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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
leadership of Brahmanical reaction, deprived the monastic order of all power in the State, acquired since the time of Asoka. Monasteries were forcibly dissolved, and monks persccuted everywhere. Yet, monasticism could not be stamped out. It kept on flourishing in the face of persecution. Monasticism had become such a serious social menace that, after the death of Asoka, the Maurya rulers tried to check its ruinous progress by imposing hcavy penalties upon those who left their families without provision. But the flood tide of social dissolution could not be resisted. It swept away the splendid empire of the Mauryas.
The sagacity of the Indian Constantine, Asoka, sought, and to some extent succeeded, to furnish the ideology of social dissolution for the defence and even consolidation of the decayed social order by pandering demonstratively to the vanity of monasticism. Under the royal patronage of Asoka and his successors, Buddhism stopped short of running its cataclysmic course of Nihilism; and that very deviation from its basic principle ultimately caused the downfall of Buddhism and the re-establishment of Brahman orthodoxy. In order to be victorious, Christianity also capitulated to the cbstinate forces of pagan superstition ; but the hybrid religion of the Catholic Church retained the original name of Christianity. In the case of Buddhism, the capitulation was complete. Even the name had to go, in return for a place conceded 260
