Early Monastic Buddhism v2.c33.s3.13

v2.c33.s3.13

The career of the off-shoots of this school, however, took a different course. They were mainly located in one country, the Andhra, for which they were given in the Ceylonese chronicles the collective name of the Andhakas. We have seen above (p. 52) that their names appear more than once in the Amarāvatī and Nāgārjunikoṇḍa inscriptions. Just as Bodh-Gaya grew up on the bank of the Nerañjarā as a very early centre of Theravāda and a place of pilgrimage for the early Buddhists so also did Amarāvatī (extending to Jaggayapeta) and Nāgārjunikoṇḍa on the bank of the Kṛṣṇā (including its tributary Paler) grow as a flourishing centre of the off-shoots of the Mahāsaṅghikas in the first century B.C. or A.D. and became a place of pilgrimage for the Buddhists of the later days.