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 Raja 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 such instances prove little
as to the religion of the surrounding Hindu population, for at the
present day numerous Buddhist pilgrims, especially Burmese, frequent
the shrine. The control of the temple passed into the hands of the
Brahmans and for the ordinary Bengali Buddha became a member of
India's numerous pantheon. Pandit Haraprasad Sastri mentions a
singular poem called Buddhacaritra, completed in 1711 and celebrating
an incarnation of Buddha which apparently commenced in 1699 and was to
end in the reappearance of the golden age. But the being called Buddha
is a form of Vishnu and the work is as strange a jumble of religion
as it is of languages, being written in "a curious medley of bad
Sanskrit, bad Hindi and bad Bihari."

It is chiefly in Orissa that traces of Buddhism can still be found
within the limits of India proper. The Saraks of Baramba, Tigaria and
the adjoining parts of Cuttack describe themselves as Buddhists.[280]
Their name is the modern equivalent of Sravaka and they apparently
represent an ancient Buddhist community which has become a sectarian
caste. They have little knowledge of their religion but meet once a
year in the cave temples of Khandagiri, to worship a deity called
Buddhadeva or Caturbhuja. All their ceremonies commence with the
formula _Ahimsa parama dharma_ and they respect the temple of Puri,
which is suspected of having a Buddhist origin.

Nagendranath Vasu has published some interesting details as to the
survival of Buddhist ideas in Orissa.[281] He traces the origin of
this hardy though degraded form of Mahayanism to Ramai Pandit,[282] a
tantric Acarya of Magadha who wrote a work called Sunya Purana which
became popular. Orissa was one of the regions which offered the
longest resistance to Islam, for it did not succumb until 1568. A
period of Sivaism in the tenth and eleventh centuries is indicated by
the temples of Bhuvaneshwar and other monuments. But in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries the reigning dynasty were worshippers of
Vishnu and built the great temples at Puri and Konarak, dedicated to
Jagannatha and Surya-narayana respectiv