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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
(JUNE, 1921
Balkh. This country was called the little Râjagriha15 on account of the numerous Buddhist sites in its neighbourhood. He found here about 100 convents and 3000 monks, all belonging to the Little Vehicle, and a temple of Vaisravana or Kuvera. Then he directed his steps towards India and, in the course of his journey over the Snowy Mountains, came to Bamiyan and found there Buddhism of the Little Vehicle in a flourishing condition. The next point in his travels was Kapisa, where he found a king of the Kshatriya race and Buddhism of the Great Vehicle the prevailing religion, though there were also Deva temples and heretics. A journey of 600 li eastward brought him to the frontiers of India.
The most noticeable feature in the accounts of the countries through which the Chinese pilgrims had to pass on their way to India is the fact that, even in the early years of the Christian era, Buddhism had penetrated almost to the frontiers of China, and Indian civilisation had made a deep impression upon the language and customs of these people. It is also remarkable that it was the school of Little Vehicle which seemed to be the dominant religion in the towns farthest from India, thus indicating that, long before the reign of Kanishka who professed the religion of the Great Vehicle and under whose influence this school gained great popularity, Buddhism of the older school had been carried far into the heart of Central Asia. It is no wonder, therefore, that Sir Aurel Stein has found, buried under the sands of old Khotan, documents in Sanskrit as well as in Prakrit. It strikes me also as very curious and exceedingly suggestive that the names of many of the cities in this region are either Sanskrit or Prakrit. All this bears indubitable evidence of a very early intercourse of India with Eastern Turkestan.
(4) PHYSIOGRAPHICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL EVIDENCE. The culture stratum at which we find the earliest settlements of the Indo-Aryan people in the Punjab was preceded by many other strata of which we practically know nothing. In the fertile basin of the five rivers, we find they had advanced remarkably in civilisation. They were no longer wandering bands of nomads; they had learnt the arts of settled life, such as agriculture, house building, the manufacture of armour and weapons of war, the construction of river-going and sea-going vessels, the use of gold and iron, the art of the weaver, the building of forts, and the laying out of towns and villages; they had tamod most of the domestic animals, such as we possess now; they lived under kings, and their society had undergone a considerable development with the institution of marriage and division of labour among various classes which, however, had not yet fussilised into castes; they had made notable progress in finishing their language and in the use of rhyme and metre; and the beautiful hymns addressed to various manifestations of naturo show a fine susceptibility to everything true and charming in form and sentiment. We catch them up indeed now and then in the midst of their migrations from pasture to pasture, but it only shows that they had a wandering life before they took to agriculture. But the centuries, during which this race was gradually emerging from the earliest stages of the existence of man, are entirely hidden from our knowledge.
I think it will be a task entirely disproportionate to the objects of this paper to look for the habitation of the Aryans when they were in a savage or barbarous condition, se., before they had entered into the pastoral stage of life.
We have sufficient evidence in the Rig Veda as well as the Avesta to enable us to conclude that they led the life of nomadic shepherds before they became cultivators. Where could they have tended their cattle in the prehistoric ages? As for the ancestors of the Indo-Iranic people, it is pretty certain that the nomadic stage of their history was passed largely in the
45 Beal's B. R. W. W., Vol. I, p. 44.
