Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/188

142 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY came to Tamluk, or Tamralipti, where he stayed two years. When he left Tamralipti in a large ship for the south-west, he appears to have reckoned himself, though he was yet to spend two years in Ceylon, as already on the return journey.

The journey, as he describes it, constitutes an abstract of all that concerns Buddhism, and quietly ignores everything else in the country. "Brahmans and heretics" is Fa-Hian's comprehensive term for Hinduism in all its non-Buddhistic phases. We are able to gather a great deal nevertheless about the state of the country from his pages. In the first place we learn —as we do with still greater emphasis later from Hiouen Tsang —that to a learned Chinese, who had made an exhaustive study of Buddhism in Gandhara, and the kingdoms of the north-west frontier, India proper, or "India of the Middle," as he calls it, was still the country in which to seek for original and authentic images. Traversing Gandhara, Swat, Darada, Udyana, Takshasila, Purushapura, and Nagara (probably Kabul), it was not in any of these, but in Tamralipti that our traveller spent two years copying books and painting images. Again; already, at the time of Fa-Hian's visit, the old city of Rajgir, he tells us, is "entirely desert and uninhabited." It follows that the carvings and statuary in which to this day that site is rich are to a great extent of a school of sculpture which had grown, flourished, and decayed prior to A.D. 400. This in itself is a fact of immense importance. We constantly find in the travels that sacred places