DEIVATHIN KURAL # 130 (Vol # 5) Dated 19 Feb 2012

DEIVATHIN KURAL # 130 (Vol # 5) Dated 19 Feb 2012

(These e-mails are translations of talks given by PeriyavaaL of Kanchi Kaamakoti Peetam, over a period of some 60 years while he was the pontiff in the earlier part of the last century. These have been published by Vanadi Padippagam, Chennai, in seven volumes of a thousand pages each as Deivathin Kural. Today we are proceeding from the second para on page No 810 of Vol 5 of the Tamil original. The readers may note that here in 'man/he' includes 'woman/she' too mostly. These e-mails are all available at http://Advaitham.blogspot.com updated constantly)
787. After Alexander it was Selucas Nicador who was the top man in Greece. He also came to India with a huge army and advanced deep into India. However he lost in battle against the forces of Magadh Kingdom based in Pataliputra. So they called it quits and made a pact for peace, leading to even some give and take of marriage proposals amongst the royal families! Later, after he went back to Greece he sent one Megasthanis as his ambassador to the King’s Court in Pataliputra. That Megasthanis has made a record of whatever he saw and heard. The Europeans consider that to be a more authentic document of Indian History! They certainly know that the period of Alexander, Selucas Nicador and Megasthanis were of the 4th Century Before Christ. So they have taken that the King of Pataliputra was also of the same period. Who is that King? He is the one pointed out as Sandracottus by Megasthanis.
788. Identifying this ‘Sandracottus’ as Chandra Gupta Mourya who established and ruled the Mourya Dynasty, the white – men have decided all the other dates of occurrence of Indian History. They simply decided that the one character whom they could correctly identify in the Indian Past as Selucas Nicador, to be of 4th Century Before Christ and Chandra Gupta Mourya to have been of the same period. Relating to that one acceptance, all others have been fitted in such as, Nanda Vamsam (Dynasty) before that, Sisunaaga Dynasty even before that; chandra Gupta Mourya’s son Bindu Saara, his grandson Asoka, the Sunga Vamsam that came after the Mourya-s and so on. Was this decision correctly arrived at or was there an error? This error, if it is an error, how blatant or contrived was it? A big question that needs to be asked!
789. What I have quoted as ‘Sandracottus’ that is Chandra Gupta as mentioned by Megasthanis, is without any prefix or suffix relating to any dynasty. He has also not mentioned the name of the dynasty before him or his son’s name as Bindu Saara. He has only called the Pataliputra as ‘Polibothra’ the capital from where he ruled his Kingdom and how fine and well advanced was his reign. That is why the question arises as to why the Chandra Gupta that Megasthanis has mentioned should be the Mourya and instead why can it not be referring to the Gupta dynasty? He also had his capital at Pataliputra? In them also there were two kings with the same name of Chandra Gupta. The Chandra Gupta II is the historical person who was famous as Chandra Gupta Vikramaaditya! Why can it not be that, Megasthanis met one of these two kings of yore?
790. Based on PuraNas, Raja Tarangini, Nepal’s VamsaavaLi and such references, when we calculate the time of the dynasties which ruled over Magadh such as Chandra Gupta Mourya and the 4th Century B.C. being the time period of Megasthanis; we find that the details just do not match! Chandra Gupta Mourya’s time was approximately 1,500 B.C. and not as fixed by the Orientalists. There is a gap of 1,200 years. We found that in our earlier discussions, regarding our AachaaryaaL’s time also, between our calculation and that of the Orientalists, there is a gap of some 1,300 years! In Vishnu PuraNa it is said that at the start of Kali Yuga, 1,500 years after Parikchit came to power, there was one Maha Padma Nandan, who established the Nanda Dynasty in Magadh. That is, this Nandan ascended the throne in about 1.600 B.C. If the next in power is Chandra Gupta, then his time works out very close to some 3,600 before now, isn’t it? Thus as far as can be discerned from various other sources, the Emperor met by Megasthanis most probably may not have been Chandra Gupta Mourya.
791. As discerned from our ancient documents by experts on the subject, the details of the kings who ruled over Magadh, is as under:-
Baarhadrada Vamsam – 22 Kings – 3102 – 2096 B.C.
Pratyoda Vamsam – 5 Kings – 2096 – 1958 B.C.
Sisunaaga Vamsam – 10 Kings – 1958 – 1598 B.C.
Nanda Vamsam – 2 Kings – 1598 – 1498 B.C.
Mourya Vamsam – 12 Kings – 1498 – 1182 B.C.
Sandracottus referred by Megasthanis could be about one of the Chandragupta-s of the Gupta Dynasty, which comes much later and not Mourya Dynasty. Relate this above statement with what comes hereinafter! As concluded by the Orientalists research scholars Chandra Gupta Mourya is from the early part of the 4th Century B.C.; while Chandragupta from the Gupta Dynasty was ruling from the latter portion of 4th Century A.D., till the early part of the 5th Century A.D.! So, between Chandragupta of Mourya Dynasty and the same named one from the Gupta Dynasty, there is a gap of some seven to eight hundred years! Since it is all guess work, the difference in calculations can even be a thousand years or more!
792. So, if Gupta Dynasty’s Chandra Gupta is the one Megasthanis met, all our historical events will go back some thousand years. That would mean the glory of what Megasthanis described is only in 4th / 5th Century A.D. and our civilization was flying its flag high, in Magadha itself some three thousand years before that from the start of Baarhadrada Dynasty, is it not so? We do not have to pick up a fight with them on this. Actually we should be thankful that people like Sir William Jones and Wilson have searched and found out that Megasthanis has spoken about on Sandracottus aka Chandra Gupta. But subsequently, that we were stupid enough to agree with them without further analysis was a mistake. We do not have to curse them. It was our duty to investigate the veracity of their statements, when they were teaching us our nation’s history and find out if their intentions were noble enough.
793. You may ask a question like this, “In the time of Chandra Gupta Vikramaaditya ‘Fa-hiyan’ from China visited this country, isn’t it? So he must have been of the period 4/5th Century A.D. only. How to take him back to 6th Century B.C.? The interesting thing is that, Fa-hiyan came to India and stayed here for six years, visiting all important places of Buddhist religious significance, writing extensively about his travels, true. But he never bothered about any king or ruler and made no comments about any of them! He did say something about the social life. So from his visit, historians say that he came during Chandra Gupta of the Gupta Dynasty as per the time frame already decided by them and not from what Fa-hiyan had written. So there is no basis for exactly identifying if that visit was during the period of Chandra Gupta of Mourya or Gupta Dynasty!
794. I have neither done much research of my own on this, nor am I qualified to do so. So students and scholars of history should carefully research this subject. There is one Kota Venkatachalam of Vijayawada, who has gone deep in to this matter and has come to the conclusion that Sandracottus is a king of the Gupta Dynasty only. Then Kota Venkatachalam became a renounced Sanyasi under the Adwaita Matam. Mr. G.K Natesa Saastry of Aayurveda College Mylapore, after research into this had also come to the same conclusion. Some other scholars after studying other PuraNas, Nepal’s VamsaavaLi, Raja Tarangini and such books have concluded that contrary to what is given in the History text books, our ancient culture and heritage can be traced much farther back and they have given clear evidence for the same.
795. In the Gupta Dynasty, the son of Chandra Gupta I and the father of Chandra Gupta II, called Samudra Gupta, might have been the one mentioned as Sandracottus by Megasthanis, as per my assessment. The two letters ‘Sa’ in Samudra Gupta and Sandracottus matches clearly. In Greek language phonetics the difference between ‘Sa’ and ‘Cha’ is clearly identified. Could Megasthanis have made a mistake in the first letter itself of a name? The people of Greece of Alexander’s time have said that, there was a King by name Xandrames in Pataliputra during those times. Though we are not able to decipher as to who that was, they say that the Xandra here is Chandra only and not Sandra, while Meghasthanis is mentioning ‘Sandra’!
796. Megasthanis did not read any of our books but, depended on what he heard. The vowels in talking get hidden and the consonants are more clearly discerned. So, naturally the White man as we have seen, makes ‘Thiru Valli KeNi’ into ‘Triplicane’; ‘Thiru’ becoming ‘Tri’, ‘Valli’ becoming ‘pli’ and ‘KeNi’ becoming ‘cane’! In fact we can add many monstrosities to this list of transliteration, like Bengaluru becoming Banglore! Samudra in our people’s diction would have sounded like ‘samdra’ only. That too in Sanskrit, there are many half consonants being combined like, ‘..kra.., ..mda.., ..nda.., ..pra..’ and so on! It is a challenge for even trained hands to do transliteration of Indian words! So, it is quite easily possible for ‘Samudra’ becoming ‘samdra’ in pronunciation and ‘sandra’ in writing in Greek. Anyhow it is all Greek to me! I do not know as to how ‘Gupta’ became ‘cottus’!
797. Thus all told, if everything recedes some thousands years, how can it be that only our AachaaryaaL’s time comes forward to 8th Century A.D.? This should also mean that Buddha’s time would also have to further recede back in time. Even if our AachaaryaaL’s time is considered as Sixth / Fifth B.C., he was not a contemporary of Buddha and it would mean that he comes on the scene only after Buddhism had taken roots in India and after Kumarila Bhatta and Mandana Misra before him had done their all to repudiate and counter that religion!
(To be continued.)
Sambhomahadeva.