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HINAYANA AND MAHAYANA
so-called golden age of Indian religious art, Buddhist as well as Hindu (inspired by the profound psychological realizations of the Tantra), came into being, in a fabulous world of peace, civilized sophistication, universal tolerance, and general prosperity. Once again, the ideal of the Cakravartin seemed to have been all but attained.
3.
Hinayāna and Mahāyāna
THE VILLAGE LIFE of India was little modified by the rise and fall of the dynasties. The conquerors-even the complacent Grecks-soon recognized the virtues of the native way of being civilized. Alexander took to himself, as guru, the Jaina saint Kalanos, whom he invited to fill the vacancy of his old boyhood tutor Aristotle; while under the Kusana warrior-kings both Buddhist art and Buddhist philosophy moved into a new and richly documented period. The Hellenistic Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara, as well as the more spiritual and vigorous contemporary native Jaina and Buddhist art of Mathura, gives ample evidence that under the protection of their foreign overlords the Indian religious systems were continuing to evolve. And we have the testimony of tradition for the statement that at the great Buddhist council assembled by Kanişka (the "Fourth Buddhist Council," held according to some reports at Jalandhar in the castern Punjab, according to others at Kundalavana in Kashmir), the representatives of no less than eighteen Buddhist sects were in attendance.
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