The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c10.65

c10.65

At this point all our authorities become unintelligible and incredible. According to the Purāṇas the last two kings of the Saiśunāga dynasty were followed by the ‘Nine Nandas’, namely king Mahāpadma (eighty-eight years) and his eight sons (twelve years), of whom the first was named Sukalpa, with variants.¹ These two generations are thus supposed to have reigned for a century. It is clear that the history has somehow been falsified and that the chronology cannot be correct. The Jains, doing still greater violence to reason, extend the duration of the dynasty to 155 years, while the Buddhist Mahāvaṁsa, Dīpavaṁsa, and Asokāvadāna deepen the confusion by hopelessly muddled and contradictory stories not worth repeating. Some powerful motive, possibly *odium theologicum*, as in other cases, must have existed for the distortion of the history of the so-called 'Nine Nandas' in all forms of the tradition.²