“The Holy Wars Vedānta and Buddhism Never Waged”History remembers civilizations not only for their victories but for the weapons they chose. India’s great philosophers—Vedāntins like Śaṅkara and Buddhists like Nāgārjuna—fought their wars with words. They demolished rival arguments with syllogisms, not with armies. Their “conquests,” celebrated as digvijaya, meant intellectual triumphs, not burning temples or forced conversions. Debate could ruin reputations, yes, but it never left corpses on battlefields.
Contrast that with some Sufi orders in Persia and India. Sufis are often remembered today as poets of love, singing of divine ecstasy and transcending divisions. That memory is real—but incomplete. At critical moments, certain Sufis allied themselves with power, blessing rulers as they coerced populations into religious conformity. Their charisma, once mystical, became political. And once mysticism was fused with empire, the results were devastating.
In Persia, the Safaviyya order turned into the Safavid dynasty. Shah Ismail I, hailed as both saint and sovereign, imposed Twelver Shiʿism across the land in the 16th century. Sunnis were executed, their mosques converted, their clerics silenced. Zoroastrians, reduced already to fragile minorities, faced new harassment and waves of forced conversion. Entire communities fled to India, forming the Parsi diaspora. Persia had once been a land of Zoroaster, Mani, Mazdak, and plural strands of Islam. After the Safavids, it was homogenized by force, with Sufi mysticism serving as the ideological engine of coercion.
India offers another cautionary tale. The Chishti order, celebrated for its inclusivity, thrived under the patronage of Delhi sultans and Mughal emperors. Their shrines became symbols of conquest sanctified by saints. But it was the Naqshbandis who most clearly fused mysticism with militancy. Their most famous voice, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, railed against Akbar’s experiment in tolerance. In letter after letter, he called Hindus kāfirs, pressed for their temples to be destroyed, their festivals abolished, their lives subordinated. His vision found a willing executor in Aurangzeb, who reimposed the jizya tax on non-Muslims, demolished temples, and pursued a politics of persecution that fractured the empire. Naqshbandi mysticism did not restrain him; it egged him on.
The contrast with India’s own intellectuals is stark. Śaṅkara never urged a king to burn a mosque. Rāmānuja never called for Buddhists to be exterminated. Nāgārjuna, though ruthless in dialectic, never blessed armies to enforce emptiness. Their victories were cultural and intellectual, never military. They produced schools of thought, not armies of holy warriors. Their legacies—Advaita Vedānta, Mahāyāna Buddhism—are remembered for their reasoning, their compassion, their metaphysics, not for their persecutions.
This is not to deny that India has seen blood spilled in the name of religion. Hindu kings fought wars, Buddhist rulers built empires, Jain communities suffered harassment. But the decisive point is that India’s philosophers never provided doctrines of holy war. They had no categories of “infidel” or “heretic” to annihilate. They spoke instead of truth and error, ignorance and enlightenment. That is why Indian civilization produced a bewildering variety of schools, preserved side by side for centuries. The violence of their rivalry was rhetorical, not literal.
Persia and Mughal India show the opposite. When mysticism fused with empire, the categories of law and revelation turned rivals into enemies, coexistence into betrayal, pluralism into heresy. Mystical prestige could be used to legitimate the sword. And once that fusion occurred, diversity withered. Persia became homogenized into Shiʿism. Mughal India, once an experiment in pluralism under Akbar, descended into religious fracture under Aurangzeb. Both cases show that mysticism is not always a guarantor of tolerance. Saints can bless swords as easily as they bless songs.
The lesson is civilizational. A culture that fights its battles in words preserves pluralism. A culture that lets mystics bless kings’ swords risks reducing pluralism to ash. That is why India, even after invasions and empires, still hosts Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsis. It is messy, sometimes violent, but fundamentally plural. Persia, by contrast, remains overwhelmingly Shiʿi, its once-great diversity a shadow. The difference lies in whether philosophers or mystics provided rulers with ideological cover. Indian philosophers refused to sanctify holy war. Some Sufis did not.To point this out is not prejudice. It is history. Rūmī and Hafez still speak of love; they are not forgotten. But alongside them stand Sirhindi and Ismail, who show that mysticism, when tethered to power, can sanctify coercion. Śaṅkara and Nāgārjuna show the opposite: that philosophy, tethered to reason, cannot. The contrast explains why one civilization remained a garden of schools and the other a fortress of conformity. And it is a warning for us still—that love is not always a defense against violence, and that words, not swords, are the truest weapons of pluralism.
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