Geography of Early Buddhism c8.4

c8.4

There are numerous references to Uttarāpatha in Pāli literature. In the Hāthigumphā inscription of King Khāravela, we are told that King Khāravela was able to strike terror into the heart of the King of Uttarāpatha. He compelled King Bahasatimita of Magadha to bow down at his feet. Khāravela's Uttarāpatha probably signifies the region including Mathurā in its south-eastern extension up to Magadha. From the prologue of Book V of the Suttanipāta (p. 190), it appears the Dakkhiṇāpatha lent its name to the region through which it passed—the whole tract of land lying to the south of the Ganges and to the north of Godāvarī being known, according to Buddhaghosa, as Dakkhiṇāpatha or the Deccan proper (VT., Mahāvagga, V, 13; Cullavagga, I, 18, p. 362). Uttarāpatha too may be supposed to have been originally a great trade route—the northern high road, so to speak, which extended from Sāvatthi to Takkasilā in Gāndhāra, and have lent, precisely like the southern high road, its name to the region through which it passed, i.e., the region covering, broadly speaking, the north-western part of the United Provinces, and the whole of the Punjab and the North-Western Frontier Provinces. But this definition of Uttarāpatha is nowhere explicitly stated in Pāli literature. It is, therefore, not at all improbable that Uttarāpatha, in Pāli literature might have also signified the same region, i.e., the entire northern India from Aṅga in the east to Gandhāra in the north-west and from the Himalayas in the north to the Vindhyās in the south as understood by its later and wider sense (i.e., the whole of Āryāvarta), e.g., in the Cālukya inscriptions of the 7th and 8th centuries A.D.