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THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA 107 After Shiva, however, the attention of sculptors in Magadha was more and more concentrated on the image of Narayana. It is probably an error to think of this as rigidly fixed in form. An unyielding convention is always the end of an evolution, never the beginning. And like Shiva in the west, so also Narayana in Magadha is connected with Buddha by a long series of gradual modifications. Sometimes we can detect Chinese influence in a particular statue. With the rise of the Guptas and the necessity of a gold coinage, it would seem as if Chinese minters had been employed, just as in his time and capital Kanishka had undoubtedly employed Greeks for the same purpose. There is no difficulty in imagining that such Chinese workmen might sometimes be employed on a statue. The fact that the form itself, however, was not of their initiating is best proved by the gradual transitions which connect it with the image of Buddha. So much has been said, so lightly, about the impossibility of Indian inventiveness, that it is necessary to guard from time to time against petty misconception. Another point of the same kind arises with regard to Hinduism itself. It may be well to say that Buddhism did not originate the ideas which in their totality make up Hinduism. Indeed Buddhism was itself the result of those ideas. But by its limmense force of organisation, it achieved such a unification of the country and the people, that it forced upon the Brahmans the orcranisation of Hinduism.