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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
POLITICAL HISTORY were put to considerable inconvenience and discomfort during their stay there. On their return home, they made a representation to the king that such a holy place of the Buddhists as Bōdh-Gayā, where the founder of their religion obtained Enlightenment, had yet remained without any accommodation for the Sinhalese pilgrims. Thereupon Mēghavarṇa, we are told, sent an embassy, with presents to the Magadha Court and obtained the permission of Samudragupta to erect a monastery and a rest-house for the convenience of travellers from Ceylon. The same story with variations has been told also by Hiuen Tsiang. From this it appears that the monastery was built outside the northern gate of the of the wall of the Bōdhi Tree. It was three storeys in height, included six halls, was adorned with three towers, and surrounded by a strong wall thirty or forty feet high. The statue of the Buddha was cast in gold and silver and was studded with gems. The monks exceeded one thousand in number, and belonged to the Sthavira school of the Mahāyāna.1 The site is now marked by an extensive mound on the northern side of the Bōdhi Tree. According to the Mahāvaṁsa, Mēghavaṇṇa (Mēghavarṇa) succeeded his father Mahāsēna and ruled from 836-863 A.B., which, according to the reckoning of the era accepted by Gieger,2 correspond to 352-379 A.D. This makes Mēghavarṇa an exact contemporary of Samudragupta.
In between the list of the countries and tribes who were situated on the outskirts of Samudragupta’s dominions and who paid him tribute and homage and the list of the distant foreign
monarchs who entered into diplomatic relations with him occurs a line in the Allahabad pillar
praśasti which says that the fame of this Gupta sovereign became tired with wandering over
the whole earth and re-establishing the royal families that had been overturned and had
been dispossessed of their realms. It is a pity that Harishēṇa, the author of the praśasti, tells us
nothing as to which royal houses had lost their kingdoms but were reinstated by Samudragupta. He gives us details about all other achievements of his lord and master, but curiously
enough, does not give the name of any royal dynasty that had been so restored to power by
the Gupta monarch. Presumably he had good reasons to observe reticence over this point.
These royal families, it seems, were now on terms of great intimacy with the Gupta House, and
it was probably considered to be a positively bad taste to mention their names and thereby
revive the memories of their unfortunate past and remind them of their subordinate present.
Harishēṇa’s silence is thus perfectly intelligible. Can we, however, make a shrewd guess about
any one of these royal families ? Now, it is worthy of note that Harishēṇa has given us a detailed account of Samudragupta’s conquests but has not said a word about the Vākāṭakas.
What was the position of the Vākāṭakas about this time ? For a long time there was nothing
to show that Vākāṭaka family was in any way connected with the Gupta family. Nay,
nothing was known about the exact period when the Vākāṭakas flourished. Of course, there
was palaeography to help us in the matter. But palaeography is not an exact science. And it
is no wonder if Feet and Kielhorn differed widely from Bhagwanlal Indraji and Bühler3 in
regard to their correct time, though all of them were erudite scholars. It was the discovery
of the Poona plates of Prabhāvatiguptā4 that established a synchronism. She was the chief
queen of the Vākāṭaka Mahārāja Rudrasēna (II) and daughter of the Imperial Gupta sovereign Chandragupta II. The father of Rudrasēna (II) was Pṛithivīshēṇa I, who was thus a
contemporary of Chadragupta II. Their fathers, consequently, were contemporaries, namely, 1 Ind. Ant., Vol. XXXI, p. 194; Beal, Buddh. Rec. West. World, Vol. II, p. 133; Watters, on Yuan Chwang, Vol.
II, p. 136.
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