images of Buddha. Yet in reviewing the disappearance of Buddhism from India we must remember that it was absorbed not expelled.
Târanâtha says that he corrected the text of the scriptures and that in his time there were many Pandits and resident Bhikshus in the monasteries of Vikramasîla, Bodh-Gaya and Odontapuri. There is thus every reason to suppose that in the twelfth century Buddhism still nourished in Bihar, that its clergy numbered several thousands and its learning was held in esteem.
Though he says nothing about it in the Edicts which have been discovered, he erected numerous religious buildings including the Sanchi tope and the original temple at Bodh-Gaya. Their effect in turning men's attention to Buddhism must have been greatly enhanced by the fact that so far as we know no other sect had stone temples at this time. To such influences, we must add the human element.
Manuscripts preserved in Nepal indicate that as late as the fifteenth or sixteenth century Bengali copyists wrote out Buddhist works, and there is evidence that Bodh-Gaya continued to be a place of pilgrimage. In 1585 it was visited by a Nepalese named Abhaya Râjâ who on his return erected in Patan a monastery imitated from what he had seen in Bengal, and in 1777 the Tashi Lama sent an embassy.
But of its putrefying influence in corrupting the minds of those who ought to have preserved the pure faith there can be no doubt. More than any other form of mixed belief it obliterated essential differences, for Buddhist Tantrism and Śivaite Tantrism are merely two varieties of Tantrism. What is happening at Bodh-Gaya at present illustrates how Buddhism disappeared from India.
Thus the Chinese inscriptions of Bodh-Gaya though they speak at length of the three bodies of Buddha show no signs of Tantrism. It would appear that the worship celebrated in the holy places of Magadha preserved a respectable side until the end.
Here he determined to devote himself to the severest forms of asceticism. The place is in the neighbourhood of Bodh-Gaya, near the river now called Phalgu or Lilañja but formerly Nerañjara.
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