The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c20.17

v1.c20.17

This brief conspectus of the conditions obtaining in India during the time to which we have to assign the Sūtras, epics, and legal works will show that other influences than those with which we have been dealing hitherto are to be expected; and these are indeed found, but not to such an extent as might have been anticipated. These influences are indeed to be traced rather in the general enlargement of vision of the writers than in specific details. The simple village life with which for the most part the Sūtras are concerned, the government of a circumscribed district by a local rāja, are gradually exchanged for the life reflected from large towns and imperial power. Though this is more noticeable in the epics, it may be detected in the later Sūtras and again in the still later law-books. During this period the power of Buddhism increased and then, reaching its culmination, began to wane. The world of India by the second century before Christ was already becoming indifferent to the teaching of Buddhism and was being reabsorbed into the great permanent cults of Vishṇu and Çiva, with which in spirit Buddhism itself began to be amalgamated. The Brāhman priests reasserted themselves; animal sacrifices, forbidden by Açoka, were no longer under the royal ban; and with this open expression of the older cult the whole system of Brāhmanism revived, fostered alike by the temple priests and their ritualism and by the philosophers, who regarded Buddhism as both a detestable heresy and a false interpretation of life.