Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [112]
The sense of numinous power infusing Sanskrit led on occasions to a sort of spiritual nostalgia. One king of Champa, Gangaraja, is said to have abdicated his throne so as to have the chance to give up the ghost on the banks of the Ganges. And, more public-spiritedly, there is evidence from an inscription put up at Vat Luong Kau in Laos that a king called Śrī Devanīka planned to set up a new Kuruketra at home as a substitute for the sheer holiness of the real Kuruketra north of Delhi. As the site of the Mahabharata’s great battle, it was peerless among shrines, but sadly inaccessible. He quotes the epic:
Pthivyā Naimiam puyam antarīke tu Pukaram Trāyānām api lokānām Kuruketram viśiyate.
On the earth the blessed Naimisha, in the ether Pushkara, But in the three worlds, Kurukshetra holds the crown.37
The long years of Indian influence came to an end only after a full millennium. A major jolt had already come in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols sacked Pagan and other Burmese kingdoms in the north. But it has been suggested by one of the leading scholars, not without nostalgia, that Indian civilisation was the victim of its own increasing popularity: ‘The underlying causes of this decline were the adoption of Indian civilization by an increasingly large number of natives who incorporated into it more and more of their original customs, and the gradual disappearance of a refined aristocracy, the guardian of Sanskrit culture.’38
In any event, in the fifteenth century Vietnam expanded its influence into Champa, annexing permanently the south of Indo-China; and about the same time groups of mountain peoples, the Shan in Burma, and the Thai in Siam, established new kingdoms that thrust aside the old powers of Pagan and Angkor. Nonetheless, when founding their new capital, the Thai could not help calling it Ayutthaya, in direct tribute to the Hindu hero Rama’s residence, Ayodhya.
Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia
So far we have largely spoken of Sanskrit as a vehicle of Hinduism. And it seems that for the most part this is what it conveyed at first in South-East Asia. Fa-Xian, returning to China via Ye-po-ti (Yava-dvīpa) in the East Indies in the early fifth century AD, remarked: ‘in this country heretics and Brahmans flourish, but the law of Buddha is not much known’.39
To this day, Hinduism survives on the island of Bali, east of Java. However, elsewhere in South-East Asia the picture is now very different, Hinduism long ago replaced by Buddhism. This is the result of a long and complex, though not especially bloody, history of doctrinal contests between the two faiths. Hindu cults’ close associations with ruling dynasties ultimately worked against them, when those dynasties fell. But there was also competition among strains of Buddhism, Tantra, originally ‘the loom’ or ‘the framework’, Mahāyāna, ‘the great vehicle’ and Theravāda, ‘the docrine of the elders’. Theravada, buttressed by links with the Sinhala in Śri Lanka, ultimately triumphed in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, all these struggles took place against an unchallenged background of Indian learning.
Buddhist missionaries actually came very soon after the first Indian buccaneers and traders, if not along with them. Ceylonese chronicles tell of Aśoka sending two monks, Soa and Uttara, to Suvaabhūmi in the third century BC,40 although the first archaeological records of Buddhist activity in South-East Asia (in the areas of modern Burma and Thailand) are from the fifth century AD. Hinduism was always a religion likely to appeal to kings and a ruling elite, but not voluntarily to the lower orders, the