Story of Nation Buddhist India

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: T Fisher Unwin Ltd

Page 71

50
BUDDHIST INDIA
were quite unknown. But we have too many refer. ences to times of scarcity, and that, too, in the very districts adjacent to Patna where Megasthenes lived,' to accept his statement as accurate for the time we are discussing. As those references refer, however, to a date two centuries earlier, it is possible (but not, I think, very probable) that things, in this respect, had improved in the interval between the times referred to in our records, and that of Megasthenes. We shall see below, in the chapter on Chandragupta, that his statements often require correction. And this is, more probably, merely another instance of a similar kind.
It was under some such economic conditions as these that the great bulk—say at least 70-80 per cent.—of the people lived. In the books, ancient and modern, a few of the remaining few are so much more constantly mentioned (precisely because they differ from the mass, and the mass is taken for granted as understood that the impression given to the reader is apt to be entirely misleading. These others—priests and kings, outcasts and jugglers, soldiers, citizens, and mendicant thinkers — played their part, and an important part. But the peoples of India, then much more even than now, were, first and foremost, village folk. In the whole vast territory from Kandahar nearly to Calcutta, and from the Himālayas southwards to the Run of Kach, we find mentioned barely a score of towns of any considerable size.
See the passages collected at Vinaya Texts, 3. 220 ; and also Ját. 2. 149, 367, 5. 193, 6. 487.