History of Indian and Eastern Architecture

In addition to the inscriptions bearing these names, General Cunningham quotes a great number of others, with dates in the same Samvat era, extending from the year 5 to the year 281, but without any kings’ names in them. Their purport, however, and the form of the characters used, he considers sufficient to show that they form a connected series dating from one and the same era, whatever that may be.

Here, therefore, we have an era, which we may safely assume was established by Kanishka, either from the beginning of his reign, or to mark some important event in it, and which was used after his time for two or three centuries at least. The question is, was that the era since known as that of Vicramaditya, dating from 56 B.C., or was it the Saka era of King Salivahana, dating 135 years after that? General Cunningham unhesitatingly adopts the former; and though it is not a subject to dogmatise upon, I am much more inclined to adopt the latter.

In the first place, because I can find no trace of any such era being in use before the cataclysm in A.D. 750. Bhau Daji states that he knows no inscription dated in it before the 11th century.[737] General Cunningham says it was not used as early as 826,[738] but, in another place, quotes an inscription in 754.[739] I know of none earlier; and can trace no allusion to any king of the name of Vicramaditya in the first century B.C., and no events that could have given rise to an era in 56 B.C. No trace of it is found in Thibet, in Burmah, or Cambodia, and it never was heard of in Ceylon or Java. In all these countries the Saka era is known and was used, and it seems strange that an era established by so powerful a Buddhist king as Kanishka should have endured for two or three centuries, and then perished, without leaving a trace in any Buddhist country, and then, after the 8th century, been revived and adopted by the Brahmans for their chronology. It may be so; but it is so strange, it seems to require some strong evidence to make it credible, and none such has yet been advanced.

Hitherto Kanishka’s date has been assumed almost wholly on numismatic evidence, but it seems to me without sufficient grounds. In all the lists hitherto published,[740] there are at least a dozen barbarian kings, several of whom, from the extent of their mintages, must have had long and prosperous reigns. To compress the whole into the sixty-four years that elapsed for the destruction of the Bactrian kingdom (120 B.C.), and the era of Vicramaditya (56 B.C.), seems to me a very strong measure, for which I can see no justification. To allow each, on an average, sixteen years’ reign, seems very much more probable, especially as many more names may yet be discovered—and even without them this would take us on to the Saka era (A.D. 79) without difficulty. One of them, Gondophares, as we shall presently see, reigned for twenty-six years at least.

The Roman consular coins found by M. Court, above referred to (ante, p. 79), were so worn as to be hardly legible, and though, therefore, they limit the antiquity of his reign certainly to this side of 44 B.C., they by no means prove that he was so early. On the contrary, the coins being worn, seems to prove that they were old before being buried; the probability is that they may have belonged to some pilgrim, or missionary, in the West, and had become sacred relics before they were enshrined. If Kanishka had merely wanted foreign coins, Greek or Roman, he might have had hundreds of perfect ones at his command. There must have been some other and holier motive for their deposit than merely to mark a date.

Every one has heard of the legend of St. Thomas the Apostle visiting the court of Gondophares, and, some add, being beheaded by his order. It may be a legend, and not one word of truth in it, but those who invented it in the second or third century must at least have had the means of knowing what was the name of the king who was on the throne of Gandhara at, or immediately after, the time of the Crucifixion. This name appears frequently on coins and inscriptions, and, from the numismatic evidence, has been placed by all as anterior to Kanishka, and I fancy that no one looking at the coins can well arrive at any other conclusion. If this is so, and he was reigning at any time between A.D. 33 and 50, Kanishka certainly belongs to the latter half of that century.

Against this it must be stated that both General Cunningham and Professor Dowson read an inscription of this king found at Takht-i-Bahi, as dated in his twenty-sixth year—one says in the 103rd,[741] the other 100th,[742] of the same Samvat as the inscription of Kanishka—a date which would answer perfectly for the legend. If this is so, there is an end of the controversy; but the stone is so worn, and the writing so indistinct, that I cannot see in the photographs of it what these gentlemen find there, and others are equally unable to do so; and besides this, it is such a wrench to all numismatic evidence to place the coins of Gondophares 100 years after those of Kanishka, that we must have more evidence than this imperfect inscription affords before we adopt its epochal date. The regnal date seems quite clear.

There is one other point of view from which this question may be regarded, but which it is difficult to express clearly without going to a greater length than our limits will admit of. It is the date of the third convocation, as the northern Buddhists call it—the fourth, according to the southern. It was held certainly under Kanishka’s auspices, and I cannot help fancying about the year 70 or 80 A.D. At that time, at least, Buddhism seems to have made a great stride in Thibet, in Burmah, and the East generally. It was about this time that it was fabled to have been first carried to Java, and about the time when it was first introduced in China.[743] It looks so like one of those outbursts of missionary zeal that followed all the three previous convocations, that I cannot help fancying that this one was held in the latter half of the first century, and that the era of the king who held it was allowed in all Buddhist countries to supersede that of the Nirvana, which, as far as I can see, was the only one that had existed previously in India.

To argue this out fully would require more space than its importance for architectural purposes would justify; but its bearing on the age of the Gandhara monasteries is in some respects considerable. If they are as modern as I suspect them to be, the more modern date for Kanishka would accord better with the known facts than carrying his date up before the Christian era.

Proceeding onward, the next name we come to of any importance is Mahiracula, who is said to have invaded Ceylon. There is, however, no trace of any such invasion at that time, which, by the application of averages would be about 180 A.D., if Kanishka ruled before, and 250 if after, the Christian Era. His date would be interesting if it could be ascertained from his connexion with Baladitya, the king of Magadha, whose story Hiouen Thsang tells in such minute detail.[744]

The Aditya dynasty opens with a king who is said to have been a kinsman of Vicramaditya, and is evidently the grandfather of the great king of that name, who figures prominently in the next dynasty as the patron of Matrigupta. The story of the latter is told in great detail in the ‘Raja Tarangini,’ and is one of the most curious episodes in the history. He was sent to Kashmir four years before the death of Vicramaditya (550), and on hearing of his patron’s decease, resigned his viceroyalty, and retired to Benares, leaving the throne to his successor, Pravarasena.

In speaking of the dynasty of Malwa, only twenty or twenty-five years were allowed for the reign of Sri Harsha, and only eighty for the whole duration, from the fall of the Guptas, 470, to the death of the great Vicramaditya, 550, a period, it seems from the evidence of the ‘Raja Tarangini,’ it is impossible to contract. Pratapaditya, the kinsman of the first, was, we are told, the great-grandfather of Megavahana, the first king of the next dynasty, and then we have one more king before we reach Hiranya, who is said to have been contemporary with the second Vicramaditya. Of course there may have been considerable overlapping at both ends, and the lives of the Kashmiri kings may have been short; but as we have six intermediate kings in the one list between the two Vicramadityas, and only one in the other, it seems that the last could hardly have ascended the throne before 515, if so early.

One of the acts of Pravarasena was to invade Siladitya, the first Ballabhi king of that name ruling in Gujerat. We have not, it is true, any dated coins or inscriptions belonging to him, but we have of his next successor but one, Sri Dharasena II., 593 (ante, p. 730), so that any date between 550 and 570 would answer perfectly well for this war, and the fact of its being so is in itself almost sufficient to establish the correctness of the chronology we are now trying to explain.

Since I wrote last on the subject, a passage has been pointed out to me[745] in Rémusat’s ‘Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques’ (vol. i. p. 197), which enables us to fix the chronology of the Naga dynasty within a year or two for extreme deviation. It seems that the third king, Chandrapira, applied to the Chinese Emperor for assistance against the Arabs in 713, and that the Emperor conferred the title of King on him in or about 720. As he was on the throne only eight years and eight months, there is no room for deviation in this date, and it carries with it those of his predecessors and followers. It thus becomes clear that Durlabha I. was the king who was on the throne when Hiouen Thsang resided in the valley, 631-633, and also when he passed near it on his return home in 643, all which is perfectly consonant with what we find in his text; and it also fixes the date of Lalitaditya, one of the most important kings in the list, with almost absolute certainty, as 725-762.[746]

Without placing implicit reliance on all that is said in the ‘Raja Tarangini,’ with regard to the exploits of this king, or of his having overrun and conquered all India, from beyond the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, still a sufficient residuum of fact must remain to enable us to see that the troubles which had begun in 650, on the death of Siladitya of Canouge, had laid India prostrate at the feet of any daring adventurer.

From whatever side we approach it, we can hardly fail to perceive that a great revolution took place in India about the year 750. All the old dynasties are then swept away, and for 200 years we have nothing but darkness, and when light again dawns, about two centuries afterwards, the map is re-arranged, and new dynasties and new religions have taken the place of the old.

This reign, too, forms a most appropriate termination to the principal division of our architectural history. The coins of his rival, Yasoverman of Canouge, found in the great Tope at Manikyala, prove the completion of that great Buddhist monument, just 1000 years after the style had been inaugurated by the great Asoka, and in that thousand years all that is important in Buddhist architecture is included. The fact, too, of his being the builder of the great Naga temple at Marttand, the earliest, so far as I know, in Kashmir, marks the commencement of a new architectural era, the fruits of which we see when the curtain again rises. The Jaina religion, with its new style of temples, had entirely replaced Buddhist forms over the greater part of India, and the Vaishnava and Saiva religions reigned supreme everywhere else, in the forms in which we now find them, after the lapse of nearly another 1000 years’ duration. As, however, there are no chronological difficulties with regard to these later dynasties, the discussion of the dates of the kings’ reigns who built them has evidently no place in this Appendix.[747]

Era of Vicramaditya.

Before concluding this Appendix, I would like to be allowed to explain an hypothesis which, if it can be sustained, not only clears up what has hitherto been a great mystery, but gets rid of a quantity of rubbish which obscures the chronology of the period. It does not, however, alter any date, nor affect them further than, if true, it confirms some, which, if it prove groundless, are deprived of its support.

No one has yet been able to point to the name of Vicramaditya as belonging to any king in the first century B.C., or to any event likely to give rise to an era being dated from it.[748] What, then, was the origin of the era dating from 56 B.C., and how did it arise and obtain its name?

My belief is that the solution of the mystery will be found in a passage in Albiruni, the meaning of which he did not profess to understand, combined with two or three passages in the ‘Raja Tarangini.’

The passage in Albiruni is to the following effect:—“L’ère de Saca, nommée par les Indiens Sacakala, est postérieure à celle de Vicramaditya de 135 ans. Saca est le nom d’un prince qui a régné sur les contrées situées entre l’Indus et la mer (le Golfe du Bengale). Sa résidence était placée au centre de l’Empire (Muttra?), dans la contrée nommée Aryavartha. Les Indiens le font naître dans une classe autre que celle des (Kchatrias?): quelques-uns prétendent qu’il était Soudra et originaire de la ville de Mansoura. Il y en a même qui disent qu’il n’était pas de race indienne, et qu’il tirait son origine des régions occidentales. Les peuples eurent beaucoup à souffrir de son despotisme, jusqu’à ce qu’il leur vînt du secours de l’Orient. Vicramaditya marcha contre lui, mit son armée en déroute, et le tua sur le territoire de Korour, situé entre Moultan et le Château de Louny. Cette époque devint célèbre, à cause de la joie que les peuples ressentirent de la mort de Saca, et on la choisit pour ère, principalement chez les astronomes.”[749]

It seems impossible to apply this narrative to any events happening in the first century B.C., not to mention the inherent absurdity of Vicramaditya establishing an era 56 B.C., and then 135 years afterwards defeating the Saka king on the banks of the Indus. If it meant anything, it might point to the origin of the Saka era, not that of Vicramaditya.

Turning from this to the ‘Raja Tarangini,’ we find the following passages in Troyer’s translation:—

“Ayant fait venir ensuite, d’un autre pays, Pratapaditya, parent du roi Vicramaditya, ils le sacrèrent souverain de l’Empire.

“D’autres induits en erreur ont écrit que ce Vicramaditya fut le même qui combattit les Çakas; mais cette version est rejetée.”[750]

A little further on we have: “Dans le même temps—the death of Hiranya—l’heureux Vicramaditya, appelé d’un autre nom Harcha, réunit comme empereur à Udjdjayini l’Empire de l’Inde sous un seul parasol....

“Employant la fortune comme moyen d’utilité, il fit fleurir les talents: c’est ainsi qu’encore aujourd’hui les hommes de talent se trouvent la tête haute au milieu des riches.

“Ayant d’abord détruit les Çakas, il rendit léger le fardeau de l’œuvre de Hari, qui doit descendre sur la terre pour exterminer les Mletchhas.”[751]

Before going further, it may be as well to point out what appears to be a fair inference from the above. That the first Vicramaditya, the friend of Pratapaditya, was so near in date to the second—he, in fact, appears to have been his grandfather—as to be confounded with him, and to have the name of Sakari applied to him, which in fact belonged to his grandson, the real destroyer of the Sakas.

My conviction is, that these paragraphs refer to one and the same event; and, assuming that the battle of Korûr was fought 544—the year before Vicramaditya sent Matrigupta to be his viceroy in Kashmir—what I believe happened was this: Some time after 750, when the Hindus were remodelling their history and their institutions, so as to mark their victory over the Buddhists, they determined on establishing two eras, which should be older than that of the Buddhists, A.D. 79, and for this purpose instituted one, ten cycles of sixty years each, before the battle of Korûr, and called it by the name of the hero of that battle, the most illustrious of their history; the other ten centuries, or 1000 years before the same date, and called it by the name of his father, Sri Harsha—a title he himself often bore in conjunction with his own name—the first consequently dated for 56 B.C., the second from 456. It need hardly be added that no Sri Harsha existed in the fifth century B.C., any more than a Vicramaditya in the first.

The co-existence of these eras may be gathered from the following passage in Albiruni:—

“On emploie ordinairement les ères de Sri Harscha, de Vicramaditya, de Saca, de Ballabha, et des Gouptas.” “D’après cela, en s’en tenant à l’an 400 de l’ère de Yezderdjed, on se trouve sous l’année 1488 de l’ère de Sri Harscha—l’an 1088 de l’ère de Vicramaditya—l’an 953 de l’ère de Saca—l’an 712 de l’ère de Ballabha, et de celle des Gouptas (A.D. 1032).”—‘Journal Asiatique,’ series iv. vol. iv. pp. 280, 286.

The Sri Harsha era, exactly 400 years before that of Vicramaditya, was avowedly conventional, and seems never to have come into use, and no further mention is made of it afterwards.

If this view of the matter can be sustained, the advantage will be not only that the date of the battle of Korûr, and of the expulsion of the Sakas, Hunas, Yavanas, &c., from India will be fixed with mathematical precision in 544, but that one of the greatest mysteries connected with the history of the period will be cleared up, and the revival of the Hindu religion relegated to a much later period. If, on the other hand, it can be shown that this view of the matter is not tenable, we shall lose these advantages, but it will require a great deal more than that to prove that Vicramaditya, or any Hindu king, reigned in the first century B.C. Buddhism was then in its palmiest state, and there is no trace of the Hindu religion then existing, and the expulsion of Sakas, Yavanas, and Hunas did not take place for long afterwards.

Be this as it may, having now cursorily run through the whole chronology, in so far as it admits of controversy, I feel very confident, on a calm review of the whole, that none of the important dates quoted above can be disturbed to a greater extent than say ten, or at the utmost twenty years—except, perhaps, that of Kanishka. From the Anjana epoch, 691 B.C., to the death of Lalitaditya, A.D. 761, all seems now tolerably clear and fixed, and, with a very little industry, minor blemishes might easily be swept away. If this were done, the chronology of mediæval India for the Buddhist period might be considered as fixed on a secure and immoveable basis of ascertained facts. The advantages of this being done can hardly be over-estimated for improving our knowledge of India generally, while, among other things, it would give a precision and solidity to all our speculations about that country, which, for want of it, have hitherto been generally so vague and unsatisfactory.

APPENDIX B.

The following are the last of the twenty-four Buddhas, beginning with Dipankara I., who appeared to instruct and enlighten mankind, and to whom Sakya Muni succeeds in the present Kalpa:

APPENDIX C.

THE TWENTY-FOUR TIRTHANKARAS OF THE JAINS.

INDEX.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z