Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/809

785 HISTORY.] The Kanishka commentaries were written in the San skrit language, perhaps because the Kashmir and northern priests who formed his council belonged to isolated Aryan colonies, which had been little influenced by the growth of the Indian vernacular dialects. In this way Kanishka and his Kashmir council (1 40 A.D.) became in some degree, to the northern or Tibetan Buddhists what Asoka and his Patna council (241 B.C.) had been to the Buddhists of Ceylon and the south. The missionary impulse given by Asoka quickly bore fruit In the year after his great council at Fatna his son Malundo c irried Asoka s version of the Buddhist with him a band of fellow missionaries ; and soon afterwards his sister, the princess Sanghamitta, who had entered the order, followed with a company of nuns. It was not, however, till six hundred years later (410-432 A.D.) that the holy books were rendered into Pali, the sacred language of the southern Buddhists. About the same time missionaries from Ceylon finally established the faith in Burmah (450 A.D.). The Burmese themselves assert that two Buddhist preachers landed in Pegu as early as 207 B.C. Some indeed place their arrival just after the Patnd council (244 B.C.), and point out the ruined city of Tha-ton, between the Tsi-tang and Salwin estuaries, as the scene of their pious labours. Siam was converted to Buddhism in G38 A.D. ; Java received its missionaries direct from India between the 5th and the 7th centuries, and spread the faith to Bali and Sumatra. While southern Buddhism was thus wafted across the ocean, another stream of missionaries had found its way by Central Asia into China, Their first arrival in that empire is said to date from the 2d century B.C., although it was not till 65 A.D. that Buddhism there became an established religion. The Gneco-Bactrian kingdoms in the Punjab and beyond it afforded a favourable soil for the faith. The Scythian dynasties that succeeded them accepted it, and the earliest remains which recent discovery has unearthed in Afghan istan are Buddhist. Kanishka s council, soon after the commencement of the Christian era, gave a fresh impetus to the faith. Tibet, south Central Asia, and China lay along the great missionary routes of northern Buddhism ; the Kirghis are said to have carried Buddhist settlements as far west as the Caspian ; on the east, the religion was introduced into the Korea in 372 A.D., and thence into Japan in 552. Buddhism never ousted Brahmanism from any large part of India. The two systems co-existed as popular religions during more than a thousand years (244 B.C. to about 800 ,,,. A.D.), and modern Hinduism is the joint product of both. Certain kings and certain eras were intensely Buddhistic ; but the continuous existence of Brahmanism is abundantly proved from the time of Alexander (327 B.C.) downwards. The historians who chronicled his march, and the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, who succeeded them (300 B.C.) in their literary labours, bear witness to the predominance of the old faith in the period immediately preceding Asoka. Inscriptions, local legends, Sanskrit literature, and the drama disclose the survival of Brahman influence during the next six centuries (244 B.C. to 400 A.D.). From 400 A.D. we have the evidence of the Chinese pilgrims, who toiled through Central Asia into India as the birthplace of their faith. Fa-Hiun entered India from Afghanistan, and journeyed down the whole Gangetic valley to the Bay of Bengal in 399-413 A.D. He found Brahman priests equally honoured with Buddhist monks, and temples to the Indian gods side by side with the religious houses of his own faith. Hwen Tsing also travelled to India from China by the Central Asia route, and has left a fuller record of the state of the two religions in the 7th century. His 785 journey extended from 629 to 645 A.D., and everywhere throughout India he found the two faiths eagerly competing for the suffrages of the people. By that time, indeed^ Brahmanism was beginning to assert itself at the expense of the other religion. The monuments of the great Buddhist monarchs, Asoka and Kanishka, confronted him from the time he neared the Punjab frontier ; but so also did the temples of Siva and his &quot; dread &quot; queen Bhima. Through out north-western India he found Buddhist convents and monks surrounded by &quot; swarms of heretics.&quot; The political power was also divided, although the Buddhist sovereigns predominated. A Buddhist monarch ruled over ten king doms in Afghanistan. At Peshawar the great monastery- built by Kanishka was deserted, but the populace remained faithful. In Kashmir king and people were devout Buddhists, under the teaching of five hundred monasteries and five thousand monks. In the country identified with Jaipur, on the other hand, the inhabitants were devoted to heresy and war. Buddhist influence in northern India seems, during the 7th century A.D., to have centred in the fertile doab or plain between the Jumna and the Ganges. At Kanauj (Kanyakubja), on the latter river, Hwen Tsang found a powerful Buddhist monarch, Siladitya, whose influence reached from the Punjab to north-eastern Bengal, and from the Himalayas to the Narbada river. There flourished one hundred Buddhist convents and ten thousand monks. But the king s eldest brother had been lately slain by a sovereign of eastern India, a hater of Buddhism ; and two hundred temples to the Brahman gods reared their heads under the protection of the devout Siladitya himself. This monarch seems to have been an Asoka of the 7th century A.D., and he practised with primitive vigour the two great Buddhist virtues of spreading of the faith and charity. The former he attempted by means of a general council in 634 A.D. Twenty-one tributary sovereigns attended, together with the most learned Brahman and Buddhist monks of their kingdoms. But the sole object of the con vocation was no longer the undisputed assertion of the Buddhist religion. It dealt with the two distinct phases of the religious life of India. First there was a discussion between the Buddhists and Brahmans, especially of the Sankhya and Vaiseshika schools, and then followed a dis pute between the two Buddhist sects who followed respec tively the northern and the southern canons, known as &quot; the greater and the lesser vehicle of the law.&quot; The rites of the populace were of as composite a character as the doctrines of their teachers. On the first day of the council a statue of Buddha was installed with great pomp ; on the second, an image of the sun-god ; on the third, a figure of Siva. Siladitya held a solemn distribution of his royal trea sures every five years. Hwen Tsang describes how on the plain near Allahabad, where the Ganges and the Jumna unite their waters, all the kings of the empire, and a vast multitude of people, were feasted for seventy-five days. Siladitya brought forth the stores of his palace, and gave them away to Brahmans and Buddhists, monks and heretics, without distinction. At the end of the festival he stripped off his jewels and royal raiment, gave them to the bystanders, and, like Buddha of old, put on the rags of a beggar. By this ceremony the monarch commemorated the Great Renunciation of the founder of the Buddhist faith, and at the same time practised the highest duty inculcated alike by the Buddhist and Brahmanicul religions, namely, almsgiving. Hwen Tsang describes a distribu tion on a smaller scale in the western kingdom of Valabhi (circa 630 A.D.). &quot; For seven days every year the king holds a great assembly at which he distributes to the multitude of recluses choice dishes, the three garments, medicine, fie seven precious things, and rare objects of XII. - on
 * V scriptures in the Magadhi language to Ceylon. He took