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lesson, and prospered. So also the future sovereign is made to owe his success, throughout the long series of adventures, defeats, and victories, of intrigues, murders, and treasons, which led him to the throne, to the constant advice and aid of a brahmin, nicknamed Chanakya, as deformed in body as he was depraved at heart (or, perhaps, we should rather say that he was, like the gods, not so much immoral as unmoral). Justin (xv. 4), on Greek authority, tells two graceful stories of the effect upon animals of the marvellous nature of the king. Once, when, as a fugitive from his foes, he lay down overtaken, not by them, but by sleep, a mighty lion came and ministered to him by licking his exhausted frame. And again, when he had collected a band of followand went forth once more to the attack, a wild elephant came out of the jungle, and bent low to receive Chandragupta on his back.
ers,
It is curious that in the extant priestly literature Chandragupta is completely ignored for about ten centuries. In spite of his friendship with the brahmin Chanakya, he belonged to, and indeed had the insolence to found, the hated Moriya dynasty, to which, later on, Buddhism owed so much. But the memory of him, or at least of the popular romance attached to him, must have been kept very much alive among the peoples of India. For in the eighth century of our era, a layman, the author of a famous Sanskrit drama, the Mudra-rakshasa, takes that romance as his plot. He gives a number of details out of which Lassen already, half a century ago, tried, with the help of other traditions, to unravel the
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
BUDDHIST INDIA
