Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c30.34

c30.34

**Kashmir.** Hiuen Tsang next visits Kashmir, where Buddhism was very flourishing. From the *Life* we gather that he entered the country by its western approach, passing on the way several Buddhist monasteries in which he performed worship and at one of which, the Hushkapura-Vihāra, he spent a night. On his arrival, he was lodged for the first night in the Jayendra Monastery and was transferred next day to the palace where the king appointed some score of Brethren headed by the illustrious Bhadanta (or? Yasa) to wait on him. He also had the Scriptures read and expounded by Hiuen Tsang and appointed as his assistants twenty clerks to copy out MSS., besides five other men as his attendants. The pilgrim spent here two years, studying certain Sūtras and Śāstras and visiting Buddhist sacred places. He gives 100 as the number of monasteries then existing and 5,000 as the number of the Brethren living therein (pp. 258–261). Regarding the history of Buddhism in Kashmir, Hiuen Tsang relates the legend of its introduction by the Arhat Madhyāntika, the disciple of Ānanda, and of the settlement of 500 Arhats from Pāṭaliputra during the reign of Asoka in 500 monasteries built by that emperor (pp. 265, 267). These Arhats founded the Sthavira school in Kashmir as distinguished from the Mahāsaṁghika school formed by the Brethren from whom they separated (p. 269). Among the existing monasteries of Kashmir, Hiuen Tsang mentions one containing above 300 Brethren with "a tope built for a Tooth-relic of the Buddha", another with a standing image of him, and another fine large old monastery on a mountain, of which only a two-storeyed building in one corner was inhabited by thirty Mahāyāna Brethren, which was famous as the dwelling-place of the Śāstra-master, Saṁghabhadra (p. 280). In the neighbourhood was another small monastery famous for its 'old boy', the great Śāstra-master, Skandhila (ib.). At a distance from the capital, the pilgrim noticed two other monasteries, one called the Merchant's-wood Monastery, where wrote the Śāstra-master Pūrṇa, and the other a Mahāsaṁghika Monastery with above 100 inmates, where wrote the Śāstra-master Bodhila (p. 282).