Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c8.7

c8.7

Historical truth is many-sided, and there is always scope for differences of interpretation of the evidence at hand; the scope for such differences is particularly wide in our period in which almost all the sources bear a certain bias—Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jaina—and offer divergent accounts of the same set of events. As nothing is gained and something may be lost by an artificial smoothening of these differences, it has appeared best to leave untouched the slightly differing views of the contributors of the different chapters and give the reader the opportunity of realizing the difficulty of reaching categorical conclusions on complex issues.