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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c19.s7: The First Great Gap

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c19.s7

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English

The First Great Gap

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The passages referred to above tell us a good deal of the political condition of India during the Buddha's life, and enable us to draw certain conclusions as to previous conditions for some time before the birth of the Buddha. There are also one or two passages in the Canon which must refer to dates after the Buddha's death. Perhaps the most remarkable is the verse in the Pārāyana (a poem now included in the Sutta Nipāta) which, referring to a time when the Buddha was alive, calls Vesālī a Magadha city⁸. Now we know from the *Mahā-parinibbāna Suttanta* that (at the time when that very composite work was put together in its present shape) Vesālī and the whole Vajjian confederacy was considered to have remained independent of Magadha up to the end of the Buddha's life¹. If therefore the reading in our text of the Pārāyana be correct, the expression 'Magadha city' must be taken in the sense of 'now a Magadha city,' and as alluding to the conquest of Vesālī as described above, p. 185. But it is apparently the only passage in the Canon which takes cognisance of that event. Again in the Aṅguttara we have a *sutta*² in which a king Muṇḍa, dwelling at Pāṭaliputta, is so overwhelmed with grief at the death of his wife Bhaddā that he refuses to have the cremation carried out according to custom. But after a simple talk with a *thera* named Nārada he recovers his self-possession. We learn from the chronicles that King Muṇḍa was the grandson of Ajātasattu and began to reign about the year 40 a.b.³ It is a fair inference from this episode that Pāṭaliputta had already at that time become the capital of Magadha. Nārada is said to have lived in the Kukkuṭārāma, no doubt consisting of a few huts or cottages scattered under the trees in the pleasaunce so called. It was a well-known resting-place for the Buddhist Wanderers, and Asoka is said to have built a monastery on the site of it⁴.

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⁸ *Sutta Nipāta*, 1013.

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¹ *Dialogues*, ii, 78–80.

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² *A.* iii, 57–63.

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³ *Mahāvaṃsa* iv, 2, 3; *Divyāvadāna* 369.

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⁴ *S.* v, 171; *A.* v, 342; *M.* i, 350; *Divy.* 368, 434; T. Watters, *On Yuan Chwang*, ii, 98, 99.

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The long poem of old Pārāpariya, a *laudator temporis acti*, on the decay of religion since the death of the Master⁵, adds nothing to political history. So also the edifying ghost-story recorded in the Peta-vatthu (ii, 10) can only, at most, give us the name of a sort of public-works officer at Kosambī shortly after the Buddha's death.

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⁵ *Thera-gāthā*, 920–948.

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These few details are all that we can glean from the Theravāda Canon concerning the history of India for more than a hundred and sixty years. And the chroniclers and commentators do not add very much more. They have preserved indeed a dynastic list of the kings of Magadha with regnal years of most of the kings. The list is as follows:

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| Ajātasattu | reigned | 32 years |
| Udāyi-bhadda | ” | 16 ” |
| .Anuruddha / Muṇḍa | ” | 8 ” |
| Nāgadāsaka | ” | 24 ” |
| Susunāga | ” | 18 ” |
| Kālāsoka | ” | 28 ” |
| His 10 sons | ” | 22 ” |
| Nine Nandas | ” | 22 ” |
| Chandagutta | ” | 24 ” |

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There are other lists extant, not so complete, and not always with the regnal years given, in Jain, Hindu, or Buddhist Sanskrit works. They have been carefully compared and discussed by W. Geiger, in a very reasonable and scholarly way¹. He comes to the conclusion that, on the whole, the above list is better supported than the others. This may well be the case; but at the same time it must be confessed that the numbers seem much too regular, with their multiples of six and eight, to be very probably in accordance with fact. And we are told nothing at all of any of the other kingdoms in India, or even of the acts of the kings thus named, or of the extent of the growing kingdom of Magadha during any of their reigns. The list gives us only the bare bones of the skeleton of the history of one district.

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¹ *Mahāvaṃsa* (English translation), Intr. pp. xl-xlvi.

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