imaginings can in the fertile East creep into works during the remodellings of a thousand years, will easily understand with what caution they must be used. Fortunately in this instance the monuments and inscriptions come to our assistance, and we are enabled to form a fair idea of the progress of monasticism in India from what they tell us.
Before the first monuments, the books tell us of three great convocations: the first held immediately on the death of the founder of the religion, B.C. 543, at Rajagriha; the second 100 years afterwards, at Vaisali; and the third by Asoka, 250 B.C., at Pataliputta, or Patna. These we are told were attended by thousand and tens of thousands of monks.[1] But Asoka's edicts give no countenance to any such extension of the system in his day. Shortly after this, however, the earlier caves show cells appropriated to hermits, or even for the reunion of a limited number of monks under one roof. These Viharas or monasteries are small at first, and insignificant as compared with the Chaityas or church caves to which they are attached, as at Karlee, Baja, Bedsa and elsewhere; but shortly afterwards, at Nassick and Jooneer, in the first or second centuries they become more important; and when we reach such a series as that at Ajunta or Baug, for instance, we find the Vihara becoming all important, the Chaitya sinking into comparative insignificance. This great change took place apparently about the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century of our era, and continued till Buddhism actually perished, smothered under the weight of its enormously developed hierarchy some three centuries later.
The sculptures tell the same story. There are no representations of priests in the form we afterwards find them in at Sanchi, in the first century of our era. Ascetics there are, dwelling in woods and lonely places, but not congregated in monasteries, nor jointly performing ceremonies. But at Amravati, three centuries later, we have shaven priests in their distinctive robes, and every symptom of a well developed system.
If this is so, it could hardly have been before the era of the Roman Empire that these peculiar institutions penetrated to the West; nor could they have done so during its supremacy without
- ↑ Turnour's 'Mahawanso,' 12 et seqq. 'J. A. S. B.,' vii. passim.
