DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

6.7] INFORMATION FROM HOARDS 183
Some of these, members of the * Sakyan monastic community’ dressed
in kasaya (still famous as Banaras katthai) red togas brought the
name and words of the Buddha. The new teaching could not have
struck deep roots before Candragupta’s Magadhan armies swept away
the few remaining tribal buffer states of the east Punjab, the new
Macedonian garrisons left by Alexander, and the counterattacks of
Seleukos Nikator, who formally ceded the frontier provinces. The
new government at Patna appointed a viceroy for Taxila and
introduced rigid controls that nearly strangled the long-established
trade, as shown in the next chapter. Within a generation after
Alexander’s raid, the economic position of Taxila was drastically
impaired, never again to be fully restored. It may well be that the
older Taxilan hoard was buried in anticipation of the catastrophic
Magadhan attack. Its principal moral for us is that history was not
written by the vainglory of princes who punched the marks onto the
coins, nor by the hierophants who designed those mysterious symbols
of Tantric character, nor by the traders whose guilds adopted the
secret cultic signs. The real history that anyone may read from the
coins was written into them by contemporary society as a whote,
which fabricated them to accurate standard weight and rubbed off the
metal slowly through innumerable exchange transactions. Every hoard
of coins bears the signature of its society.
Notes and reference
1. The treatment of Buddhism followed here owes a great deal to my father’s
Mariith] writings which pointed out the economic foundations of Buddhism as early as
1913 (Buddha, dharma, ani sarfigha) ; his final work on the subject was Bhagavan
Buddha, (2 vols., Nagpur, 1940-1, nov\ available in a Hindi translation). Though his
interpretation of pre-Buddhist history as rationalized from myth leaves something to be
desired. I owe my first study of Indian history to his teaching.
For sources, the Pali Text Society’s editions may be accepted as satisfactory on the
whole, their translations somewhat less so. For the Jatakas, the seven volume German
translation of J. Dutoit (1906-1921) is far better than that by Cowell and others in
English. To this should be added E. S. Burlin-game’s three volumes of ‘Buddhist Legends’
(HOS. 28-30) translated from the Ohammapada-Atthakatha.
The Buddhist Vinaya texts have been translated in SBE. vols. 13, 17, 20, whereof the
Mahdvagga and Cullavagga have been used in passing. G. P. Malalasekera’s Dictionary
of Pali Names (2 vols. London 1938) is to be highly recommended for the P51i texts.
Those questioning the authenticity of the legends will like J. Przyluski’s Legende de