THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA iii
fervour and devotional conviction in the highest degree. Evidently we have here a great body of monk-pundits, imported for the summer into Gandhara. Probably many of them never returned to their mother-communities, but remained, to form the basis of that great monastic development which Gandhara was afterwards to see.
The priority of Magadha requires little further argument. At the time of the Council the synthesis of the Mahayana was already more or less complete. And in accordance with this is the fact that on the recently-discovered relic casket of Kanishka are three figures, Buddha and two Bodhisattvas. In harmony with this is the further fact that the few inscriptions hitherto discovered in the Gandhara country are all dated between a.d. 57 and 328. We can see that after the evolution of the ornate and over-multiplied style of Gandhara Buddhism could not have had the energy to begin over again in India to build up a new art with its slow and sincere history of a growing symbolism. As a matter of fact, Gandhara was in the full tide of her artistic success in the fourth and early fifth century, when Magadha had already reached the stage of pre-occupation with images of Narayana.
Thus a definite theory has been enunciated of the chronological succession of religious ideas in Indian sculpture. According to this theory, Magadha was the source and centre of the Indian unity, both philosophically and artistically. This province was, in fact, like the heart of an organism
