The Age of the Imperial Guptas c7.17

c7.17

This final redaction of the Purāṇas was one of the minor results of the activities of the Brāhmaṇas of Northern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Their principal work was the reform of Hinduism or the Orthodox Brāhmanical religion from the state of torpor into which it had fallen during the long rule of the barbarians. The rise of Northern Buddhism during the reign of Kāṇiṣka I and the creation of a pantheon of superior and inferior deities in it had constituted that religion into a very formidable rival of Orthodox Hinduism. Deprived of Imperial patronage during the long centuries which followed the dismemberment of the Śuṅga empire, the priestly classes were unable to retard the total break-up of castes or to do anything which would make the now unintelligible religion of the Vedic Aryans more acceptable to the masses. We do not know much about the condition of the Orthodox Brahmanical religion during the five centuries which intervened between the fall of the Imperial Śuṅgas and the rise of the Guptas. The inscriptions of the Scythian period are in the majority of cases Jaina and Buddhist and if epigraphical evidence is to be relied upon solely for the reconstruction of the history of our sacred literature then we must admit that Brahmanism was not a popular or flourishing religion in Mathurā or the Western part of the United Provinces. The majority of inscriptions discovered in the district of Mathurā and its immediate neighbourhood prove that more than ninety per cent of the sacred edifices in that locality were Buddhist and Jaina from the 1st century B.C. till the 4th century A.D. It is true that one inscription belonging to the year 24 of the reign of Vāsiṣka records the erection of sacrificial posts for the great Aśvamedha sacrifice, but this is a solitary instance. Inscriptions concerning the Orthodox Brahmanical religion or deities are very few in number and indicate that the public patronage of this religion had almost ceased.