Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/103

76 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY It is a land of the worship of Miri-Amma, the Earth-Mother, in her symbols of the neeni and the pointed stone. There are temples of Hanuman too here and there. But though I found a Brahman chanting the worship of Satyanarayan in his own house on the full-moon night I saw no shrines to Shiva or Vishnu. This bo-ix^o. on the Ajanta road may have sheltered a friars' dharmsala in Buddhistic ages. Here at this gate Hiouen Tsang and his train, in the middle of the seventh century, may have stopped to pay toll or to rest, on their way to or from the abbey, four miles distant. And the ^(?-tree, growing here beside the neem, may seem to the spirit of the place, with the memories it recalls of the peopled cloisters of twelve hundred years ago, a memento of what is a comparatively recent incident in the long long story of the land.

Buddhism might well be divided historically by the students into the Rajgir, the Pataliputra, and the Takshasila periods. Or we might choose for the names of our periods those monarchs who were the central figures of each of these epochs. At Rajgir these would be Bimbisara and his son Ajatasatru, at Pataliputra Asoka, and at Takshasila Kanishka, the second sovereign of the Kushan empire. The epochs thus named would also be coterminous with the dates of the three great