________________
354
BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
tions give us several of the names of the Ándhrabhritya, or, in the dialect of the inscriptions, Ádhábhati princes; such as Bálin, Kripa Karna, Gautamiputra, and Yajna Srí Sát Karni, members of a dynasty who were the powerful princes of the "Andhra gens", noticed by Pliny, and who, we learn from the Puráñas, confirmed by the accounts of the Chinese travellers, extended their authority to Central India, and reigned at Pátaliputra from the commencement of the Christian era to the fifth century after it, which period we may consider as the date of the principal Buddhist excavations in the west of India.
The evidence thus afforded by the Sthúpas, and the caves, of the time in which the principal monuments of Buddhism were multiplied, harmonises with that which we have derived from the more lasting literary monuments of the same faith, and leaves no doubt that the first four or five centuries after Christ, were the period during which the doctrine was most successfully propagated, and was patronized by many of the Rájás of India, particularly in the north and in the west. Ever ready as the Chinese traveller, FaHian, at the end of the fourth century, is to see Buddhism everywhere dominant, he furnishes evidence that in the east, and particularly in the place of its reputed origin, the birth place of Sákya, which had become a wilderness, it had fallen into neglect. In the seventh century, Hiuan Tsang abounds with notices of deserted monasteries, ruined temples, diminished number of mendicants, and augmented pro
