Geography of Early Buddhism c6.22

c6.22

To the east of Bārāṇasī is the eastern country; to the south of Māhiṣmatī is the Dakṣiṇāpatha or the Deccan; to the west of Devasabhā (not yet identified) is the western country; to the north of Pṛthudaka (modern Pehoa, about 14 miles west of Thaneswar) is the Uttarāpatha or the northern country; and the tract lying between Vinasana and Prayāga, i.e. the confluence of the Yamunā and the Ganges, is called the Antaravedī. But when the Kāvyamīmāṃsā says that the western boundary of the eastern country (Purvadeśa) is Benares, it seems to extend the eastern boundary of Manu's Madhyadeśa up to Benares. This is exactly what it should be. For, by the time when the Kāvyamīmāṃsā came to be written the Aryans had already outstripped the older limits of the Madhyadeśa and Aryandom had extended up to Benares. In the Dharmasūtras and Dharmaśāstras, Aryandom, i.e. Āryāvarta, is described to have extended from the region where the river Saraswatī disappears (i.e. the Vinasana of Manu and Kāvyamīmāṃsā) in the west, to the Kālakavana or Black Forest (identified with a locality near Prayāga by S. N. Majumdar; see CAGI., Intro., p. xli, foot-note) in the east; and from the Himalayas in the north to the Pāripātra in the south. The Dharmaśāstra of Manu calls the Āryāvarta of the Sūtras to be the Madhyadeśa or the Middle Country and his boundaries of Aryandom are almost identical. Almost all Brahmanical sources give a description of Madhyadeśa or Āryāvarta, the most important division of India, but very few except the Kāvyamīmāṃsā, as stated above, and the Bhuvanakoṣa section of the Purāṇas give any detail about the four remaining divisions of the country. And this is exactly the case with Buddhist sources as well. A detailed description of the Middle Country is as old as the Vinaya Piṭaka as well as references to Majjhimadesa all over early Pāli texts; but an accurate description of the other divisions of India is not found earlier than Yuan Chwang. The reason is not very far to seek. As with the Brahmanical Aryans, so with the Buddhists, Middle Country was the cradle on which they staged the entire drama of their career, and it is to the description and information of this tract of land (by whatever name they called it) that they bestowed all their care and attention. Outside the pale of Madhyadeśa there were countries that were always looked down upon by the inhabitants of the favoured region.