North Indian Inscriptions

RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Allahābād pillar inscription of Samudragupta. The date must, therefore, be assigned to the Kalachuri era and must be taken as equivalent to 332 A.D. This unquestionably makes this Kaṇishka almost contemporaneous with Samudragupta. There can thus be no reasonable doubt that this inscription belongs to the Gupta epoch and that if excavations are undertaken on the mound where it originally came to light, sculptural remains and epigraphic records would be exhumed in abundance, which pertain to the Gupta period. We have referred to this Mathurā inscription, because it is of great importance to the history of Buddhism of this period. There is just one expression here in the first line which is worthy of our careful consideration, which is as follows: bhagavatō Pitāmahasya Sammya[k*]saṁbuddhasya sva-matasya dēvasya.¹ This is a string of ‘attributives’ of which only one can be taken as the ‘attributed.’ The ending words sva-matasya dēvasya are rendered by Sahni as “(her) favourite deity,” ‘her’ referring, of course, to the female donor, Saṁghilā, who installed the image of Buddha on whose pedestal the inscription is engraved. This cannot, however, give us the correct rendering. We have to take one of these as the ‘attributed’ and the rest as its attributives. It is safer to take the ending word, namely, dēvasya, as the ‘attributed’ here.

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We may therefore translate the expression thus: “Of God (dēva), the Blessed One, the Pitāmaha, the ‘Completely Englightened One,’ (and) Svamata.” Here two words have been left untranslated. One of these is Pitāmaha. It is worthy of note that Pitāmaha is an attributive of the Hindu god Brahmā. It is further worthy of note that this epithet is nowhere in the Pāli literature associated with Buddha. And when it is so associated with Buddha in this record, we have to take it in its primary sense, namely, ‘the progenitor of progenitor.’ In other words, Buddha is here understood like Hindu Brahmā as the Creator of the Universe. If this is the case, the word dēva which occurs at the end of the expression must be taken in the sense of ‘God’ and not ‘a god of deity.’ This indicates that a new sect of Buddhism had sprung up about the commencement of the Gupta period which looked upon Buddha as God and Creator of the Universe. But what could be the name of this sect? Let us see whether any light is thrown upon this point by the attributive Sva-mata which is comprised in the phraseology. In this connection we have to take note of the occurrence of this term in another inscription (No. 25 below), namely, the Mankuwar stone image inscription of Kumāragupta I. There we meet with the expression sva-mat-āviruddhasya. Here then we have two records where sva-mata is met with. What can the phrase mean? We cannot help thinking that sva-mata explains not only the origin of Sāṁmitīya, the name of a celebrated sect and school of Buddhism but also its principal doctrine. No scholar has yet been able to adduce a satisfactory etymology of the term Sāṁmitīya. It occurs for the first time in a Sārnāth inscription of the early Gupta period, which is wrongly read as Sa[mmi]tiyānaṁ by Vogel.² It is to be transcribed as svamyātiyānāṁ and corrected into svāmatīyānām, “Of those who propound the doctrine of sva-mata.” Svā-matīya can be easily Prakritised into Sāṁmatīya. But what can be this doctrine of Sva-mata after which the sect is called Svāmatīya? “The most important tenet of the Sāṁmitīya creed . . . . . ,” says Poussin, “is the Pudgalavāda, the belief in a pudgala, a sort of person or soul.”³ This suits here excellently, because one of the senses of sva, according to Monier Williams’ Dictionary, is: “the Ego, the human soul,” so that sva-mata can be taken to mean “One to whom the human soul is something approved (svaṁ mataṁ yasya saḥ).” We can thus make it applicable to Buddha as it has been done in the Mathurā pedestal inscription. “The relation of the Pudgala to the Skandhas is like the relation of the whole (avayavin) to its part (avayava). The Sāṁmitīyas do not maintain that there is a soul existing in se apart from the Skandhas-just as there is no whole apart from its part, no cloth apart from
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¹ Ep. Ind., Vol. XIX, p. 97.
² Ibid., Vol. VIII, p. 172.
³ E.R.E., Vol. XI, p. 169.