After a successful campaign against the Greeks, who had advanced into the very heart of the Mauryan country, Pushyamitra returned in triumph to Pataliputra. A review of the troops was held; in the midst of the festivities, the Mauryan emperor suddenly fell dead, slain

by an arrow from an unknown hand. The successful general, whose triumph was being celebrated, was at once proclaimed emperor in his stead--and the hour of vengeance had come for the Brahmans. In the very city where As'oka had prohibited animal sacrifices, Pushyamitra celebrated (B.C. 184) the Hindu rite of As'vamedha, the "sacrifice of the horse"; the equality in the eyes of the law, which As'oka had established, disappeared once more. Hinduism was once more the dominant faith, though a Hinduism more elaborate, more philosophical than it had been, and one that had come into fertilizing contact with foreign influences. Buddhism was in its turn downtrodden and oppressed.

But beyond the limits of the kingdom ruled over by the new dynasty, there were principalities and kingdoms in which Buddhism found a welcome and a home, the principalities of the Greeks, the Parthians, the Yuetchi, S'akas, who come and go round the north-western confines of India during the two troubled centuries which precede the Christian era.

It is here, rather than in India itself, that must be sought those germs of thought which ended by making the Mahayana so very different from its more southerly and more purely Indian sister. Buddhism has always been a faith that has readily taken into itself whatever in its immediate surroundings it has found suitable for its purposes. Even Jewish influences would not necessarily be excluded. "Woe is me," says the Hebrew pilgrim, "that I am constrained to dwell in Mesech." There

were Buddhists in Mesech as well as Israelites; there were also Zoroastrians and Greeks, and the remnants of the old Babylonian cults.

Presently, with Kanishka, this Buddhism returns to India, and in As'vaghosha's time appears as a conqueror before the walls of Benares. And in process of time As'vaghosha is converted to the Mahayana.

Footnotes

^47:1 See Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. vi., No. 5 (May, 1910), "Causes of the Dismemberment of the Maurya Empire," by Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad S'astri.