Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/76

BEHAR 57 flashes and side-gleams, as it were, can we gather even the faintest idea.

It is partly the good and partly the bad fortune of Buddhistic movements in India that, from their association with an overwhelming individualised religious idea, they appear to us as a sudden invention of the human mind in such and such a year. We do not sufficiently realise that they, together with all the words and symbols associated with them, must have been taken from a pre-existent stock of customs and expressions already long familiar to the people amongst whom Buddhism grew up. We imagine the great Chandra Gupta to have been the first monarch in India of an organ- ised empire, but the words of Buddha himself, "They build the stupa over a Chakravarti Raja — a suzerain monarch — at a place where four roads meet," show that the people of that early period were familiar enough wAh the drama of the rise and fall of empires, and that the miracle of Chandra Gupta's retirement to Pataliputra, thence to rule as far as the Punjab and the Indian Ocean, was in fact no miracle at all, since the India of his time was long used to the centralised organisation of roads, daks, and supplies, and to the maintenance of order and discipline.

The peculiar significance of Behar in the comity of the Indian peoples rises out of its position on the frontier-line between two opposing spiritual influences. To this day it is the meeting-place of Hinduistic and Mussulman civilisations. Sikh and