Buddhist Civilisation 123like the later Ajanta cave paintings, show voluptuous women,
towering superhuman Bodhisattvas and delicate court scenes,
indicating a pleasure-loving society. Kosambi believes that the
Jatakas, though referring back to events in Kosala and Magadha of
the Buddha’s time, actually depict this society, and he contrasts it
to the narrow-minded Brahmanic ritualism making its recovery in
the north and described in the Manusmriti (Kosambi 1975:
268–71, 277). The Sanskrit play Mrcchakatika,or ‘Little Clay Cart’,
showing the love of a Brahman householder for a courtesan with
her own well-to-do household, and climaxing in a peasant uprising
and change of dynasty, was written in Satavahana territory, and
the great Buddhist philosopher–physician Nagarjuna was associ-
ated with the Satavahana kings. All in all, it was an open society in
spite of the occasional claim of a king to ‘prevent the mixture of
varnas’ and it was a society under the hegemony of Buddhism.
In north India, while the central Asian incursions which were
coming in waves around opponents of the Satavahanas, new and
prosperous empires such as that of the Kushanas (between 1st to
3rd centuries CE) were coming up. The Kushana empire was not
simply an ‘Indian’ one but a world empire including most of north-
ern India and much of central Asia. Kanishka, its most famous
ruler, was a patron of Buddhism; it is probably his rule which
marks the beginning of the Saka era (78 CE). Trade links with
China through central Asia were strong at the time. There was a
flourishing urban culture west of the original Magadha empire, and
Buddhism remained the dominant religion. The reign of Kanishka
also marks the changes that were taking place in Buddhism; the
council that marked the beginning of Mahayana Buddhism was
supposed to have been held under him. It was during his time that
the first recorded Buddhist missionaries, Dharmaraksha and
Kasyapa Matanga, left for China in 65 CE, departing from Taxila
and climbing up ‘through the awesome Indus gorge’, going through
difficult terrain that is heavily marked by remains of stupas and
records of Kushana rulers, and finally, after a ‘spectacular climb up
the glaciers’, coming to Tashkurgan in what is now China. This is
what is now called the Karakoram route in the part of Kashmir
currently under Pakistani control which when in the late 1970s
Pakistani and Chinese engineers began work on the highway was
described as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ as a road passed
through heavily mountainous and high land (Keay 2001: 111–17).drove through northwest India, went east, and rose again under
Gotamiputa Satakani (Gautamiputra Satkarni) in the 1st half of
the 2nd century. At the height of their power they ruled much of
Maharashtra, Andhra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Their
inscriptions and those of their successors were in Prakrit with
Brahmi script. The metronymic was used both for rulers and others
in their territory as can be seen in inscriptions recording donations,
which also indicated a matrilineal and probably tribal tradition.
Kosambi considers them to have been originally an indigenous
tribe, with the name Sadakani deriving from the Austro-Asiatic
word for ‘horse’. The first major inscription, and also the largest
statue, is that of a queen Nayanika, who may even have been a ruling
queen given the inscriptional and coin evidence (Mirashi 1981: II:
5–20). Later inscriptions also show an important role of queens, per-
haps by that time as ‘queen-mothers’. It is quite possible that matriliny
was a major practice and, as with the early Egyptians, the earliest
kings may have claimed the throne through ‘marrying’ sisters.^2 After
Nayanika’s early inscription recording a number of Vedic sacrifices
and gifts to Brahmans (this may have been the time of Pushyamitra),
all others record donations to Buddhist monasteries, either by assis-
tance in the excavation of caves or the donation of villages.
The great monastic caves, inscriptions and carvings in the Western
Ghats reveal the mercantile nature of the Satavahana society; the
caves marked trade routes and show both the link with Rome and
a local monetised economy. The donors, shown through their
signatures or occasionally in statues, are a remarkable group. They
include foreigners (Greeks), bankers, wealthy merchants, and also
a perfume-vendor, a carpenter, braziers, a blacksmith, flower-
vendors, ploughmen and householder-farmers. (In contrast, the
monuments sponsored by the northern Kushanas at about the same
time had many more kings and nobles). Many women were shown
making or sharing in donations, including nuns (who thus appar-
ently held property!). Often the craftsmen were organised in power-
ful guilds, which themselves made donations, took money on interest
and entered into other financial agreements with rulers. The carvings,
122 Buddhism in India
(^2) The Jatakas record a Rama legend in which Sita is the sister of ‘Rama-pandit’
and ‘Lakkana’ and later becomes co-queen with them (# 461, JatakasVolume 4,
1985: 79–86).