Part 4 (2/2)

Whether this be true or not, certain it is that Bimbi-sara was murdered, and by his son's orders; for in one of the earliest Buddhist ma.n.u.scripts extant there is an account of the guilty son's confession to the Blessed One (_i.e_., Buddha) in these words: ”Sin overcame me, Lord, weak, and foolish, and wrong that I am, in that for the sake of sovranty I put to death my father, that righteous man, that righteous king.”

If, as tradition has it, that death was compa.s.sed by slow starvation, the prompt absolution which Buddha is said to have given the royal sinner for this act of atrocity becomes all the more remarkable. His sole comment to the brethren after Ajata-sutru had departed appears to have been: ”This king was deeply affected, he was touched in heart. If he had not put his father to death, then, even as he sate here, the clear eye of truth would have been his.”

Apart from this parricidal act, the motive for which he gives with such calm brutality, Ajata-sutru seems to have been a strong, capable king. He had instantly to face war with Kosala, the murdered man's wife--who, it is said, died of grief--being sister to the king of that country. Round this war, long and b.l.o.o.d.y, legend has woven many incidents. At one time Magadha, at another Kosala, seems to have come uppermost. Ajata-sutru himself was once carried a prisoner in chains to his opponent's capital; but in the end, when peace came, Kosala had given one of its princesses in marriage to the King of Magadha, and had become absorbed in that empire.

But this was not enough for ambitious Ajata-sutru. He now turned his attention to the rich lands north of the Ganges, and carried his victorious arms to the very foot of holy Himalaya.

In the course of this war he built a watch-fort at a village called Patali, on the banks of the Ganges, where in after years he founded a city which, under the name of Pataliputra (the Palibothra of Greek writers), became eventually the capital, not only of Magadha, but of India--India, that is, as it was known in these early days.

Patali is the Sanskrit for the bignonia, or trumpet-flower; we may add, therefore, to our mental picture of the remaining four Ses-naga kings, that they lived in Trumpet-flower City.

For the rest, these two great monarchs, Bimbi-sara and Ajata-sutru, must have been near, if not actual contemporaries of Darius, King of Persia, who founded an Indian satrapy in the Indus valley. This he was able to do, in consequence of the information collected by Skylax of Karyanda, during his memorable voyage by river from the Upper Punjab to the sea near Karachi, thus demonstrating the practicability of a pa.s.sage by water to Persia. All record of this voyage is, unfortunately, lost; but the result of it was the addition to the Persian Empire of so rich a province, that it paid in gold-dust tribute to the treasury, fully one-third of the total revenue from the whole twenty satrapies; that is to say, about one million sterling, which in those days was, of course, an absolutely enormous sum.

There is not much more to tell of Ajata-sutru; and yet, reading between the lines of the few facts we actually know of him, the man's character shows distinct. Ambitious, not exactly unscrupulous, but uncontrolled. A man who, having murdered his father, could weep over his own act, and seek to obliterate the blood-stain on his hands by confessions and pious acts. When Buddha died, an eighth portion of his bones was claimed by Ajata-sutru, who erected at Rajgriha a magnificent tope or mound over the sacred relics.

But, if tradition is to be believed, he handed down the curse of his great crime to his son, his grandson, and his great grandson; for the Ceylon chronicle a.s.serts, that each of these in turn were parricides.

It is--to use a colloquialism--a tall order; but a.s.sertion or denial are alike unproven.

If it be true, there is some relief in finding that the last of these criminal kings--Maha-nundin by name--was ousted from his throne and killed by his prime minister, one Maha-padma-Nanda, who is said, also, to have been the murdered man's illegitimate son by a Sudra, or low-caste woman.

Whether this latter be true or not, certain it is that about the year B.C. 361, or thereabouts, the reign of the Ses-naga kings ends abruptly. The dream-vision of the steps of old Rajgriha with Scythian princelings--parricidal princelings--riding up to their palaces on processional horses, or living luxuriously in Trumpet-flower city, vanishes, and something quite as dream-like takes its place.

For in the oldest chronicles we are told that there were but two generations in the next, or Nanda dynasty--viz.: Maha-padma and his eight sons--yet we are asked to believe that they reigned for one hundred and fifty-nine years!

In truth, these nine Nandas seem in many ways mythical, and yet the very confusion and contradictions which surround their history point to some underlying reason for the palpable distortion of plain fact.

They are said to have reigned together, the father and his eight sons.

The name of only one of these is known, Suma-lya; but when Alexander the Great paused on the banks of the Beas, in the year B.C. 326, he heard that a king was then reigning at Pataliputra, by name Xandrames (so the Greek tongue reports it), who had an army of over two hundred thousand men, and who was very much disliked, because of his great wickedness and base birth. For he was said to be the son of a barber, and as such, ”contemptible and utterly odious to his subjects.”

This king must have belonged to the Nanda dynasty, and the story, if it does nothing else, proves that the family was really of low extraction. That it gained the throne by the a.s.sa.s.sination of a rightful king, is also certain. But revenge was at hand. The tragedy was to be recast, replayed, and in B.C. 321 Chandra-gupta, the Sandracottus of the Greeks, himself an illegitimate son of the first Nanda, and half-brother, so the tale runs, of the eight younger ones, was, after the usual fas.h.i.+on of the East, to find foundation for his own throne on the dead bodies of his relations.

But some four years ere this came to pa.s.s, while young Chandra-gupta, ambitious, discontented, was still wandering about Northern India almost nameless--for his mother was a Sudra woman--he came in personal contact with a new factor in Indian history. For in March, B.C. 326, Alexander the Great crossed the river Indus, and found himself the first Western who had ever stood on Indian soil. So, ere pa.s.sing to the events which followed on Chandra-gupta's rude seizure of the throne of Magadha, another picture claims attention. The picture of the great failure of a great conqueror.

THE ANABASIS

B.C. 326 TO B.C. 320

”Some talk of Alexander....”

Who does not know the context? Who also does not think that he knows who Alexander was, who could not, if necessary, reel off a succinct account of his character, his conquests?

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