THE TRIUMPH AND DECLINE OF BUDDHISM.

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an empire which included Sind, part of the North-West Provinces, the Punjab, and Afghánistán.

§ 6. Greek Accounts of the Ancient Hindus.-The most striking points about the Greek accounts of the state of India at this time are :

(1) Their general agreement with the accounts in Manu; (2) the little change that has since occurred during two thousand years; (3) the favourable impression which the manners and condition of the Hindus made on the Greeks. The men are described as braver than any Asiatics whom the Greeks had yet met, and singularly truthful. They are said to be sober, temperate, and peaceable; remarkable for simplicity and integrity; honest, and averse to litigation. The practice of widows becoming satí had already been introduced, but probably only partially, for it is spoken of by Aristobulus as one of the extraordinary local peculiarities which he heard of at Taxila.

CHAPTER VI.

THE TRIUMPH AND DECLINE OF BUDDHISM.

§ 1. The spread of Buddhism. § 2. The Buddhist Scriptures. § 3. The Empire of Magadha. § 4. The Decline of Buddhism. § 5. The Chinese Pilgrims. § 6. Jainism.

§ 1. The Spread of Buddhism.-We now take up the thread of the history from the death of Buddha, in B.C. 544. Before that event it is probable that a great part of Bihár and the neighbouring provinces belonged to the new religion, one king of Magadha having been converted by Buddha himself. Thence the Buddhist doctrines rapidly spread into other parts of India. Missionaries penetrated through Nepál into Thibet, Central Asia, and China; by sea they went, first to Ceylon, and thence to Siam, Burma, and other parts of Further India; and all these countries have remained Buddhist to the present day,

though the religion has for many centuries ceased to flourish in the land of its origin.

A Buddhist Council, or meeting of the chief followers of the faith, was held shortly after the death of Buddha; and a second followed it.

Both of these were held in the realm of Magadha; the former at Rájgriha, the ancient capital, and the latter at Pátaliputra, which had in the meantime taken the place of Rájgriha as capital. The proceedings of these Councils were doubtless conducted in Mágadhí, then the vernacular language of Bihár; this was one of the spoken forms of the written Sanskrit which are known as Prakrit; and it was doubtless identical (or nearly so) with the Páli, which has alway been the sacred language of the Southern Buddhists, those of Ceylon, Burma, and Siam.

But the most important and famous of these Councils was the third, which was held in the seventeenth year of King Asoka of Magadha. This was in the year 245 B.C. We shall see in the next section, in which we shall give 'some account of the great Mauryan dynasty to which Asoka belonged, the reason why we are able to fix, with something like certainty, the dates of the chief events of this period of Indian history. This Council was held at the royal city of Pátaliputra ; and Buddhism was publicly proclaimed as the State religion of the empire of Magadha, then paramount throughout India.

A fourth Council was held in Kashmír a few years after the Christian era; it was held under the auspices of the great king Kanishka or Kanerki (see § 4), whose coins prove him to have reigned until A.D. 40.

§ 2. The Buddhist Scriptures.-At one of the two earlier councils the Buddhist canon of sacred books seems to have been drawn up. At the third Council, that of Asoka, it was revised and reformed. In the following year Mahendra, the great apostle of Ceylon, took it with him to that island-doubtless in the Mágadhi or Páli language, though they were not written out in that lan

guage in Ceylon until some centuries later; and this is the version now regarded as sacred by the Southern Buddhists, which has been translated into the languages of Ceylon and of Further India. At the fourth Council, that of Knishka, another version of the canon was made, probably in Kashmirí Sanskrit, a much purer form than most of the Prákrits of the plains of India; and this is the sacred version of the Northern Buddhists. Of this version a copy in the original Sanskrit has been obtained from Nepál; it has been translated into Thibetan (the translation being in one hundred volumes!), Chinese, Mongolian, Kalmuck, and other languages of Central and Eastern Asia.

The canon is called the Tripitaka (in Páli, Tipitaka), or 'the Three Baskets.' The first pitaka, or division, called the Sutra-pitaka, may be considered the gospel of Buddha; for it consists of the utterances and discourses of Buddha himself, and his conversations with his hearers. The second is the Vinaya-pitaka, which contains rules of religious discipline and conduct; and the third is the Abhidharma-pitaka, dogmatic and philosophical discussions.

§ 3. The Empire of Magadha.-We have already had occasion to speak once or twice of the great empire of Magadha, or Bihár, which was the first that brought all India under one umbrella.' The capital of these kings was at first at Rájgriha; and subsequently it was at Pátaliputra, on the Ganges, now called Patna. We have mentioned a king of Magadha who was one of the converts of the great Buddha; and another whose power and riches attracted the envy of Alexander the Great. The name of this latter king was Nanda, called the Rich, notorious for his cruelty and his avarice. His people were disaffected; and his fall (which forms the subject of the plot of the great Sanskrit drama called Mudrá-rákshasa) was at length compassed chiefly by the instrumentality of a Bráhman named Chánakya. Nanda was succeeded by the famous CHANDRAGUPTA, of the Maurya race; and this Mauryan dynasty occupies the most prominent place in the

Buddhist history of India. The legends about Chandragupta are conflicting; but it appears that he was a man of low origin, who succeeded in mastering the Punjab after the retreat of Alexander the Great, and ultimately possessed himself of Nanda's empire in Magadha.

He has been identified, beyond any reasonable doubt, with the Sandracottus mentioned by Arrian and other classical historians of Alexander's campaign, and later on as negotiating a treaty with Seleucus Nicator of Syria through the ambassador Megasthenes. This identification is of the highest historical importance, as it is the one link that connects early Indian history with the chronology of Greece; in fact, everything in Indian chronology depends on this one date. Chandragupta reigned for twenty-four years, from 315 to 291 B.C. His treaty with Seleucus resulted in his marrying the Hellenic daughter of the Syrian king; and during his prosperous reign he conquered a great portion of Northern India.

The conquests of Chandragupta were continued by his son Bindusára; but the greatest monarch of the old dynasty, and perhaps the greatest monarch of ancient times in India, was Chandragupta's grandson, Asoka. He ascended the throne of Magadha about the year 263 B.C., and reigned for about forty years, till 223 B.c. The great Buddhist Council of 245 B.C., held under his auspices, has already been mentioned. He is said to have maintained 64,000 Buddhist priests in his palace, and to have erected 84,000 stupas (topes, or Buddhist relic-temples) throughout India. Many inscriptions made by order of Asoka have been recently discovered in various parts of India, and are commonly known as the Edicts of Asoka. They are in the Páli language; one found at Kapur-di-giri, in Afghánistán, being in the Bactrian Páli character, written from right to left-all the others in the Indian Páli, from left to right. These inscriptions show a great tenderness for animal life, and are otherwise Buddhist in character. They are clearly the moral precepts of a Buddhist king; and though they

contain nothing absolutely peculiar to that religion, and though the name of Asoka is not mentioned in them-the king being always called Piyadási (the Páli form of the Sanskrit priyadarsi, 'the beautiful ')—yet Buddhist tradition has most fully identified them as the work of Asoka. They show that his kingdom extended at least to Orissa and the eastern parts of the Deccan, on the one side of India, and to the west of Gujarát, and to Afghánistán and the extreme north of the Punjab, on the other side.

§ 4. The Decline of Buddhism.-The Mauryan line of kings reigned for more than a hundred years in Bihár; and was succeeded by other powerful Buddhist dynasties in succession; and Buddhism was flourishing in Magadha as late as the seventh century A.D., when its holy places were visited by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiouen Thsang. It is probable, however, that after the fall of the great Mauryan dynasty of Buddhists the religion of the Bráhmans began gradually to revive throughout India. Though Buddhism existed in India until the twelfth century A.D. —that is, for more than 1,300 years longer-and often was the religion of powerful kings and great States; yet on the whole it declined slowly from this time, about 200 B.C. While the great city of Kanauj had always remained devoted to Bráhmanism, the other cities and kingdoms of India one by one returned to a form of their earlier religion.

Of most of these Buddhist dynasties we have nothing but an occasional name of a king, with at best barely an approximation to a date, and very rarely some slight indication of the extent of his jurisdiction. These meagre particulars are gathered chiefly from coins and inscriptions, used to corroborate or elucidate the hazy legends of such semi-historical works as the Rájá-tarangini of Kashmír, and the Mahawanso of Ceylon; or from references to current history in the travels of Chinese pilgrims.

One king, whose name has been preserved to us in this unsatisfactory way, appears to have possessed widely ex