The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c30.70

c30.70

King Harsha was so delighted with the discourse of Hiuen Tsang, whom he had met while in camp in Bengal, that he resolved to hold a special assembly at Kanauj, then his capital, for the purpose of giving the utmost publicity to the Master’s teaching. The king marched along the southern bank of the Ganges, attended by an enormous multitude; his ally Kumāra, King of Kāmarūpa, with a large but less numerous following, keeping pace with him on the opposite bank. Advancing slowly in this way, Harsha, Kumāra, and the attendant host reached Kanauj in the course of ninety days, and there encamped, in February or March, A.D. 643.¹ The sovereign was received by Kumāra, the Rāja of Kāmarūpa, who had accompanied him on the march, the Rāja of Valabhī in Western India, who was connected with him by marriage, and eighteen other tributary rājas; as well as by four thousand learned Buddhist monks, including a thousand from the Nālandā monastery in Bihār, and some three thousand Jains and orthodox Brahmans.