Buddhists: Does it trouble you that the myth of Nalanda turned out to be a lie?

I mean, for starters, the OP is clearly starting from a position of bad faith. The vast majority of Buddhists who have no fear or hatred of Muslims who are acquainted with the story of Nalanda would know of the traditional story, not about modern archaeological expeditions that might contradict traditional narratives. And asking if they feel bad about something they probably don't feel strongly about and are only vaguely acquainted with is, and this is my academic opinion, a dick move.

On the other hand, any Buddhist political extremism that might use the story of Nalanda as evidence of Muslim savagery I'm sure wouldn't care one bit that archaeological evidence conflicts with their narrative. Remember that time that a religion was proved wrong by archaeology and science and all of the followers adjusted their beliefs and gave up? Yeah, me neither.

Secondly, I'm not sure I understand OPs narrative, like at all. He first cites Krishna Deva and VS Agarwala,

evidence reveals a “complex history of destruction, abandonment and reoccupation” at Nalanda that pre-dated the arrival of Muslims. In other words, the archeological evidence indicates that Nalanda had already been effectively abandoned or fallen into a state of disuse long before Muslims even arrived in India, meaning that they were unlikely to have been responsible for the fate of Nalanda.

And then after stating the bizarre tautology,

the Nalanda myth is problematic for many reasons, not the least being that the story of Nalanda is not true.

OP writes that

According to Elverskog, Nalanda remained functional up until the 17th century and owed its continued existence past the date of its mythological destruction to a positive relationship between local Buddhist rulers and later Muslim administrators.

So according to OP, "the Nalanda myth," by which I assume he means "the myth that Nalanda was destroyed by Islamic armies," is fictional because a team of Indian archaeologists have proved that Nalanda was out of use prior to the 13th Century, and then fortifies that proof with the theory from a separate sscholar that Nalanda was in use through the 17th Century.

Obviously both of these things cannot be true. And frankly, neither of them absolutely leaves out the possibility that Nalanda wasn't sacked by Muslim armies in the 13th Century.

I'd bother going through the linked source. Except it's really just a religious fluff piece that amounts to saying that the Nalanda "Story" is a piece of nationalist history used by Buddhis nationalists to justify their crimes in places like Sri Lanka and Burma against the Tamils and Rohingya respectively, and can be summed up by saying "Can't we all forget about the perceived wrongs in our past and get along?"

I actually dealt with a weird version of this argument by an obvious Muslim responder who tried to point out that Temples were fair game by the rules of war in 13th Century India. In this and the tricycle's article own way, they're right: Buddhism in India faced more institutional problems that contributed far more to the inevitable decline than the Muslim invasions. The collapse of Nalanda as an institution is more of a symbolic event, if I say so myself. I write plenty about it (and the conversation about Temples as War targets that goes nowhere) here.

The tl;dr is that Buddhism in India face many institutional problems that led to the decay of its integrity so that when the Muslim invasions began, the physical destruction was irrecoverable. That Buddhist communities existed on the Indian subcontinent for another few centuries is immaterial. Buddhism as an institution, usually fuelled from outside powers like Sri Lanka, Burma, Bhutan, and Tibet, would never carry the institutional strength or influence that it once did. The destruction of Nalanda is as good an event as any to mark the end of institutional Buddhism in India.

But to the question at hand, I am not familiar with the work of Deva and Agarwala, nor Elverskog. Archaeology is not my field, textual studies is, and while I would agree generally that archaeological study should supplement and even supercede textual authority when the evidence is overwhelming, I can't say to its efficacy in this context.

To hear some sources tell it, you'd be hard pressed to find any damage that the Muslim invaders committed at all upon India. This is a pretty ridiculous position to take, and we can look at the causes and effects of historical events without assigning blame to the descendants.

The Muslim historians writing about Khilji's raid through Bihar (the name itself means "monastery" and was the homeland of the Buddha) describe a fortress that fits other descriptions of Nalanda, though there is some debate that it might be the other Buddhist University of Odantapuri. I'm no expert in this specialty, so I don't know the full arguments. Bihar itself is not that big, and Odantapuri and Nalanda were close together. Both would be tempting targets to raiders. That the Turks thought they were fortresses made them especially tempting targets.

The Persian accounts of the raids don't date the event exactly, but point towards roughly 1200.

The Tibetan pilgrim Lotsawa Chojepal (Tib: lo tsa ba chos rje dpal, commonly referred to as Dharmasvamin) visited India in the mid-late 13th Century seeking Sanskrit scriptures (with the usual debate over chronology, sometime between the 1230s and 1290s), and found Nalanda still in use, but only just. Instead of large crowds of students, classes and ceremonies, there was only a monk called Rahulashribhadra teaching Sanskrit grammar. Gone were the philosophical and medical lectures. Gone were the ceremonies and rituals. And the structure itself was in complete disrepair.

The most damning textual evidence I can tell (without knowing Persian or the historiography of those sources and I would need to contact a Persianist to further understand them) is that there don't seem to be disagreement that Khilji's historians were lying or wrong. That the Turks did destroy a monastery they had mistaken for a fort in Bihar on his c.1200 raid through the region. Whether it's Nalanda or Odantapuri is probably lost to history.

Frankly, it doesn't seem ludicrous to me that both were destroyed by the Turkish raid. Not because of some kind of anti-Turkish or anti-Muslim sentiment, but because the monasteries were close, tempting targets, and destruction is kind of the point of a raid. That they were in disrepair by the 1200s regardless of Muslim involvement is probably not only likely born out by the archaeological record, but is how we currently understand that Indian Buddhism failed to provide for the spiritual and ritual needs of common Indians in the later medieval period. Failing to provide for them, the monasteries of India failed to continue receiving royal patronage in favor of (what we would now call) Hindu ritual specialists, probably fueling the development of Bhakti movements as well as the influence of Saivite yogins. Of course, Buddhism began in India with little royal patronage, and was sustained in various parts of the world that actively persecuted it (China, Tibet, Vietnam, Korea) so it's not inconsistent to understand that Nalanda was in decline when Khilji's raiders arrived, was sacked by them, and then served as the ruined home of a fractionally small Sangha until the 17th Century, at which point it would have been under the rule of the Mughals who traditionally had a much more pluralist outlook than their predecessors in India.

tl;dr: The raid and destruction of Nalanda is borne our in the context of the texts we have available. That doesn't make the case rock solid, that doesn't mean archaeological evidence can't supplement or change our understanding of the subject, but OP's post doesn't contradict a list of our textual or circumstantial evidence of the traditional story of Nalanda's destruction.

That said, if the meta point is that the events of the 1200s shouldn't be used to justify the understood atrocities on someone's descendants, then I emphatically agree.

Sources:

A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism

Andrew Skilton, A Concise History of Buddhism

George Roerich, Biography of Dharmasvamin

EDIT: Verbs