Tribes in Ancient India c60.6

c60.6

The legend from the *Aśokāvadāna*, as summarised by the late Dr. Vincent Smith, is as follows: ‘When King Aśoka desired to distribute the sacred relics of the body of Buddha among the eighty-four thousand stūpas erected by himself, he opened the stūpa of the Urn, wherein King Ajātaśatru had enshrined the cremation relics collected from seven of the eight original stūpas. The eighth, that at Rāmagāma, was defended by the guardian Nāgas, who would not allow it to be opened. The relics thus withdrawn from the stūpa of the Urn were distributed among eighty-four thousand stūpas, "resplendent as the autumn clouds" which were erected in a single day by the descendant of the Mauryas.¹ A similar legend can be gathered from the Sinhalese chronicles and other late Pāli works, particularly Buddhaghosa’s commentary² on the *Mahāparinibbāna Suttanta*; while the epilogues attached to the *Mahāparinibbāna Suttanta* and the *Buddhavamsa* indicate that the sacred relics of the Buddha’s body were, after their re-distribution, enshrined all over Northern India from Gandhāra to Kalinga.³