The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c23.67

c23.67

The Mahāvamsa chronicle, dating from the beginning of the sixth century after Christ, which gives a list of Asoka's missionaries and the countries to which they were deputed, makes no mention of the missions to the Tamil kingdoms of Southern India. This reticence may be plausibly explained by the fierce hostility between the Sinhalese and the Tamils of the mainland, which had begun long before the Christian era and lasted for many centuries. If Mahendra had migrated from his monastery near Tanjore to the island, the fact would have been most distasteful to the monks of the Great Vihāra, who would have been unwilling to feel indebted to a resident among the hated Tamils for instruction in the rudiments of the faith, and would have preferred that people should believe their religion to have come direct from the Holy Land of Buddhism. Some such motive seems to have originated the Sinhalese form of the legend of Mahendra, who is represented as an illegitimate son of Asoka, and is said to have been followed by a sister named Sanghamitrā ('Friend of the Order'), who did for the nuns of Ceylon all that her brother did for the monks. This legend, which is overlaid by many marvellous inventions, must be to a large extent fictitious.² The presumably true version, representing Mahendra as the younger brother of Asoka, was well remembered at the imperial capital Pātaliputra, where Fa-hien, at the beginning of the fifth century, was shown the hermitage of Asoka's saintly brother; and it was still the only version known to Hiuen Tsang in the seventh century. Even when the latter pilgrim took down the Sinhalese legends from the lips of the island monks whom he met at Kānchī, he applied the stories to the brother, not to the son, of Asoka.¹