________________
616 POLITICAL HISTORY OF ANCIENT INDIA
who applied themselves to the study of the Great and Little "Vehicles". Persia (Po-la-sse ) itself contained two or three Sanghārāmas, with several hundred priests, who principally studied the teaching of the Little Vehicle according to the Sarvāstivādin school. The pătra of Sākya Buddha was in this country, in the King's palace.
The Chinese pilgrim did not probably personally visit Persia. But no doubt need be entertained regarding the existence of Buddhist communities and Sanghārāmas or monasteries in Irān. Stein discovered a Buddhist monastery in "the terminal marshes of the Helmund”in Seistān.2 Mäni, the founder of the Manichæan religion, who was born in A.D. 215-16, at Ctesiphon in Babylonia, and began to preach his gospel probably in A.D. 242, shows unmistakable traces of Buddhist influence. In his book Shābūrqān (Shapurakhan) he speaks of the Buddha as a messenger of God. Legge and Eliot refer to a Manichæan treatise which has the form of a Buddhist Sūtra. It speaks of Māni as the Tathāgata and mentions Buddhas and the Bodhisattva. In Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue of the Chinese translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka, App., II, No, 4, we have reference to a Parthian prince who became a Buddhist śramana or monk before A.D. 148. In his History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, Dr. Vincent Smith refers to a picture of a fourarmed Buddhist saint or Bodhisattva in the guise of a Persian with black beard and whiskers, holding a thunderbolt (vajra) in his left hand, which has been found at a place called DandanUiliq in Turkistan. Such figures are undoubtedly the products of a type of Buddhism which must have developed in Iran, and enjoyed considerable popularity as late as the eighth century A.D. which is the date assigned by Dr. Smith to the fresco or distemper paintings on wood and plaster discovered at Dandan-Uiliq.
It is difficult to say to what extent Buddhist literature made its influence felt in Western Asia. Sir Charles Eliot points
1 Beal, Records of the Western World, Vol. II. pp. 277-78 ; Watters, Yuan Chwang, II, 257.
2 Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, III, 3.
3 Ibid, p. 446; The Dacca University Journal, Feb. 1926, pp. 108, 111; JRAS, 1913, 69, 76, 81.
4 P. 310.
