An Outline of the Religious Literature of India c8.3

c8.3

Early in the second century B. C. the Maurya empire fell. A Hindu dynasty, the Śuṅga, took its place at the capital, Patna, and doubtless annulled Aśoka's laws against animal sacrifice; while on the now contracted western frontier crouched Bactrian Greeks, Parthians, and Scythians, waiting to spring at the central empire. Under the Hindu dynasty arose new texts of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata in which Rāma and Kṛṣṇa walk the earth as divine incarnations. In Buddhist works of the same period the Buddha appears as a semi-divine being with new attributes.