For the next two hundred years or so it retained its importance due to the patronage of the rulers and the nobility. There was occasional persecution after this but Buddhism continued its precarious existence in Kashmir up to the twelfth century.
A Chinese scholar, Wu-K’ong, was in India for about forty years (751-90), several of which he spent in Kashmir. He refers to the flourishing conditions of Buddhism there. During his stay, Lalitaditya Muktapida was the king of Kashmir. He was a great devotee of Buddhism and established a number of monasteries and chaityas besides installing many images of the Buddha, a tradition also continued by Jayapida.
Kashmir played a very important role in the propagation of Buddhism in Tibet. It seems the first Tibetan emissary to India, Thonmi-Sambhota, who also invented the Tibetan alphabet based it on the alphabet prevalent in Kashmir. However, it was Padmasambhava from Uddiyana (in all probability he had gone to Tibet from Kashmir) who established Buddhism firmly there. When the consecration of Sam-ye monastery in Tibet was over, two Kashmiri scholars, Jinamitra and Danasila, were invited there to formulate the codes of monastic discipline.
Thereafter, a number of scholars from Kashmir like Ananta, Jnanasri, Buddha-srijnana, etc. visited Tibet to translate the Buddhist texts to Tibetan. The Tibetan Buddhist canonical text contains the names of a number of Kashmiri authors and scholars who had been to Tibet in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries to propagate Buddhism there.
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Indian scholars from Nalanda continued to go to China upto the end of the tenth century; Dharmachandra (732-39), Subhakarasimha (716-99), Dharmadeva (973-1001), etc. were among them. With the establishment of the Vikramasila monastery in the closing years of the eighth century, Nalanda apparently started losing its importance. Vikramasila was on a hill on the south bank of the Ganga to the north of Magadha.
It has been identified as Patharghata in Bhagalpur district, Bihar. The Pala kings established a big institution here consisting of 107 temples, six colleges, and”H7 professors teaching various subjects. Tibetan sources mention a number of scholars and authors of books on mysticism, logic and philosophy who lived in Vikramasila in the Pala period between the eighth and tenth centuries.
The most famous among them were Ratnakarasanti, Jetari, Jnanasrimitra, Abhayakara-gupta, Divakarachandra and Dipamkara Srijnana. Like Kashmir, Vikramasila also played an important role in the propagation of Buddhism in Tibet upto the twelfth century. From the ninth to the twelfth century (when it was destroyed) Vikramasila was visited regularly by Tibetan scholars for their studies and a number of Tibetan translations of Indian texts, now a part of the Tibetan canon, were prepared there.
Odantapuri, near Nalanda, also served as a model for the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Sam-ye. The monastery at Somapura-Vihara (Paharpur, Bengal) was also an institution of importance for some time. Other institutions of lesser importance founded at about the same time by royal patronage or by donations from nobles were busy centres of study in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries and are referred to in the Tibetan sources.
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In Traikutakavihara, Haribhadra compiled his famous Abhisamayalankara when Dharmapala was the King. Jagaddala-vihara had Vibhutichandra, Danasila, Mokshakara-gupta and Subhakara as residents during the Pala period. Jagaddalavihara was also the place of study of a number of Tibetan scholars and many texts were translated into Tibetan here as well.
Buddhist Schools
Of the Buddhist schools, Hinayana declined over the years, and Mahayana flourihsed. The Mahayana was, however, not able to divert the monks from studying the Hinayana Vaibhasika and Sautranika philosophies, but it was a lost battle. Kashmir was the place for Vaibhasika studies as also Matipura. There were two divisions-the Kashmir Vaibhasika; and the Paschatya Vaibhasika; the latter in turn was divided into Mridu and Madhya.
The two Mahayana schools of philosophy were Madhyamika and Yogachara. Madhyamika had again three interpretations, Prasangika, Svatantra and Yogachara-Madhyamika.