of the tongues then spoken in Hindustan, the language in which the Buddhist Canon was composed before it was found necessary to translate it into the sacred language of the Brahmans, Sanskrit.1THE darkness enveloping the past of India is partly due to our ignorance, and archaeology will gradually dispel it to some extent. But it is also due to the nature of the Indian world. In that amalgam of diverse races and tongues, the most heterogeneous traditions arose and endured, and were never brought into unity. History is impossible except for united peoples. In India history is reduced to unconnected genealogies. Each caste, each sect or racial stock, each literature has or may have its independent tradition, the lucidity of which depends on the degree of culture to which it has risen. The highest culture belongs to the priestly caste, but that caste, which has for its heritage the understanding and religious exploitation of the Vedas, devotes itself to speculation on abstract technicalities, and only very reluctantly reflects all the confusion of the life around it. Political power lies with another caste, the nobles; but history is usually subservient to the political power, preserving the memory of its great achievements in order to glorify it. It is only by chance that the other elements of the population have their history, and it is the history which one would expect from a minority cast back on itself and making itself the centre of the world.
So we find in India a multitude of annals but not the materials of a history, for it was only at intervals that unity, religious, political, or social, was imposed on some vast portion of the Indian world. But there is a further difficulty: thought in this country seems to have a distaste for history. The exact details of human happenings interest it no more than the laws of nature; later we shall have to determine some of the causes which have produced this bent of mind. Lacking any notion of historical objectivity comparable to our own, the Hindus blend imagination with facts, and their historians are usually poets. The result is a bewildering uncertainty about the period in which one should place the really important milestones of the last three thousand years. The dates of Asoka and Kanishka, though no longer as uncertain as they were twenty-five years ago, are still suspect or approximative, and we should never be able to determine them exactly if we had to rely on evidence of Indian origin. Religious books, great deeds, and the origin of traditions are placed by the natives of India in a far distant and accordingly impressive past. European criticism places most of the dates late, for, in virtue of a wise principle, which, however, is likewise apt to beget errors, it refuses to admit the truth of any fact until the oldest dated document vouching for it has come to light. The truth must often lie somewhere between these extreme interpretations, one of which is very arbitrary while the other errs from excess of caution. But the most baffling thing is that in this Indian world, apart from events properly so called—a reign or a battle—most factors, such as institutions, doctrines, or the development of literary works, hardly allow of strict dating. Everything is older than the first instance in which its existence is observed, and everything lasts long after the time when it appears to come to an end. We must accept the fact that among peoples which had not the same rhythm of life as ourselves, which had infinitely less desire to innovate unceasingly and had not our pre-established sense of a constant and universal evolution, distinctions of time are of less importance than they are in our own civilization.
At all events, it is to the West that India will owe the reconstruction of her history. It could never have been done without the impartiality which European scholarship brings to such a subject and the objective knowledge, so important to us, supplied by the non-Indian sources for Indian history. These foreign sources are chiefly Greek and Chinese, but the archaeological and linguistic exploration of Central Asia has brought to light unexpected information, thanks to which the historical as well as the geographical unity of Eurasia is revealed.
The first definite date in Indian history is that of the Macedonian descent on the Indus in 826 B.C. We know, however, that the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus (558-529) on the ruins of the Semitic empire of Assyria had extended to the Punjab in the reign of Darius (521-485). This was hardly a foreign conquest, so much did the two branches of the Aryans still have fundamentally in common. Yet the event had very great consequences, some religious, if it is true, as one feels, that there was some connection between the development of Buddhism and Jainism and the Iranian reformation of Zoroaster, and others cultural, since it gave the country a writing, namely Kharoshthi, the Aramaic script used by the scribes of the Great King.
Two early events of a purely Indian character to which we should try to give dates are the beginnings of Buddhism and of Jainism. Let us see why their dates cannot be fixed exactly, but how they can be established approximately. If we take the two traditions separately, we find that Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, died in 528 B.C.; but in that case he could not have preached at the same time as Buddha, who, according to the writings of his sect, died about 480. The date of the Nirvana of Buddha is placed by the Ceylon Chronicles in the year 218 before Asoka, but the exact date of the Asoka's accession (in the third century) is not known. European scholars have proposed 487 or 477 for the Nirvana and 477 or 467 for the death of Mahavira. An inscription of Kharavela, King of Kalinga (middle of the second century B.C.), discovered in the cave of Hathigumpha, was held by Vincent Smith 1 to imply earlier dates, and so to justify the Jain tradition mentioned above, on the ground that it makes Mahavira and Buddha contemporaries of Kings Bimbisara and Ajatasatru, the latter of whom reigned from 554 to 527. But the inscription is badly damaged and its interpretation is very doubtful. We have no strong grounds for denying that Buddha, who lived eighty years, was born about 560 and died about 480.
The sixth century before our era, in the course of which the two anti-Brahrnanical "heresies" arose almost simultaneously, at the time when the Persian Empire was stretching out towards India,2 was without any doubt a decisive epoch. Without going so far as to say, with Sir George Grierson, that the Kauravas of the epic represent orthodoxy while the Pañchalas stand for tendencies outside the priesthood, we can take it for certain that Brahmanism was at the time passing through a crisis, and that in particular the Pandavas with their roughness and the Kauravas with their diplomacy bear witness to cultures of unequal refinement or to different mentalities.1 The crisis seems to have been due both to foreign influence and to the spread of the Aryans further and further eastwards down the Ganges. The centre of the Indian world, passing from the Punjab to Kurukshetra, the region contained between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, grew until it embraced the whole of Madhyadesa, the "Middle Country" of the immense river-basin, corresponding to the modern United Provinces, from Delhi to Benares. Kosala (Oudh), Videha, Magadha, and the country of the Angas (northern, southern, and eastern Bihar respectively) assume an increasing importance, and it is there that the torch of Buddhism will be lit, as against the Kuru and Pañchala country, the home of Brahmanism.
This period is filled by the rivalry of two kingdoms, Kosala and Magadha. The power of Kosala was acquired in wars against Kasi (Benares), which was conquered by King Kamsa. From the seventh century Magadha was ruled by the house of Sisunaga. The fifth king of that line, Bimbisara or Srenika (582-554, according to Vincent Smith), is claimed by both Jains and Buddhists as one of their sect. He conquered the Angas and built his capital at Rajagriha (Rajgir). He was probably murdered by his son Ajatasatru, the Kunika of the Jains (554-527), although there is reason to doubt the truth of the Buddhist story that the parricide was committed at the instigation of Devadatta, Buddha's wicked cousin.2 This Ajatasatru, after a first victory in his war on Prasenajit (Pasenadi) of Kosala, was captured by him, and then was set at liberty and received his daughter in marriage. This did not prevent him from afterwards defeating Kosala and taking possession of it. He built a fort which was one day to become an imperial city, Pataliputra (Patna).
The absorption by Magadha of Kosala, which occupied a central position on the Ganges, and its subsequent conquest of the Anga country near the delta show a steady eastward shift of the political axis in early Buddhist times. These states had been created shortly after a great colonizing movement on the part of the Aryan invaders, who had won ground from the jungle no less than from the coloured inhabitants. In such regions Brahmanism had only recently been introduced and was not deeply rooted, and that is doubtless why they took so readily to Buddhism. We should note, too, that a drive on a smaller scale towards the Deccan had carried Aryan culture to the southern confines of the Ganges basin—among the Vamsas or Vatsas, whose capital, Kausambi, must have been on the lower Yamuna, and in the upper valleys of the southern tributaries of that river, about the sources of the Charmanvati, where the kingdom of Avanti had been founded. The capital of that state, Ujjayini (Ujjain) seems to have been the birthplace of Pali, that of the tongues then spoken in Hindustan, the language in which the Buddhist Canon was composed before it was found necessary to translate it into the sacred language of the Brahmans, Sanskrit.1
The Buddhism which developed in this south-western corner of the Indian world had had its birth on the northern border. The region lying east of Kosala between the Himalayan heights and the Ganges contained, in contrast to the huge monarchical states mentioned above, a quantity of small republics, born of independent clans. The confederation of the Vrijis (Vajjians) consisted of eight states, the chief of which, that of the Lichchhavis, had its capital at Vaisali. There were two groups of Mallas, with towns at Kusinagara and Pava. The city of the Sakyas, on the border of modern Nepal, was Kapilavastu; they were nominally rather than effectively subject to Kosala. In this state of at most a million inhabitants Buddha was born, the "Sage of the Sakyas" (Sakyamuni). The name of this people is like Śaka, the Indian name of a Scythian people which was settled between the upper Indus and the Oxus and was at that time part of the Persian Empire,2 and would invade India in the first century of our era. Various indications suggest an affinity, which is geographically plausible, between these clans and the population of Tibet— the exposure of the dead on trees, the fact that the first King of Tibet came of the family of a Lichchhavi named Sakya, and the racial types portrayed in the sculptures of Bharhut and Sañchi (about 200 B.C.). This was enough to convince Vincent Smith that the environment in which Buddha was born was Mongolian, just as the Gurkha hillmen and Tibetans are connected with the Mongols.1 Certainly there was little that was Aryan in that environment.
What we know of the Gangetic states of the sixth and fifth centuries comes from the literatures of the country— Brahman works in Sanskrit, Buddhist in Pali (in Ceylon) or Sanskrit (in Nepal), and Jain in Magadhi, Sauraseni (at Muttra), or Maharashtri (in the Maratha country). Their indifference to history may be judged from the fact that if we were confined to these sources we should not even know that Darius reduced Sind to a satrapy.
Here we turn to Persian sources. The Behistun Inscription, apart from the fifth column, was written between 520 and 518, and it does not mention Sind among the possessions of Darius. On the other hand, that country appears in the lists of provinces given on two tablets from Persepolis (518-515) and the inscriptions of Naksh-i-Rustam (shortly after 515). Here is definite information of great value. For later ages Persian coins, followed by Greek, and Greek science bring their light.
At first Greek science worked for the Great King. The cruise of Scylax, who studied the Indus from the point where it becomes navigable to its mouth and afterwards sailed to Egypt by the Indian Ocean, must have been meant to serve the ambition of Darius. The explorer brought back yarns like that about the Slciapodes, who shaded themselves from the sun with their feet, but he also provided Persian policy with much useful geographical information. Hecatæos of Miletus, another Greek of Asia Minor, distinguished various
peoples of Gandhara, the eastern border of Iran, and the upper Indus, but he started the mistake of identifying the Indians and the Ethiopians (end of the sixth century). A hundred years later (415-897) Ctesias of Cnidos, who was physician to Darius II and Artaxerxes Mnemon for seventeen years, described the races and products of the country, but was uncritical and retailed much nonsense. Herodotus (about 450), on the other hand, distinguishes what was fabulous and gives a very rational account of India as being made up of many peoples; unfortunately he had only heard of those lying nearest to Persia, and knew nothing of the Ganges or the country south of the desert beyond the Indus.
Persian rule lasted in Sind, varying in effectiveness, until the decline of the Achæmenids in the fourth century, but their sway ceased to extend after the defeat sustained by Xerxes (486-465) in Greece, where a corps of Indian infantry served. The men who saved Attica may perhaps have indirectly saved Gangetic India from invasion by the Great King.
We have little information about that India in the first century after the death of Buddha. Ajatasatru was succeeded by his son Darsaka (527—503, according to Smith), who is mentioned in the Svapna-Vāsavadattā of Bhasa, and his grandson Udayin or Udaya (503-470), who built Kusumapura on the Ganges, near Pataliputra. The Sisunaga dynasty ends with two princes of whom we only know the names, Nandivardhana and Mahanandin. Then a palace intrigue gave the throne to Mahapadma about 413; this king and his eight sons form the dynasty of the nine Nandas, whose wealth and glory are extolled both in the Purāṇas and by the Greek writers. They do not seem to to have belonged either to the priestly or to the noble caste, and this circumstance doubtless favoured the propagation of anti-Brahmanic heresies in a Magadha which grew ever greater, swallowing up its old rivals one after another. There was no sign of a reaction until, with the aid of his minister, Chanakya, of the Brahman caste, Chandragupta overthrew the last Nanda in 322.
1 LXXIVa, 48, 52.
2 The Persian conquest of the Indus took place about 518, but Cyrus had previously reached and occupied Gandhara.
1 LXXIII, 266, 275.
2 Perhaps the Buddhists presented events in this manner simply for the sake of the moral story of a remorse-stricken monarch taking refuge with the Master and being admitted to communion with him (Vinaya, ii, 190; Digha, i, 861).
1 Przyluski, CCVII, 330.
2 For the Sacae (Sakai) of Herodotus, the inhabitants of Saeastene (Seistan), who were reduced to subjection by Darius I and were allies of Darius III against Alexander, see LXXIII, 338, 341. They must have been very slightly Iranianized. See below, Chap. IV.
1 LXXIVa, 47.
