THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESThe voluminous Buddhist scriptures throw a flood of light on the life
and times of Gautama Buddha. He was born as the son of a Sakhya prince
in a region which now belongs to Nepal. He left his family at the age of 29
and spent many years as a wandering ascetic until he experienced his
enlightenment at Bodh Gaya. He then preached his first sermon at Sarnath
near Varanasi and toured many parts of what is now Bihar and eastern
Uttar Pradesh, spreading his teachings and gaining more and more
followers. He met the high and mighty of his time—among them King
Bimbisara of Magadha.
After his death, a council of 500 Buddhist monks was convened at
Rajagriha in order to edit the corpus of his sermons so that his authentic
teachings could be preserved. A second council, convened at Vaishali,
witnessed a schism: the ‘old ones’ (theravadins) insisted on the ascetic ideal
of the community of monks (sangha), whereas a new movement stood for
a greater accommodation of the lay members and a broadening of the
concept of the sangha to include followers other than monks. In keeping
with this aim, the new trend was called Mahasanghika. This was the origin
of the ‘Great Vehicle’ (mahayana) as the new movement liked to call itself
while looking down upon the ‘Small Vehicle’ (hinayana) of the orthodox
monks. This schism was undoubtedly of great importance for the later
development of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, but it also predetermined
the decline of Buddhism in India itself.
The west under Persian dominationIn the sixth century BC, the Persian kingdom of the Achaemenids emerged
within a few decades as the first major empire in recorded history. Kyros,
the founder of this empire, is said to have sent an expedition to
Afghanistan which reached the borders of India, but the conquest of
northwestern India was left to Dareios (521 to 485 BC). In the famous
inscription of Behistun (c. 518 BC), he mentions Gandhara as a province of
his empire. Other inscriptions add Hindush (Sindh) to this list of provinces
only a few years later. The river Indus, which had already been explored by
Skylax, a Greek in Persian service, thus had become the border of the
Persian empire.
Not much is known about the administration of these Persian provinces
on the banks of the Indus, but Herodotus reports that these regions (Indoi)
provided the greatest amount of revenue to the Persian empire. This would
indicate that under Dareios and Xerxes these regions were thoroughly
subjected to Persian administration. News about this altogether novel style
of administration must have reached Magadha, whose rulers were on the
verge of founding the first major empire on Indian soil. But it is difficult to
gauge the extent of Persian influence on Indian history because
archaeological evidence is missing and the gold coins of the Achaemenids