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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Explain the social aspects of Buddhism and account for its decline in India.

  • UPSC 2004
  • Period of Mahajanapadas

Buddhism arose in the sixth century BCE in the middle Gangetic plains as more than a doctrine of nirvana — it was a social critique of the Brahmanical order taking shape around varna, ritual, and birth-based privilege. Its subsequent disappearance from the land of its birth by the thirteenth century, even as it flourished across…

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What the full answer covers

  • Rejection of Varna as Divinely Ordained
  • The Sangha as an Egalitarian Monastic Order
  • Admission of Women
  • Decline: The Long Erosion, Not a Single Collapse
  • Absorption by a Reviving Brahmanical/Bhakti Tradition
  • Internal Degeneration and the Turn to Vajrayana
  • …and 2 more sections, with a conclusion

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