The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c31.s8.17

c31.s8.17

The Kāmbojas were expelled by Mahīpāla I, the ninth sovereign of the Pāla line, who is known to have been reigning in a. d. 1026, and may be assumed to have won back his ancestral throne about A. D. 978 or 980. He is credited with a long reign of 52 years, a statement which cannot be far wrong, as there is epigraphic evidence that his rule endured for 48 years.¹ Of all the Pāla kings he is the best remembered, and songs in his honour, which used to be sung in many parts of Bengal until recent times, are still to be heard in remote corners of Orissa and Kūch Bihār. He was attacked by Rājendra, the Chola king of Kānchī, about A. D. 1023. His reign is marked by the revival of Buddhism in Tibet, which had been weakened by the persecution of Langdarma a century earlier. Pundit Dharmapāla and other holy men from Magadha accepted an invitation to Tibet in A. D. 1013, and did much to restore the religion of Gautama to honour in that country. A subsequent mission dispatched in 1038, during the reign of Mahīpāla’s successor, Nayapāla, and headed by Atīsa, from the Vikramasīla monastery in Magadha, continued the work and firmly re-established Tibetan Buddhism.²