The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

PART TWO
THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIODS
CHAPTER 5
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THE FIRST INDIAN EMPIRE: THE MAURYA PERIOD
The Maurya Period takes its name from a line of
emperors who ruled over an India united from
the Khyber to the Deccan, from 322 to 185 B.C.
The prologue to the foundation of the Maurya
Dynasty was the invasion of India by Alexander
the Great. It will be remembered that, following
the destruction of the Achaemenid Empire of
Iran with the burning of Persepolis in 330 B.C.,
Alexander, seeking to emulate the legendary
triumph of Dionysius in the Orient, led his
phalanxes eastward to Bactria and, finally, in
327 to the plains of northern India. There the
defection of one after another of the local Rajahs
and the Macedonians' final victory over the king
of Taxila enabled the conqueror to advance to
the Indus. The one constructive result of
Alexander's raid was the opening of India to the
influence of the Hellenic and Iranian civilizations
of the West. Alexander's military conquest
was in itself shortlived.
When Alexander was
forced to retire from India to die in Babylon in
323 B.C., the eastern reaches of his world empire
fell to his general, Seleucus Nicator. It was in
322 B.C., only a year after Alexander's death,
that a certain Chandragupta Maurya by a series
of coups d'etat gained complete sovereignty over
ancient Magadha in Bengal, and soon waxed so
strong that he was able by show of force to
compel the withdrawal of the Greek forces of
Seleucus beyond the Hindu Kush mountain
range. This brief passage of arms did not mean
a severance of relations with the Hellenistic
powers of the West, but rather initiated an era of
more intimate cultural connexions between
India and the Seleucid Empire, as is attested by
the accounts of the Greek ambassadors, such as
Megasthenes, at the Maurya court.
The empire that Chandragupta founded
reached its greatest moment of political, religious,
and artistic development in the middle
years of the third century B.C. At this period in
Indian history there rose above the waters of the
Ganges the towers of Pataliputra, the capital of
the Maurya Emperors of India. Enthroned
there in pillared halls, which in the words of
Megasthenes echoed the 'splendour of Susa and
Ecbatana', was Chandragupta's grandson,
Asoka, the earliest, most renowned imperial
patron of Buddhism in Asia (272-232 B.C.).
The history of his conversion to the Dharma
is probably part truth, part legend: how, like
another Napoleon III at another Solferino, he
was so overcome with horror at the countless
windrows of the slain that littered the battlefields
of his Orissan campaign, that he then and
there determined to renounce all further bloodshed
to dedicate himself and his reign to the
propagation of the Law and the Peace of
Buddha. Fabulous legends of Asoka and his
piety spread to the farthest corners of Asia : how
he threatened to wither and die with the fading
of the bodhi tree at Gaya; how, by the aid of the