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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c24: Chapter XIII. The Purāṇas

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c24

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English

Contents

Chapter XIII. The Purāṇas

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THE Purāṇas, or collections of ‘old-world’ legends, contain the traditional genealogies of the principal ruling houses of the Middle Country. They are closely connected both in form and substance with the epics and law-books. All three varieties of literature are written in the same kind of verse and in the same kind of Sanskrit; and they have much of their subject-matter in common. Not isolated verses merely but long passages recur word for word in them all. They are all alike inheritors of the same stock of legendary and traditional lore; and, so far as the nature of their contents is concerned, it is not always possible to draw any hard and fast line of distinction between them. Thus from different points of view the Mahābhārata may be regarded, as indeed it regards itself, as an epic, a law-book, or a Purāṇa.

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Any old-world story may in fact be called a Purāṇa; but the term is specially applied to certain works which, in conformity with the classical definition, deal, or are supposed to deal, with the following five topics: (1) *Sarga*, the evolution of the universe from its material cause; (2) *Pratisarga*, the re-creation of the universe from the constituent elements into which it is merged at the close of each aeon (*kalpa*) or day in the life of the Creator, Brahmā; (3) *Vaṁça*, the genealogies of gods and rishis; (4) *Manvantara*, the groups of ‘great ages’ (*mahāyuga*) included in an aeon, in each of which mankind is supposed to be produced anew from a first father, Manu; (5) *Vaṁçānucharita*, the history of the royal families who rule over the earth during the four ‘ages’ (*yuga*) which make up one ‘great age.’

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With this ideal scheme none of the existing Purāṇas is in complete agreement. All differ from it in various degrees by defect or by excess; but, in spite of this, they profess generally to conform with the old definition, and are thus made to give a description of themselves which is no longer in accordance with the facts. It is evident, then, at the outset that their original form has been modified. Only seven out of the eighteen still retain the fifth section, which should contain an account of kings who have reigned during the historical period. For the purposes of political history all the rest are therefore without value.

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Orthodox Hinduism regards these works as of divine origin; and their framework is stereotyped in accordance with this view. The chief speaker is some ancient seer who has received the tradition through Vyāsa, who himself received it from the Creator. The narrative is introduced by a dialogue between the chief speaker and his audience, and is continued in the form of a series of reported dialogues between the characters of the stories told.

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Most commonly, though not invariably, the narrator is Lomaharshaṇa or his son, Ugraçravas. The former is called ‘the Sūta,’ and the latter ‘Sauti’ or ‘the Sūta’s son’—titles which clearly indicate that the traditional lore, out of which the Purāṇas have been fashioned, was of Kshatriya, not of Brāhman, origin; for the Sūtas, its custodians, were a mixed caste who were entrusted with various important functions in royal households. In the Brāhmaṇas the Sūta is the royal herald and minstrel, and possibly also ‘master of the horse.’ He is one of the king’s ‘jewels’ (*ratnin*) and ranks with the commander-in-chief of the army and other high officers of state; and in his character as herald he was inviolable. In the law-books he is described as the son of a Kshatriya by the daughter of a Brāhman. The Purāṇas say that he was born to sing the praises of princes and that he was entrusted with the care of the historical and legendary traditions; but they state definitely that he had no concern with the Vedas (*Vāyu Pur.*, I, 1, 26–28). In later times he appears as the king’s charioteer; but he still retains his exalted rank, and in the dramas he speaks Sanskrit—the sign of high birth or education—while the inferior characters speak some Prākrit dialect.

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In the interval between the Brāhmaṇas and the dramas the Sūta had evidently been deprived of some of the most important of his ancient functions; and this change in his fortunes reflects a change which had taken place in Indian society and in the character of the Purāṇas. In the heroic age, when the Sūta was the chronicler of kings, the Kshatriyas, as we gather from the Upanishads and from early Jain and Buddhist literature, occupied a position of considerable intellectual independence. But this position was not maintained. In India, as in medieval Europe, the priestly power eventually asserted its supremacy, and all the old Kshatriya literature was Brāhmanised. The record of the lineage of princes tended to disappear from the Purāṇas, and its place was taken by endless legends about holy places, or hymns in praise of the divinities who were worshipped there. The Purāṇas had passed from the Kshatriyas to the Brāhmans, from the royal bards to the priests who waited on temples and pilgrims' shrines—a class mentioned with contempt in the law-books (Manu, III, 152). But, in spite of this transference and the radical changes which it involved, some of the old terms and some fragments of the old literature still remained to testify to a state of things which had passed away.

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Thus the Purāṇas, like the Mahābhārata, have undergone a complete transformation. Just as the Mahābhārata, originally the story of a war, has been made into a Dharma Çāstra, the main object of which is to inculcate duty, so too the Purāṇas are no longer mere collections of ancient legends. Like the 'Lives of the Saints' they have been applied to purposes of edification. For them the kings of the earth have existed simply to point a moral—the vanity of human wishes:

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He who has heard of the races of the Sun and Moon, of Ikshvāku, Jahnu, Māndhātṛi, Sagara, and Raghu, who have all perished; of Yayāti, Nahusha, and their posterity, who are no more; of kings of great might, resistless valour, and unbounded wealth, who have been overcome by still more powerful Time, and are now only a tale: he will learn wisdom, and forbear to call either children, or wife, or house, or lands, or wealth, his own. (*Vishṇu Pur.*, trans. Wilson, IV, p. 240.)

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The chief object of the Purāṇas is to glorify Çiva or Vishṇu, the great divinities who, in their manifold forms, share the allegiance of India. They have become sectarian and propagandist, exalting their own particular deity at the expense of all others. In a word, they have become the scriptures of various forms of the later Hinduism, and bear to these the same relation that the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas bore to the older Brāhmanism. But while the scriptures of the ancient sacrificial religion have remained unaltered and have been protected from textual corruption by the elaborate devices of priestly schools, the Purāṇas have adapted themselves to the changes which have taken place in the social and religious life of the people, and their text has been perverted by generations of editors and transcribers.

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They are made up of elements old and new. However late they may appear in their present form—and some of them are said to have been altered in quite recent times—there can be no question that their main source is to be traced back to a remote antiquity. The ancient lore of the bards from which, like the epics, they are derived is known to the Atharvaveda (XV, 6, 11 f.)

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as a class of literature with the general title *Itihāsa-Purāṇa* ‘story and legend’; and both in the Upanishads (*Chhāndogya*, vii, 1 and 7) and in early Buddhist books (*Sutta Nipāta*, iii, 7) this literature is called the fifth Veda. It was in fact the Veda of the laity; and as such the epics and Purāṇas have been universally accepted all through the classical period even down to the present day.

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The attitude of modern scholarship towards these documents has varied at different times. In the early days of the study of Sanskrit in Europe they were accepted as historical. But it was soon evident that no satisfactory system of Indian chronology could be established by their aid alone; and for a long time scholars seem to have agreed to ignore their evidence unless when supported from other sources. After having been unduly appraised, the Purāṇas were unduly neglected. In recent years a reaction has set in, and there is a growing belief that these works are worthy of more serious attention than they have hitherto received. It has been shown that the historical information which they convey is not so untrustworthy as was formerly supposed. Dr Vincent Smith, for example, was able in 1902 (*Z.D.M.G.*, pp. 654, 658 ff.) to prove that both the dynastic list of the Andhra kings and the duration of the different reigns as stated in the Matsya Purāṇa are substantially correct.

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The critical study of the Purāṇas, which was inaugurated by Mr Pargiter’s *Dynasties of the Kali Age* (1913), is still in its infancy. When this important branch of literature has been examined by the methods which have been applied to the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas, there can be little doubt that valuable historical results will be obtained. The Purāṇas are confessedly partly legendary and partly historical. The descriptions of superhuman beings and of other worlds than this are glorified accounts of the unknown founded on the analogy of the known. They find their counterpart in that Christian Purāṇa, Milton’s *Paradise Lost*. The descriptions of ancient monarchs and of their realms are essentially historical. They may be compared to the Sagas and the medieval chronicles of Europe. They are the products of an imaginative and uncritical age in which men were not careful to distinguish fact from legend. It is the task of modern criticism to disentangle the two elements. Its first object should be to remove from the existing Purāṇas all later additions, and then from a comparison of their oldest portions to determine the relations in which they stand to one another, and thus, as far as possible, to restore their common tradition to its original form.

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As yet this necessary preliminary process has not even been begun; and until it is completed the real value of the Purāṇas as historical evidence cannot be estimated. They still continue to be dated by scholars according to the latest indications which can be discovered in them, and they are too often rejected as incompetent witnesses for the events of any earlier period. The elementary fact that the date, whether of a building or of a literary production, is not determined by its latest addition is in their case generally ignored.

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The eighteen Purāṇas are associated with an equal number of Upapurāṇas. Traditional lists, in which all of these Purāṇas and Upapurāṇas are arranged in a definite order of precedence, have been preserved in the works themselves. In these the Brahmā Purāṇa stands first; and, as this position and its alternative title 'Ādi' or 'the First' would alike seem to indicate, it is probably the oldest. There would appear to be nothing in its earlier portions to discountenance this claim; but it has received late additions, and on the evidence of these Wilson ascribed it to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. This affords a signal instance of the misconception which may be caused by failure to discriminate between the ages of different parts of a work. All the Purāṇas without exception have been altered. The Vishṇu Pur., which stands third in the list, has apparently suffered less than the others.

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Comparatively little is known about the Upapurāṇas. Few of them have been published or thoroughly investigated. They appear to be, as a rule, still more narrowly sectarian than the Purāṇas, and to be intended to further religious interests which are more purely local. They probably have little, if any, historical worth.

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The total number of couplets comprised in the eighteen Purāṇas as given in the lists is 400,000, the length of the different versions varying from 10,000 to about 81,000 couplets. These statements were no doubt accurate at the time when the computation was made; but great changes have since taken place. On the one hand, whole sections have been lost. The Vishṇu Pur., usually regarded as the best conserved of all, has now less than 7000 couplets: in the lists it appears with 23,000. On the other hand, numerous more recent works claim to belong to one or other of the Purāṇas, so that it is now sometimes impossible to define the precise limits of the latter. If all the productions which profess to form portions of the Skanda Pur., for instance, were included, the total given in the lists would be greatly exceeded.

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As to the history of these eighteen versions of a common tradition, it seems certain that they were moulded into their present form at various centres of religious activity. The case has been clearly stated by the late Mr A. M. T. Jackson in the Centenary Volume of the *Jour. of the Bombay Branch of the R. A. S.* (1905), p. 73:

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A very striking analogy to the mutual relations of the various Purāṇas is to be found in the case of our own Saxon chronicle, which, as is well known, continued to be written up in various monasteries down to the reign of Stephen, though the additions made after the Roman conquest were independent of each other. Similarly the copies of the original verse Purāṇa that were possessed by the priests of the great centres of pilgrimage were altered and added to chiefly by the insertion of local events after the fall of a central Hindu government had made communication between the different groups of Brāhmans relatively difficult. In this way the Brahmā Purāṇa may represent the Orissa version of the original work, just as the Padma may give that of Pushkara, the Agni that of Gayā, the Varāha that of Mathurā, the Vāmana that of Thānesar, the Kūrma that of Benares, and the Matsya that of the Brāhmans on the Narmadā.

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At what period the eighteen Purāṇas assumed their distinctive titles is uncertain. It was no doubt long after they had ceased to be regarded as repositories of historical information, for they are grouped in the traditional lists entirely according to their religious character. It has sometimes been supposed that one of their number is the immediate source of all the others; but it seems more probable that they belong to several groups which represent different lines of tradition. Possibly the Purāṇas which are narrated by the Sūta may belong to one such group, and those which are narrated by Maitreya to another. One at least of the present titles may be traced back to an early period; for the Bhavishya or Bhavishyat Pur., the ninth in the list, is quoted in the Dharma Sūtra of Āpastamba (II, 9, 24, 6) which cannot be later than the second century B.C. and may possibly be still more ancient.¹ But as a rule early references to this traditional lore describe it generally as Purāṇa or Itihāsa-Purāṇa, a class of literature which, as we have seen, undoubtedly goes back at least to the time of the Atharvaveda.

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¹ Chapter x, pp. 249 f.

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Some such antiquity is implicitly claimed by the Purāṇas in their prologues. Parāçara, who narrates the Vishṇu Pur., is the grandson of Vasishṭha, the rishi of the seventh maṇḍala of the Rigveda; and his narration takes place in the reign of Parikshit² who is celebrated as a king of the Kurus in the Atharvaveda. Nearly all the other Purāṇas are attributed to the Sūta and to a period four generations later. Of the prologues to these that of the Vāyu Pur. may be selected as typical. The rishis are performing their twelve-year sacrifice in the Naimisha forest on the bank of the sacred river Dṛishadvatī. To them comes the Sūta, the custodian of the ancient Kshatriya traditions. At their request he takes up his parable and retells the legends entrusted to his care by Vyāsa. The scene is laid in the reign of the Pūru king Adhisīmakṛishṇa, who is supposed to have lived before the beginning of the Kali Age, or, as we should say, before the historical period. But the genealogy assigned to him indicates a more definite date; for of his immediate forbears—Açvamedhadatta, Çatānīka, Janamejaya, Parīkshit—all but the first, his father Açvamedhadatta, are no doubt to be identified with kings of the same names who appear in the Brāhmaṇas.

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² The name appears as Parikshit in the earlier, and as Parīkshit in the later, literature.

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Whatever may be the historical value of these prologues, they certainly carry us back to the same period, the period of the Atharvaveda and the Brāhmaṇas, to which modern research has traced the existence of an Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature. To suppose that they are altogether concoctions of the Middle Ages is to place too great a strain on our credulity. They can scarcely have been reconstructed from the fragmentary evidence supplied by Vedas and Brāhmaṇas at a period when no one could have dreamed of treating Vedas and Brāhmaṇas as historical documents—a task reserved for the nineteenth century. We cannot escape from the only possible conclusion, that the Purāṇas have preserved, in however perverted and distorted a form, an independent tradition, which supplements the priestly tradition of the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas, and which goes back to the same period. This tradition, as we may gather from the prologues, was handed down from one generation of bards to another and was solemnly promulgated on the occasion of great sacrifices.

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The Kshatriya literature of the heroic age of India has for the most part been lost. Such of it as has survived has owed its preservation to its association with religion. The commemoration of the lineage of kings found a place in religious ceremonial, as, for instance, in the year-long preparation for the ‘horse-sacrifice,’ by the performance of which a king ratified his claim to suzerainty over his neighbours. It is no doubt to such commemorations that we owe the dynastic lists which have been preserved in the Purāṇas.

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The historical character of these works is disguised by their setting. They have been made to conform with Indian ideas as to the origin and nature of the universe and its relation to a First Cause. The effect of this has been to remove the monarch, who is represented as reigning when the recital takes place, and all his predecessors from the realm of history into the realm of legend; and it has been found necessary to preserve the illusion throughout the subsequent narrative. The Sūta is invited by the sacrificing rishis of the Naimisha forest to describe the Kali Age which is still to come. It is evident that he can only do so prophetically. He can only reproduce the foreknowledge which has been divinely implanted in him by Vyāsa. Accordingly he uses the future tense in speaking of kings who have actually reigned and of events which have actually happened. History has been made to assume the disguise of prophecy.

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When this pretence is set aside, and when all legendary or imaginary elements are removed, the last two sections of the Purāṇas afford valuable information as to the geography and history of ancient India.

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The fourth section, the *manvantara*, deals with the ‘periods of the different Manus.’ These form part of a chronological system which is purely hypothetical. Time, like soul and matter, is a phase of the Supreme Spirit. As Brahmā wakes or sleeps, the universe wakes or sleeps also. Each day and each night of Brahmā is an ‘aeon’ (*kalpa*) and is equivalent to a thousand ‘great ages’ (*mahāyuga*), that is to say, 1000 × 4,320,000 mortal years. During an ‘aeon’ fourteen Manus or ‘fathers of mankind’ appear, each presiding over a period of seventy-one ‘great ages’ with a surplus. Each ‘great age’ is further divided into four ‘ages’ (*yuga*) of progressive deterioration like the golden, silver, brazen, and iron ages of Greek and Roman mythology. These are named, from the numbers on the dice, Kṛita, Tretā, Dvāpara, and Kali, and are accordingly supposed to last for periods represented by the proportion 4:3:2:1. We need not follow this subdivision of time down to its ultimate fraction ‘the twinkling of an eye’ (*nimesha*) or dwell on the sectarian zeal which leads some of the Purāṇas to assert that an ‘aeon’ of Brahmā is but ‘the twinkling of an eye’ in the endurance of Çiva or Vishṇu.

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The account of the *manvantara* of Manu Svāyambhuva, the first in the series of fourteen, includes a description of the universe as it now exists or is supposed to exist. The greater part of this description is, like the chronology, imaginary. The world, according to this primitive geography, consists of seven concentric continents separated by encircling seas. These are the 'seas of treacle and seas of butter' at which Lord Macaulay, with his utter inability to understand any form of early culture, scoffed in his celebrated minute on Indian education. The innermost of these continents, which—and here we come to actuality—is separated from the next by salt water, is Jambudvīpa; and of Jambudvīpa the most important region is Bharatavarsha or Bhārata, that is to say, the sub-continent of India:

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The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is Bhārata; for there dwell the descendants of Bharata...
The seven main chains of mountains in Bhārata are Mahendra, Malaya, Sahya, Çuktimat, Ṛiksha, Vindhya, and Pāripātra...
On the east of Bhārata dwell the Kirātas (the barbarians); on the west, the Yavanas: in the centre reside Brāhmans, Kshatriyas, Vaiçyas, and Çūdras. (*Vishnu Pur.*, trans. Wilson, II, pp. 127–9.)

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General descriptions such as this are followed by lists, more or less detailed, of the rivers which flow from the Himālayas and the seven great ranges, and of the tribes inhabiting the various regions. As in all early geography, the district is known by the plural of the tribal name. Similar lists are found also in the Mahābhārata and elsewhere. This extensive geographical literature gives a remarkably full account of the whole sub-continent.

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The geographical, like the dynastic, lists have evidently been brought up to date from time to time, since foreign invaders of very different dates appear in them. These seem to range from the Yavanas, Çakas, and Pahlavas, who came into India in the second and first centuries B.C., to the Hūṇas, who broke up the Gupta empire at the end of the fifth century A.D.

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The fifth and last section of the Purāṇas, the *vamçānucharita*, gives an account of the kings of the earth, the descendants of Manu Vaivasvata, the 'son of the Sun.' The narrative uses all three tenses, past, present, and future; for it recounts the kings who have been, the kings who are, and the kings who are to be. The earliest of these genealogies, like the most ancient chronicles of other peoples, are legendary. They trace the descent of the rulers of this world from the Sun and Moon, and through them from the Creator—a claim inherited and still maintained by the Sūrajbansi and the Chandrabansi families of Rājput princes. Such pedigrees have been pieced together from fragments of religious lore or from fancied etymologies on to which old-world traditions and speculations have been engrafted. Ilā, the daughter of Manu, from whom the Lunar family is derived, personifies, as her name denotes, the sacrificial offering made by Manu in the legend of the Flood (*Çata. Br.*, I, 8, 1, 11). Such legendary characters are everywhere the result of man’s early speculations on the origin of the world. The first glimpses of authentic history only appear when tribal names are inserted in the genealogies under the disguise of eponymous ancestors. These, too, are the outcome of hypothesis, but of hypothesis founded on facts. All the members of a tribe are presumably descended from a common ancestor, and related tribes are descended from related ancestors. On these supposed individuals the names of the tribes are conferred; and they supply a sort of genealogical framework which continues to be filled in by tradition until the age of records. Once fashioned in this way such genealogies are accepted without question until the period when critical scholarship arises and undertakes its first duty, which is to discriminate between legend and fact in the story of past ages.

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In the Purāṇas, which were the common scriptures of the ruling Āryan peoples of Northern and Western India, the traditional genealogies of the royal houses have been collected and made to form a consistent whole. Not only are the ancient tribes of the Rigveda and the kingdoms immediately descended from them represented here, but the realms of Kosala (Ayodhyā), Videha, Vaiçālī, and Magadha, which were not Āryanised until a later date, have also been brought into the scheme and furnished with a still longer and more august pedigree. They belong to the Solar family and are derived directly from Manu through Ikshvāku. A family of princes bearing this name is known from Vedic literature; and it is quite possible that the Solar dynasties of Kosala and other kingdoms to the east of the Middle Country may have been descended from this family. If so, the Ikshvāku of the genealogical tree must be regarded as an eponymous ancestor; and as his superhuman origin had to be explained, a myth founded on a far-fetched etymology of his name was invented. Ikshvāku was so called because he was born from the sneeze (*kshava*) of Manu (*Vishṇu Pur.*, trans. Wilson, III, p. 259).

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Fragments of historical fact may no doubt be found embedded even in the earliest lists; but these fragments have been carried down the stream of time and deposited far away from their original home. Thus, for instance, Purukutsa and his son Trasadasyu, who in the Rigveda are Pūrus living on the Sarasvatī, appear in the Purāṇas among the Solar kings of Kosala; Vadhryaçva, Divodāsa, Pijavana, and Sudās, who form a direct line in the succession of Bharata princes ruling in the country between the Sarasvatī and Dṛishadvatī, appear in this order, but with intervening reigns, among the kings of N. Pañchāla¹. It is probable that these apparently conflicting statements are not really contradictory: the chain of evidence which might bring the tradition of the Purāṇas into substantial agreement with the Rigveda has been broken.

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¹ Pargiter, *J.R.A.S.*, 1910, p. 28.

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But it is clear that documents of this kind can only be used with the greatest caution. To some extent at least they have unquestionably been fabricated in accordance with preconceived opinions. How these pedigrees have been elaborated, even at a comparatively late date, by court poets who sought to magnify the ancient lineage of their lord, may sometimes be seen at a glance. For example, in the genealogy of the Ikshvākus of Kosala the immediate predecessors of Prasenajit, the contemporary of Buddha, are Çākya, Çuddhodana, Siddhārtha, and Rāhula. That is to say, the eponymous hero of Buddha's clan, Buddha's father, Buddha himself, and his son have all been incorporated in the dynastic list of the kings of Kosala².

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² See Pargiter, *Dynasties of the Kali Age*, pp. 11, 67.

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It seems impossible to bring the Purāṇic genealogies into any satisfactory relation with the Vedic literature or with one another until we approach the period at which they profess to have been recited, that is to say, the reign of Parīkshit in the case of the Vishṇu Pur. and the reign of Adhisīmakṛishṇa in the case of most of the others. Then certain synchronisms seem to afford a more secure chronological standpoint. Parīkshit is celebrated as a king of the Kurus in the last and latest book of the Atharvaveda: according to the epic, as usually interpreted, he was appointed king of Hastināpura more than thirty-six years after the great war between the Kurus and Pāṇḍus. Adhisīmakṛishṇa, the great great grandson of Parīkshit is represented by the Purāṇas as contemporary with Divākara of Kosala and Senājit of Magadha. Between the last mentioned and his predecessor Sahadeva, who was killed in the great war, six reigns intervene. The length of each reign and the total duration of the different dynasties of Magadha are given in some versions. Unfortunately the state of the text is so corrupt and the numbers are so discrepant that this evidence is generally of no value. Leaving out of account an impossible reading which attributes a reign of one hundred years to Nirāmitra, the MSS. as they stand give a maximum of 289 and a minimum of 259 years to the six reigns which separate the great war from Senājit of Magadha; and even the lesser of these estimates would seem to be excessive. We must be content with the general conclusion that the tradition of the Purāṇas, according to the dynastic lists of Hastināpura and Magadha, places the great war early in what we know as the Brāhmaṇa period, say about 1000 B.C.

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That the war between the Kurus and Pāṇḍus is historical and that it took place in ancient times cannot be doubted, however much its story has been overloaded with legend, and however late may be the form in which it has been handed down. The legend of the war of the Mahābhārata in India finds its exact parallel in the legend of the Trojan war in Europe. Each became the great central point to which the nations of the Middle Ages referred their history. To have shared ancestrally in the fame of Kurukshetra or of Troy was for nations the patent of nobility and ancient descent. The remotest peoples of Eastern and Southern India and the late invaders of the North-West alike claimed a place in the story of the Mahābhārata, even as the royal houses of Western Europe traced their origin to Trojan heroes. Until the close of the sixteenth century no historian of France or Britain doubted that the kings of these countries were descended from the Trojan Francus or Brutus, both of whom were in reality eponymous heroes like Yadu and his brothers in the Purāṇas. Milton in his *History of England* (1670) repeats the story of Brutus at length and in detail; but a chance phrase—'they who first devis'd to bring us from some noble ancestor'—shows that historians were beginning to recognise the origin of such legends. And so far as the Mahābhārata associates most of the nations of India with the great war it has been 'devis'd' in the same manner and for the same purpose. A nucleus of fact has been encrusted with the legendary accretions of ages.

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After the great war detailed dynastic tables continue to be given in the case of three royal lines only—the Pūrus, the Ikshvākus, and the kings of Magadha. Other kingdoms are mentioned summarily with a bare statement of the number of contemporary reigns. The Purāṇic history is thus, professedly though not actually (pp. 311, 318), confined in its later stages to the regions now represented by the United Provinces and S. Bihār.

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In the Pūrus or Pauravas of the Purāṇas the Bharatas of the Rigveda and the Kurus of the Brāhmaṇas have been merged. In the Rigveda both the Pūrus and the Bharatas live in the land of the Sarasvatī (Brahmāvarta or Sirhind). But already the Āryan occupation of Kurukshetra, the adjacent country of the upper Jumna and Ganges on the south-east, was beginning: for a victory on the Jumna gained by Sudās, king of the Tṛitsus, over a native leader called Bheda is referred to in VII, 18, 19. In the Purāṇas, Sudās and his family appear in the list of the kings of N. Pañchāla to the east of Kurukshetra. That is to say, the later kings of N. Pañchāla (p. 316) claimed descent from the Tṛitsus of the Rigveda, who are regarded by the Purāṇas as a branch of the Pūrus.

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But the great conqueror of Kurukshetra was Bharata Dauḥshanti, whose victories on the Jumna and Ganges are commemorated in an old verse quoted by the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa (XIII, 5, 4, 11); and the extension of Bharata's conquests to Kāçī (Benares) is attributed by another ancient verse (XIII, 5, 4, 19) to Çatānīka Sātrājita. In the Purāṇic list of Pūru kings, Bharata and his father, Dushyanta, appear long before, and Çatānīka soon after, the beginning of the Kali Age. Between the periods of the two conquerors, Bharata and Çatānīka, came the war of the Mahābhārata, which for the Purāṇas marks the division between the third and fourth ages of the world.

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The later list contains the names of twenty-nine Pūru kings, who lived after the war. They reigned first at Hastināpura, the ancient capital of the Kuru princes, which is usually identified with a ruined site in the Meerut District 'on the old bed of the Ganges, lat. 29° 9′ N., long. 78° 3′ E.' (Pargiter, *Mārk. Pur.*, p. 355); but when this city was destroyed by an inundation of the Ganges in the reign of Nichakshus, the successor of Adhisīmakṛishṇa, they removed the seat of their rule to Kauçāmbī, possibly the present Kosam in the Allahābād District. Another of their capitals was Indraprastha in the Kuru plain, the ancient city of the Pāṇḍu princes: it is the modern Indarpat, near Delhi. The Pūrus therefore, with their capitals in the north, east, and west, ruled over a large portion of the present province of Agra from the Meerut Division on the north to the Benares Division on the south-east. The dynasty came to an end with Kshemaka, the fourth king to reign after Udayana, the contemporary of the Buddha (p. 310)¹.

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¹ For the historical details here summarised, see *Vedic Index*, I, pp. 153, 155, 165, 169; II, pp. 12, 96, 110, 186; Pargiter, *J.R.A.S.*, 1910, pp. 26-29; *Kali Age*, pp. 4 ff., 65 ff.

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From the evidence both of Vedic literature and of the Purāṇas it appears that the Ikshvākus were originally a branch of the Pūrus. They were kings of Kosala, the country which lay to the east of the Kurus and Pañchālas and to the west of the Videhas, from whom it was separated by the river Sadānīra, probably the Great Gandak. This territory was practically the modern province of Oudh. The chief cities were Ayodhyā (Ajodhyā on the Gogrā in the Fyzābād District) with which the Sāketa of Buddhist writers was probably either identical or closely associated, and Çrāvasti (Set Mahet in the Gondā District). In story Ayodhyā is famous as the city of Daçaratha, the father of Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa. Both of these characters, who may possibly have been historical, are assigned by the Purāṇas to a dim and distant period long before the beginning of the Kali Age.

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Although the extension of Brāhmanism from the land of the Kurus and Pañchālas to Kosala was comparatively late (p. 117), the Āryan occupation of the country goes back to an earlier period. In the later Vedic literature two kings of Kosala, Hiraṇyanābha and Para Āṭṇāra, probably father and son, seem to be mentioned as performing the horse-sacrifice in celebration of their victories; and, as the former of these appears in the Purāṇic list before the Kali Age, the conquest of Kosala was evidently attributed to the period before the great war.

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In the time of the Buddha, Kosala was the predominant kingdom in Northern India, but it was already being eclipsed by the growing power of Magadha. Such incidents in its history as can be recovered from early Buddhist literature have been narrated in Chapter VII (pp. 178 ff.).

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The Purāṇic list of Ikshvāku kings in the Kali Age concludes with Sumitra, the fourth successor of Prasenajit, who was contemporary with the Buddha. The royal houses of Pūru and Ikshvāku, the sovereigns of Agra and Oudh, thus disappear from the scene at about the same time (p. 308). Henceforth the historical interest of the Purāṇas centres in Magadha which had become the suzerain power in the Middle Country¹.

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¹ *Vedic Index*, I, pp. 75, 190, 491; II, p. 506; Pargiter, *J.R.A.S.*, 1910, pp. 27, 29; *Kali Age*, pp. 9, 66.

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The Magadhas, who inhabited the Patna and Gayā Districts of S. Bihār, are unknown by this name to the Rigveda; but, together with their neighbours, the Aṅgas, in the Districts of Monghyr and Bhāgalpur, they are mentioned in the Atharvaveda as a people living on the extreme confines of Āryan civilisation. Their kings claimed to be Pūrus: they traced their descent from Kuru through the great conqueror, Vasu Chaidya², whose son, Bṛihadratha, was the founder of the dynasty which is known by his name.

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² Possibly the Kaçu Chaidya of Rigveda, VIII, 5, 37.

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Magadha is the most famous kingdom in ancient and medieval India. Twice in history did it establish great empires—the Maurya Empire in the fourth and third centuries B.C., and the Gupta Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. The long line of kings attributed to Magadha by the Purāṇas consists of a series of no fewer than eight dynastic lists furnished with a statement of the number of years in each reign and the duration of each dynasty. If all these dynasties could be regarded as successive, and if the length of reigns could be determined with certainty, the chronology of Magadha would be a simple matter of calculation. But this is not the case. Some of the royal families included in the series were undoubtedly contemporary, and the text of the Purāṇas has become so corrupt that the numbers as stated by the different MSS. are rarely in agreement.

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Brihadratha himself and nine of his successors are supposed to have reigned before the Kali Age. It is recorded that, when Sahadeva, the last of these, was slain in the great war, Somādhi, his heir, became king in Girivraja, ‘the fortress on the hill,’ at the foot of which the old capital of Magadha, Rājagṛiha, grew up. The site is marked by the ruined town of Rājgīr in the Patna District. In the reign of Senājit, Somādhi’s sixth successor, most of the Purāṇas claim to have been recited. No other event is connected with the twenty-one successors of Sahadeva.

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The next two dynasties, the Pradyotas and Çiçunāgas, were almost certainly contemporary. The Pradyota dynasty may be identified with the Pauṇika family mentioned in the *Harshacharita* (trans. Cowell and Thomas, p. 193). According to the Purāṇas, the founder, Puṇika (Pulika), slew his master, Ripuñjaya, the last of the Bṛihadrathas, and anointed his own son in his stead. After five reigns, the duration of which is given by some versions as 52 years and by others as 138 years, the Pradyota dynasty is supplanted by Çiçunāga, who, after placing his son on the throne of Kāçī (Benares), himself takes possession of Girivraja.

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But this is history distorted. Some editor has evidently placed independent lists in a false sequence and supplied appropriate links of connexion. This is clear from the evidence of Buddhist literature.

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The Pradyotas were kings of Avanti (W. Mālwa) and their capital was Ujjain. Pradyota (Pajjota) himself, like Bimbisāra and Ajātaçatru (Ajātasattu), the fifth and sixth in the list of Çiçunāgas, and like the Pūru Udayana (Udena) of Vatsa (Vaṃsa) and the Ikshvāku Prasenajit (Pasenadi) of Kosala, was contemporary with the Buddha¹. The first of the Pradyotas, and the fifth and sixth of the Çiçunāgas, who are separated by more than 150 years at the least according to the Purāṇas², were therefore ruling at the same period in different countries.

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¹ See Chapter VII, pp. 180, 183, 185, 187.

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² *Kali Age*, pp. 18–21, 68–9.

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That the Pradyota of the Purāṇas and the Pradyota of Ujjain were one and the same person does not admit of question. The fact is implied in the statement of the Matsya Pur.³, and is clear when the Purāṇas are compared with other Sanskrit literature. Udayana, the king of Vatsa, is the central figure in a large cycle of Sanskrit stories of love and adventure; and in these Pradyota, the king of Ujjain, the father of the peerless Vāsavadattā, plays no small part. In some of the stories he appears also as the father of Pālaka and the grandfather of Avantivardhana⁴. Now of the five members of the dynasty in the Purāṇas the first two are Pradyota and Pālaka (*v.l.* Bālaka), and the last is probably Avantivardhana; for the various readings of the MSS., as given by Mr Pargiter (*Kali Age*, p. 19), indicate that this may be the correct form of the name which appears in his text as Nandivardhana.

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³ Mr Harit Krishna Deb in *Udayana Vatsarāja* (Calcutta, 1919), p. 4.

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⁴ Lacôte, *Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā*, p. 154.

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This intrusion of kings of Avanti in the records of Magadha is probably to be explained, as in the similar case of the Andhras (p. 318), as the result of a suzerainty successfully asserted by Avanti; and this may have been the outcome of the attack on Ajātaçatru which Pradyota was reported to have been contemplating shortly before the Buddha's death⁵. If so, the supremacy of Avanti, which may have been temporary, was not established until some years after the beginning of Ajātaçatru's reign, and the Pradyotas of the Purāṇas were contemporary with the later Çiçunāgas—Ajātaçatru, Darçaka, and Udāyin.

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⁵ Chapter VII, p. 185.

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It is only when we come to the reigns of Bimbisāra and Ajātaçatru in the Çiçunāga dynasty that we find the firm ground of history. At this period lived Mahāvīra and Buddha, the founders, or perhaps rather the reformers, of Jainism and Buddhism; and now the Purāṇas are supplemented by two other lines of tradition which are presumably independent. In the Jain accounts Bimbisāra appears as Çreṇika and Ajātaçatru as Kūṇika: the former began the expansion of Magadha by the conquest of the kingdom of Aṅga (Monghyr and Bhāgalpur), and the latter is said to have come to the throne after the death of Mahāvīra and a few years before the death of Buddha.

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Unfortunately on one important point the three sources of information are not in agreement. The first eight kings in the Purāṇic genealogy may be arranged into two groups, the first headed by Çiçunāga and the second by Bimbisāra. This arrangement is reversed in the Buddhist lists, while Çiçunāga’s group is omitted altogether by the Jains. It is difficult to see how the three traditions, each of which has its champions among modern scholars, can be reconciled.

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The Brāhman and Buddhist books record the length of the reigns of Bimbisāra and Ajātaçatru; but they are not in agreement with one another, and moreover the Brāhman accounts are not consistent. In the present corrupt condition of the text the various MSS. of the Purāṇas attribute a reign of either 28 or 38 years to Bimbisāra, and one of 25, 27, or 28 years to Ajātaçatru (*Kali Age*, p. 21). Until the text has been restored by critical editing the authentic tradition of the Brāhmans cannot be ascertained. In contrast with this discrepancy the Buddhist chronicles of Ceylon, the Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa, offer a consistent and more detailed account of these reigns and of certain important events in the lifetime of Siddhārtha, the Çākya prince who became the Buddha. Whether this tradition is to be accepted as correct in preference to the other may be questioned; but it affords the best working hypothesis which has yet been discovered. The chronology as determined by Prof. Geiger in the introduction to his translation of the Mahāvaṃsa (pp. xl–xlvi) may be tabulated as follows:

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| *Çiçunāga Kings.* | | | *Siddhārtha (the Buddha).* | |
| Bimbisāra’s birth | 558 b.c. | Born | 563 b.c. |
| „ accession | 543 „ | Leaves his father’s house... | 534 „ |
| „ death | 491 „ | Becomes Buddha | 528 „ |
| Ajātaçatru’s accession | 491 „ | Meets Bimbisāra (for the second time)¹ | 528 „ |
| „ death | 459 „ | Attains *nirvāṇa* | 483 „ |

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¹ See Chapter vii, pp. 183 f.

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After these two reigns we come once more to a period of conflicting authorities and chronological uncertainty which lasts until the reign of Chandragupta. The Buddhist genealogy preserved in the Mahāvaṃsa is certainly not above suspicion²; for each of the five kings from Ajātasattu to Nāgadāsaka is said to have killed his father and predecessor within a period of fifty-six years, and we are solemnly told that, after the last of these, Nāgadāsaka, had occupied the throne for twenty-four years, the citizens awoke to the fact that ‘this is a dynasty of parricides’ and appointed the minister Susunāga (Çiçunāga) in his stead. The Jain tradition recognises only Udāyin and the nine Nandas as reigning during this interval; and the Purāṇic list (*Kali Age*, pp. 21–6, 68–9) is as follows:

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² Chapter vii, pp. 189 f.

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Darçaka reigned 24, 25, or 35 years
Udāyin ,, 33 ,,
Nandivardhana reigned 40, or 42 years
Mahānandin ,, 43 ,,
.Mahāpadma ,, 28, or 88 ,, / His eight sons ,, 12 ,, Total, 100 years.

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Darçaka appears not to be mentioned by the Buddhist writers, unless indeed he is to be identified with Nāgadāsaka whom they place before Udāyin (Udāyi-bhadda); but he is known to Sanskrit literature as a king of Magadha and the brother of Padmāvatī, the second queen of Udayana, king of Vatsa¹. Udāyin, or Udāyi-bhadda, is known to all the three traditions. To him the Brāhmans and Jains attribute the foundation of Kusumapura on the south bank of the Ganges. The new city, which was either identical with the later Pāṭaliputra or in its immediate neighbourhood, was built near the fortress which Ajātaçatru had established at the village of Pāṭali as a protection against the Vajjian (Vṛiji) confederacy of Licchavis, Videhas, and other clans of N. Bihār. The foundation of Pāṭaliputra is ascribed by the Buddhists to Kālāsoka.

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¹ *Svapnavāsavadattā*, Act. I (ed. Trivandrum Series, pp. 4, 5).

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The ten Çiçunāga kings are expressly called Kshatriyas by the Purāṇas, but the last of these, Mahānandin, became, through his marriage with a Çūdra woman, the founder of a Çūdra dynasty which endured for two generations—Mahāpadma and his eight sons. One of the latter, usually supposed to be named Dhanananda, was on the throne in 326 B.C., when Alexander the Great was obliged by the unwillingness of his army to abandon his scheme of attacking the災害 Prasioi, or ‘eastern nations,’ then united under the suzerainty of Magadha. Within a few years of Alexander’s retirement from India, this suzerainty passed from the Nandas to the Mauryas, probably c. 321 B.C.

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The period of the nine Nandas is thus determined. According to the Purāṇas they represent no new family: they are the direct descendants of the Çiçunāgas, the last and the last but one of whom, Mahānandin and Nandivardhana, bear names which indicate their connexion. There are, therefore, two groups of these kings, which seem to be distinguished in literature as the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Nandas; and, as Mr Jayaswal has suggested, ‘new’ and not 'nine' may have been the correct designation of the later group¹. The Purāṇas know no break of political continuity between the Çiçunāgas and the Nandas; but they recognise that a great social and religious gulf has been fixed between the earlier and the later Nandas by the flagrant violation of caste law which placed Mahāpadma, the son of a Çūdra woman, on the throne; and they mark their sense of this chasm by interpolating after the reign of Mahānandin a summary of the number of reigns in other contemporary dynasties before proceeding with their account of the rulers of Magadha.

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¹ *Jour. Bihar and Orissa Research Soc.*, September 1915, p. 21.

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As to the origin of the Nandas we have no certain information; but the name is probably tribal, and it may be connected with the Nandas who lived near the river Rāmgaṅgā, between the Ganges and the Kosi in the Himālayan region of the United Provinces². The countries of the Himālayan fringe at this period were occupied by innumerable clans governed by tribal constitutions which may best be described as aristocratic oligarchies. Like the Rājputs, they were conquerors ruling in the midst of subject peoples; and, as Dr Vincent Smith has suggested³, many of these clans may have been of Tibeto-Chinese origin. It is possible that the Çiçunāgas and Nandas may have been the descendants of mountain chieftains who had won the kingdom of Magadha by conquest.

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² Pargiter, *Mārk. Pur.*, pp. 292, 383.

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³ *Oxford History of India* (1919), p. 49.

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A Nanda king is twice mentioned in the Hāthigumphā inscription of king Khāravela of Kaliṅga (Orissa). The inscription, which is a record of events in thirteen (or fourteen) years of the king's reign, has been badly preserved. Considerable portions have been lost, and both the reading and the interpretation of many passages are uncertain. The record in its present state can only be used as a basis for history with the utmost caution. It is clear, however, that in his fifth year Khāravela executed some public work which was associated with the memory of king Nanda⁴, and that in his twelfth year he gained a victory over the king of Magadha and, according to Mr Jayaswal's translation¹, recovered certain trophies which had been carried away by king Nanda.

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⁴ The different versions of this passage in line 6 of the inscr. depend chiefly, though not solely, on the translation of *ti-vasa-sata*. The following renderings have been proposed:
(1) 'He opened the three-yearly almshouse of Nandarāja' (Pandit Bhagvānlāl Indrājī, *Trans. Inter. Or. Cong.*, Leiden, 1884, Part 3, p. 135. *Sata* = *sattra* or *çatra*, cf. *Ep. Ind.*, x, *Appendix*, no. 967, p. 100, and no. 985, p. 102);
(2) 'He had an aqueduct, that had not been used for 103 years since king Nanda (or since the Nanda kings), conducted into the city' (Prof. Lüders, *Ep. Ind.*, x, *Appendix*, no. 1345, p. 161. *Sata* = *çata*, as also in the next translation);
(3) 'He brings into the capital...the canal excavated by king Nanda three centuries before' (Mr J. P. Jayaswal and Mr R. D. Banerji, *Jour. Bihar and Orissa Research Soc.*, Dec. 1917, pp. 425 ff.).

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¹ *Op. cit.*, pp. 447, 464–5.

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These statements of the inscription, coupled with the somewhat enigmatical testimony of an ancient Sanskrit MS. quoted by Mr Jayaswal², seem to show that Kaliṅga had been conquered by one of the Nanda kings and lost by another. Kaliṅga was undoubtedly conquered by Açoka, the third of the Maurya emperors, *c.* 262 B.C.³ We must infer, therefore, either that it was not included in the dominions of the first two emperors, Chandragupta and Bindusāra, or that it had revolted and was reconquered by Açoka.

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² *Ibid.* p. 482.

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³ Chapter xx, p. 495.

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Certain stages in the growth of the power of Magadha from its ancient stronghold in the fortress of Girivraja may thus be traced. The expansion began with the conquest of Aṅga (Monghyr and Bhāgalpur in Bengal) by Bimbisāra, *c.* 500 B.C. The establishment of a supremacy over Kāçī (Benares), Kosala (Oudh), and Videha (N. Bihār) was probably the work of his son and successor, Ajātaçatru, in the first half of the fifth century. Kaliṅga (Orissa) was, perhaps, temporarily included in the empire as a result of its conquest by a Nanda king. It remained for Chandragupta to extend the imperial dominions by the annexation of the northwestern region which for a few years had owned the sway of Alexander the Great and his satraps, and for Açoka to conquer, or reconquer, Kaliṅga.

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