The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7.7

c7.7

How Buddhism fared under the Greek princes of the North-West during the second century B.C. is largely a matter of inference and surmise. For among the myriads of Buddhist monuments and antiquities that have survived until the present day there is not one that can be referred with certainty to Greek authorship in the second century before our era. Indeed, the only positive bit of information about this Greek period that we possess is the story told in the Milindapañha about king Menander and his conversion to Buddhism by Nāgasena. Though the story may be largely apocryphal, there is no reason for doubting its substantial truth. The Greeks were very open-minded about religious matters; and the teaching of Śākyamuni, by its essentially ethical character, by its logical reasoning, and by the stress it laid on free will and the observance of the golden mean, was bound to make a strong appeal to the Greek intellect, notwithstanding that it was based on a view of life altogether more negative and joyless than the Greek. Moreover, from a political point of view Menander must have had the strongest reasons for identifying himself with the Buddhist Church in its struggle against their common enemy, the Śunga king Puṣyamitra, and the violent Brahmanical reaction championed by him, which had led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist monasteries in the Eastern Panjāb.