Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c3.s3.t3.16

c3.s3.t3.16

It then comes to this. Daṇḍaka, Bhīmaratha, Assaka and Kaliṅga were contemporaries. But unfortunately none of these, except Bhīmaratha, is a personal name, and therefore it is very difficult to identify any of them. Daṇḍaka is not known to the Brāhmaṇas or the Upaniṣads. The Paurāṇic Daṇḍa or Daṇḍaka is, as rightly pointed out by Pargiter,⁷ an eponym to account for the name of the forest, because it clashes with the other statements about the many kings that occupied the Deccan. But whatever may have been the personal name of our Daṇḍaki, he is most certainly identical with Dāṇḍakya of Kauṭilya⁸ and Daṇḍaka of the Rāmāyaṇa⁹ and the Mahābhārata¹⁰ and also of the Jaina Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita of Hemacandra.¹¹ For, all of these refer to the dire destruction that befell his realm. He was most probably a post-Vedic king as may be judged by his absence from the Vedic texts, though this argumentum ex silentio is never conclusive, we admit. We cannot say for certain, again, with which of the several Bhīmas of Vidarbha of the Purāṇas mentioned in Pargiter's list¹ are we to identify our Bhīmaratha, or whether the identification is possible at all. Nor is his identification with Bhīma of the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* possible, for in that case we shall have to carry him back to the early *Brāhmaṇa* period to make him contemporaneous with such comparatively ancient kings as Dummukha and Naggaji, which is, to our mind, inconceivable. It appears therefore that Bhīmaratha was later than the *Brāhmaṇic* Bhīma. Similarly, the Kaliṅga king mentioned in our *Jātaka* must be taken as later than Karaṇḍu of the earlier period. Assaka's identity remains uncertain. So from all this it appears reasonable to hold that these four kings, whosoever they in reality may have been, lived at a time when the Northern powers like the Pañcāla and Videha of the later Vedic period were showing signs of collapse and when Kāsī had not yet risen to its Imperial status capable enough to capture Assaka and other powers of the South.² The period may with a fair approximation be dated as 800 B. C..³