Geography of Early Buddhism c8.16

c8.16

In the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī (I, p. 124), we are told that Kamboja was the home of horses. The commentary on the Kunāla Jātaka (Jāt., V, p. 446) gives us to know how the Kamboja people caught horses in the forest. In one of the Jātakas (Jāt., Cowell, VI, 110 note) we are informed that the Kambojas were a north-western tribe who were supposed to have lost their original Aryan customs and to have become barbarous. In the Bhūridatta Jātaka (Jāt., VI, p. 208) we are told that many Kambojas who were not Aryans told that people were purified by killing insects, flies, snakes, frogs, bees, etc. The Jātaka tradition is corroborated by that contained in Yāṣka's Nirukta as well as in Yuan Chwang's account of Rājapura and the adjoining countries of the north-west. The Nirukta would have us believe that in Yāṣka's time the Kambojas had come to be regarded as a people distinct from the Aryans of India proper, speaking a different dialect. Speaking of Rājapura, Yuan Chwang says, ‘From Lampa to Rājapura the inhabitants are coarse and plain in personal appearance, of rude violent disposition.... they do not belong to India proper but are inferior peoples of frontier (i.e., barbarians) stocks’ (Watters—Yuan Chwang, I, pp. 284 ff.).