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THE ALPHABET
334 a remarkable age in many ways. The ruler of the Magadha kingdom, Bimbisara, of the Sisunaga dynasty (middle of the seventh or the sixth century B.C.), made the first serious attempt to unify a great tract of India into a single political state with a central government, and this certainly favoured the diffusion of writing.
(9) In the sixth century B.C., northern India witnessed a remarkable religious revolution which profoundly influenced the course of Indian history. It was, in some respects, a popular reaction against the cumbersome rituals and bloody sacrifices which in those days constituted the essence for the "exclusive" priestly classes of the Vedic religion. Two great sons of India largely brought about this mighty transformation. They were Vardhamana Mahavira, the Jina ("Conqueror of passions," the "leader of the school of thought"), the founder of Jainism (apart from Parswa, who ranks in the succession of the Jainas as the predecessor of Mahavira), and Gautama Sakyamuni Buddha (the "Enlightened One"), the founder of Buddhism. Both lived in the sixth century B.C., and were anxious to make their spiritual teachings accessible to the common people and refused to confine them to Sanskrit, the language of the small privileged class. The new teachings of the Buddha especially, with their popular appeal, have long been recognized as the potent cause of the development of the languages of the people; Buddhist monks and nuns carried far and wide the gospel of the Englightened One. There is no doubt that while the knowledge of writing may have favoured the diffusion of Jainism and Buddhism, these two religions, and especially the latter, contributed much to the diffusion of the knowledge of writing.
(10) On the whole, many different lines of evidence suggest a date between the eighth and the sixth century B.C. for the introduction of writing into "Aryan" India, thus confirming the conclusion that the Brahmi script was much later than the Indus Valley writing, and that the knowledge of writing flourished from the seventh-sixth century B.C. onwards.
THEORIES CONCERNING ORIGIN OF BRAHMI SCRIPT
The theories concerning the origin of the Brahmi script can be divided into two main groups: the first ascribes the Brahmi script to India, and the second considers it as borrowed from a foreign source.
(1) Many scholars, for instance, Edward Thomas, thought that the Brahmi script was a Dravidian invention, while General Cunningham, Dowson, and others believed that the Indian priests had developed it from picture writing. Since the discovery of the Indus Valley civilization, this latter theory has been connected with the Indus Valley script (see Part 1, Chapter IV).
Many Indian scholars follow this opinion, which, however, cannot be upheld for the reasons already explained.
