144 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
"still exists in the same locality." It was after the making of this statue, he further tells us, that the Buddhist missionaries began to come from the far side of the Indus, with their collections of the books and of the Sacred Precepts; and the image was erected three hundred years after the Mahanirvana. Here we learn a great deal. In the first place, when Buddhism crossed the Indus, three hundred years after the death of Buddha, it was already the religion of the Bodhisattvas. Obviously there had been solitary saints, and perhaps even communities of monastics, without the books before—or how should there have been an arhat to transport a sculptor three times to the Tusita Heaven?—but there was a sudden accession of Buddhistic culture at a date three hundred years after the death of the Master, and this culture was Mahayanist in character. Thus the Mahayana doctrine with its fully- equipped pantheon, its images, and its collections of books, to be declared canonical under Kanishka purported to come, like the Hinayana, from India proper, or, as Fa-Hian calls it, Madhyadesa. Magadha, Kosala, and Vaisali, then, may claim the honour of having initiated Buddhistic art as fully and truly as Buddhistic thought.
Further, it is clear that in Magadha itself the great ages of sculpture were felt to be already past. Talking of Pataliputra, which had been the capital of Asoka, "the palaces in the town have walls," says our traveller, "of which the stones were put together by genii. The sculptures and the carved
