North Indian Inscriptions

THE GUPTA INSCRIPTIONS

Plate I. The peculiar from of ending m in prahāvṇ-ārttham, line 2, noteworthy. They include, in line 2, forms of the numerical symbols for 8, 9, 10, 20 and 100. The language is Mixed Dialect; and the inscription is in prose. The orthography presents nothing calling for remark.

       The inscription refers itself to the reign of the Imperial Gupta king Kumāragupta I. For some reason or other, it gives him the subordinate feudatory title of Mahāraja, instead of the paramount title of Mahārājādhirāja. But we know of no feudatory chieftain of the name of Kumāragupta; and the date fits exactly into the period of Kumāragupta I, of the Imperial Gupta dynasty; and there can be no doubt that he is the person referred to. The use of the subordinate title is most probably due to carelessness or ignorance on the part of the drafter of the inscription. “Or possibly it may indicate,’ says Fleet, “an actual historical fact, the reduction of Kumāragupta towards the end of his life, to feudal rank by the Pushyamitras and the Hūṇas, whose attacks on the Gupta power are so pointedly alluded to in the Bhitarī inscription of Skandagupta” (No. 31 below).¹ But this seems very unlikely, because the political disturbances alluded to in that inscription appear to have taken place, not in, but after, the reign of Kumāragupta I.

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The date of the inscription, in numerical symbols, is the year one hundred and twenty nine² (448-49 A.D.), and the eighteenth day, without any specification of the fortnight, of the month Jyēshṭha (May-June). It is a Buddhist inscription; and the object of it is to record the installation of the image on the pedestal of which it is engraved. The image, we are told, was installed by the monk Buddhamitra; and as the Buddha is here described sva-mat-āviruddha, ‘uncontroverted in respect of his own tenets,’ it shows, says K. B Pathak, “that this Bhikshu Buddhamitra of the Mankuwār inscription was identical with the Buddhamitra who was the teacher of Vasubandhu,” whose “patrons mentioned by Paramārtha were Skandagupta-Vikramāditya and Narasiṁhagupta-Bālāditya.”³ But in this connection we have to take note also of the attributives used with reference to the Buddha in the Mathurā pedestal inscription,⁴ namely, bhagavatō pitāmashasya Sammya[k*]-sambhuddhasya sva-matasya dēvasya. Every one of the words occurring in this phraseology is an attributive of Samyaksambuddha. It will not, therefore, be a correct procedure to take sva-matasya as an adjective of dēvasya, and translate it by “(her) favourite deity,” as has been done by the late Dayaram Sahni who edited the inscription. In fact, sva-mata-āviruddhasya found in phraseology seems identical with sva-mata of the expression sva-mat-āviruddhasya found in our record. What can sva-mata mean? It seems that from this phrase has somehow originated the name, Sāmmitīya, of a well-known sect and school of Buddhism. Nobody has yet been able to give any satisfactory derivation of Sāṁmitīya. It is met with for the first time in a Sarnath epigraph. It is translated as Sa[ṁmi] tiyānām by Vogel. The impression, however, shows that the first two letters are sva-umyā. It seems vā has been wrongly tacked on to my(a). This is indicated by a thin indentation joining vā to the preceding sa. So we perhaps have to read here svāmyatiyānaṁ, which appears to be intended foe svāmatīyānāṁ. And Svāmatīya can easily run into Sāṁmatīya The question that now arises is: What did the original Svāmatīya mean? That it is derived or is derivable from svamata can scarely be doubted. But why should the Buddhist school be called Svamata or Svāmatīya ? This has been explained above, Introduction, pp. 141-42.
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¹ We may compare the legend on the copper coins of Chandragupta II, Mahārāja-Chandraguptaḥ (Allan, Catalogue of the Coins of the Gupta Dynasty, p. 52).
² [D. C. Sircar reads this date as 100 0 9 i.e. 109 (JAIH., Vol. III, p. 135). But we do not agree with him.— Ed.].
³ Ind. Ant., Vol. XLI, p. 244.
⁴ Ep. Ind., Vol. XIX, P. 97.