III. THE GOLDEN AGE OF INDIA

An epoch of invasions—The Kushan kings—The Gupta Empire—The travels of Fa-Hien—The revival of letters—The Huns in India—Harsha the generous—The travels of Yuan Chwang

From the death of Ashoka to the empire of the Guptas—i.e., for a period of almost six hundred years—Hindu inscriptions and documents are so few that the history of this interval is lost in obscurity.⁴⁴ It was not necessarily a Dark Age; great universities like those at Taxila continued to function, and in the northwestern portion of India the influence of Persia in architecture, and of Greece in sculpture, produced a flourishing civilization in the wake of Alexander’s invasion. In the first and second centuries before Christ, Syrians, Greeks and Scythians poured down into the Punjab, conquered it, and established there, for some three hundred years, this Greco-Bactrian culture. In the first century of what we so provincially call the Christian Era the Kushans, a central Asian tribe akin to the Turks, captured Kabul, and from that city as capital extended their power throughout northwestern India and most of Central Asia. In the reign of their greatest king, Kanishka, the arts and sciences progressed: Greco-Buddhist sculpture produced some of its fairest masterpieces, fine buildings were reared in Peshawar, Taxila and Mathura, Charaka advanced the art of medicine, and Nagarjuna and Ashvaghosha laid the bases of that Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism which was to help Gautama to win China and Japan. Kanishka tolerated many religions, and experimented with various gods; finally he chose the new mythological Buddhism that had made Buddha into a deity and had filled the skies with Bodhisattwas and Arhats; he called a great council of Buddhist theologians to formulate this creed for his realms, and became almost a second Ashoka in spreading the Buddhist faith. The Council composed 300,000 sutras, lowered Buddha’s philosophy to the emotional needs of the common soul, and raised him to divinity.

Meanwhile Chandragupta I (quite distinct, despite his name and number, from Chandragupta Maurya) had established in Magadha the Gupta Dynasty of native kings. His successor, Samudragupta, in a reign of fifty years, made himself one of the foremost monarchs in India’s long history. He changed his capital from Pataliputra to Ayodhya, ancient home of the legendary Rama; sent his conquering armies and tax-gatherers into Bengal, Assam, Nepal, and southern India; and spent the treasure brought to him from vassal states in promoting literature, science, religion and the arts. He himself, in the interludes of war, achieved distinction as a poet and a musician. His son, Vikramaditya (“Sun of Power”), extended these conquests of arms and the mind, supported the great dramatist Kalidasa, and gathered a brilliant circle of poets, philosophers, artists, scientists and scholars about him in his capital at Ujjain. Under these two kings India reached a height of development unsurpassed since Buddha, and a political unity rivaled only under Ashoka and Akbar.

We discern some outline of Gupta civilization from the account that Fa-Hien gave of his visit to India at the opening of the fifth century of our era. He was one of many Buddhists who came from China to India during this Golden Age; and these pilgrims were probably less numerous than the merchants and ambassadors who, despite her mountain barriers, now entered pacified India from East and West, even from distant Rome, and brought to her a stimulating contact with foreign customs and ideas. Fa-Hien, after risking his life in passing through western China, found himself quite safe in India, traveling everywhere without encountering molestation or thievery.⁴⁵ His journal tells how he took six years in coming, spent six years in India, and needed three years more for his return via Ceylon and Java to his Chinese home.⁴⁶ He describes with admiration the wealth and prosperity, the virtue and happiness, of the Hindu people, and the social and religious liberty which they enjoyed. He was astonished at the number, size and population of the great cities, at the free hospitals and other charitable institutions which dotted the land,* at the number of students in the universities and monasteries, and at the imposing scale and splendor of the imperial palaces.⁴⁸ His description is quite Utopian, except for the matter of right hands:

The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households, or attend to any magistrates or their rules; only those who cultivate the royal land have to pay a portion of the gain from it. If they want to go they go; if they want to stay they stay. The king governs without decapitation or corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined; . . . even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion they only have their right hands cut off. . . . Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the Chandalas. . . . In that country they do not keep pigs and fowls, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers’ shops, and no dealers in intoxicating drinks.⁴⁹

Fa-Hien hardly noted that the Brahmans, who had been in disfavor with the Mauryan dynasty since Ashoka, were growing again in wealth and power under the tolerant rule of the Gupta kings. They had revived the religious and literary traditions of pre-Buddhist days, and were developing Sanskrit into the Esperanto of scholars throughout India. It was under their influence and the patronage of the court that the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were written down into their present form.⁵⁰ Under this dynasty, too, Buddhist art reached its zenith in the frescoes of the Ajanta caves. In the judgment of a contemporary Hindu scholar, the “mere names of Kalidasa and Varahamihira, Gunavarman and Vashubandu, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, are sufficient to mark this epoch as an apogee of Indian culture.”⁵¹ “An impartial historian,” says Havell, “might well consider that the greatest triumph of British administration would be to restore to India all that she enjoyed in the fifth century A.D.”⁵²

This heyday of native culture was interrupted by a wave of those Hun invasions which now overran both Asia and Europe, ruining for a time India as well as Rome. While Attila was raiding Europe, Toramana was capturing Malwa, and the terrible Mihiragula was hurling the Gupta rulers from their throne. For a century India relapsed into bondage and chaos. Then a scion of the Gupta line, Harsha-Vardhana, recaptured northern India, built a capital at Kanauj, and for forty-two years gave peace and security to a wide realm, in which once more native arts and letters flourished. We may conjecture the size, splendor and prosperity of Kanauj from the one unbelievable item that when the Moslems sacked it (1018 A.D.) they destroyed 10,000 temples.⁵³ Its fine public gardens and free bathing tanks were but a small part of the beneficence of the new dynasty. Harsha himself was one of those rare kings who make monarchy appear—for a time—the most admirable of all forms of government. He was a man of personal charm and accomplishments, writing poetry and dramas that are read in India to this day; but he did not allow these foibles to interfere with the competent administration of his kingdom. “He was indefatigable,” says Yuan Chwang, “and the day was too short for him; he forgot sleep in his devotion to good works.”⁵⁴ Having begun as a worshiper of Shiva he was later converted to Buddhism, and became another Ashoka in his pious benefactions. He forbade the eating of animal food, established travelers’ rests throughout his domain, and erected thousands of topes, or Buddhist shrines, on the banks of the Ganges.

Yuan Chwang, most famous of the Chinese Buddhists who visited India, tells us that Harsha proclaimed, every five years, a great festival of charity, to which he invited all officials of all religions, and all the poor and needy of the realm. At this gathering it was his custom to give away in public alms all the surplus brought into the state treasury since the last quinquennial feast. Yuan was surprised to see a great quantity of gold, silver, coins, jewelry, fine fabrics and delicate brocades piled up in an open square, surrounded by a hundred pavilions each seating a thousand persons. Three days were given to religious exercises; on the fourth day (if we-may believe the incredible pilgrim) the distribution began. Ten thousand Buddhist monks were fed, and each received a pearl, garments, flowers, perfumes, and one hundred pieces of gold. Then the Brahmans were given alms almost as abundant; then the Jains; then other sects; then all the poor and orphaned laity that had come from every quarter of the kingdom. Sometimes the distribution lasted three or four months. At the end Harsha divested himself of his costly robes and jewelry, and added them to the alms.⁵⁵

The memoirs of Yuan Chwang reveal a certain theological exhilaration as the mental spirit of the age. It is a pleasant picture, and significant of India’s repute in other lands—this Chinese aristocrat leaving his comforts and perquisites in far-off Ch’ang-an, passing across half-civilized western China, through Tashkent and Samarkand (then a flourishing city), over the Himalayas into India, and then studying zealously, for three years, in the monastic university at Nalanda. His fame as a scholar and a man of rank brought him many invitations from the princes of India. When Harsha heard that Yuan was at the court of Kumara, King of Assam, he summoned Kumara to come with Yuan to Kanauj. Kumara refused, saying that Harsha could have his head, but not his guest. Harsha answered: “I trouble you for your head,” and Kumara came. Harsha was fascinated by Yuan’s learning and fine manners, and called a convocation of Buddhist notables to hear Yuan expound the Mahayana doctrine. Yuan nailed his theses to the gateway of the pavilion in which the discourse was to be held, and added a postscript in the manner of the day: “If any one here can find a single wrong argument and can refute it, I will let him cut off my head.” The discussion lasted eighteen days, but Yuan (Yuan reports) answered all objections and confounded all heretics. (Another account has it that his opponents ended the conference by setting fire to the pavilion.)⁵⁶After many adventures Yuan found his way back to Chang-an, where an enlightened emperor enshrined in a rich temple the Buddhist relics which this holy Polo had brought with him, and gave him a corps of scholars to help translate the manuscripts that he had purchased in India.⁵⁷

All the glory of Harsha’s rule, however, was artificial and precarious, for it depended upon the ability and generosity of a mortal king. When he died a usurper seized the throne, and illustrated the nether side of monarchy. Chaos ensued, and continued for almost a thousand years. India, like Europe, now suffered her Middle Ages, was overrun by barbarians, was conquered, divided, and despoiled. Not until the great Akbar would she know peace and unity again.