The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c29.150

c29.150

The political decadence of Magadha never affected the reputation of the kingdom as the centre and head-quarters of Buddhist learning, which continued to be cultivated sedulously at Nālandā and other places under the Pāla kings up to the time of the Muhammadan conquest at the close of the twelfth century, when the monasteries with their well-stocked libraries were reduced to ashes. A good illustration of the reverence with which the Buddhist Holy Land continued to be regarded in the later Gupta age by foreign students of the doctrine of Gautama is afforded by the fact that, in the year A. D. 539, Wu-ti, or Hsiao Yen, the first Liang emperor of China and an ardent Buddhist, sent a mission to Magadha for the purpose of collecting original Mahāyānist texts and obtaining the services of a scholar competent to translate them. The local king, probably either Jīvitagupta I or Kumāragupta, gladly complied with the wishes of his imperial correspondent, and placed the learned Paramārtha at the disposal of the mission, which seems to have spent several years in India. Paramārtha then went to China, taking with him a large collection of manuscripts, many of which he translated. He arrived in the neighbourhood of Canton in A. D. 546, was presented to the emperor in 548, and died in China in 569, at the age of seventy. It was in the reign of the same emperor (502–49) that Bodhidharma, the son of a king in Southern India, and reckoned as the twenty-eighth Indian and first Chinese patriarch, came to China in A. D. 520, and after a short stay at Canton, settled at Lo Yang. His miracles are a favourite subject of Chinese artists.²