According to Chinese source, Meghavarman, the ruler of Sri Lanka, sent a missionary to which of the following Gupta Kings for permission to build a Buddhist temple at Gaya?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Samudragupta. The episode survives in Chinese writing and not in any Indian text, which is exactly why the stem says 'according to Chinese source'. Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang), who compiled the Si-yu-ki in 646 CE after years in Magadha, writes in Book VIII of Bodh Gaya: 'Outside the northern gate of the wall of the Bodhi tree is the Mahabodhi sangharama. It was built by a former king of Simhala (Ceylon).' He then gives the whole back-story. The Sinhalese king's own brother, a monk, had toured India's holy places and at every convent 'was treated with disdain as a foreigner (a frontier countryman)'; he came home so bitter that at first he could not speak, and then asked his brother to 'build convents throughout all India'. The king sent 'all the jewels of his country' in tribute to the king of India, and his envoy delivered the request — 'The king of Simhala salutes the king of India (Maha Sri raja)' — asking for a house where Sinhalese pilgrims could find 'a place of rest between their journey there and back'. The Indian king granted a fraction of what was asked: 'I permit your royal master to take one of the places in which Tathagata has left the traces of his holy teaching.' The Sinhalese monks then deliberated and chose the Bodhi tree, 'the place where all the past Buddhas have obtained the holy fruit and where the future ones will obtain it'. What went up was substantial — six halls, towers of three storeys, a defence wall thirty to forty feet high, a Buddha image cast of gold and silver, and more than a thousand resident monks who, Xuanzang notes with care, 'study the Great Vehicle and belong to the Sthavira school'. The foundation deed was 'engraved on copper': 'And now I, unworthy descendant in the royal line, have undertaken to found this sangharama, to enclose the sacred traces... Let this privilege be handed down from generation to generation without interruption.' Xuanzang names neither ruler. Identifying the Sinhalese king as Meghavarna (Meghavarman) and the Indian emperor as Samudragupta (c. 335-375 CE) is the standard identification in Indian historiography, not a phrase in the Chinese text — and it is corroborated from India's own side. Line 23 of Samudragupta's Allahabad (Prayag) Prashasti, as edited by J. F. Fleet, lists 'the people of Simhala and all (other) dwellers in islands' among those rendering acts of respectful service and 'soliciting (his) commands'; Fleet's palaeography note records that the Sanskrit word standing behind that phrase, saimhalaka, is read in that very line.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The founder of the imperial Gupta line, c. 319-335 CE. He is the first of the family whom the Prayag Prashasti dignifies as Maharajadhiraja — his father Ghatotkacha and grandfather Gupta get only the lesser Maharaja — and he is the husband of the Lichchhavi princess Kumaradevi, named beside him on the Chandragupta-Kumaradevi gold coin type, with the prashasti calling their son 'the daughter's son of the Lichchhavi'. But his reign is a generation too early for the Bodh Gaya foundation, and it is his son's record, not his, that reports island powers courting a Gupta emperor.  (c) The most tempting wrong answer, because Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (c. 375-415 CE) is the Gupta most firmly attached to a Chinese visitor: Fa-hien left Chang'an in 399 CE, travelled in India through the years 399-414 CE, and spent three years at Pataliputra transcribing manuscripts and learning Sanskrit. But Fa-hien is a different Chinese source about a different reign. At the place of the Enlightenment he counts three monasteries and attributes none of them to a king of Ceylon; the royal Sinhalese foundation appears only in Xuanzang, more than two centuries later, and belongs to Chandragupta II's father.  (d) A 'none of them' option only works if all three named kings can be excluded. Here one of them is supported from two independent directions — Xuanzang's account of a Sinhalese royal embassy that was granted a site at the Bodhi tree, and the Simhala clause in Samudragupta's own eulogy — so choosing (d) means discarding the only evidence the question rests on. Treat 'none of them' as a claim that needs its own proof, not as a safe hedge for a stem that feels unfamiliar.

Concept: Gupta history is reconstructed from two very different bodies of evidence, and this question sits exactly where they meet. From India come inscriptions and coins — above all the Allahabad (Prayag) Prashasti, which J. F. Fleet published in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum Vol. III under the title 'Allahabad posthumous stone pillar inscription of Samudragupta'. 'Posthumous' is a point Fleet had to establish against the record's first editors, Captain Troyer (1834) and the Revd Dr Mill, who both missed it: the eulogy was cut after Samudragupta's death, and Fleet reads its closing homage to 'these same feet' as pointing at the reigning Chandragupta II. It runs to 33 lines of Sanskrit in mixed verse and prose, composed by Harishena, who names himself at the close as sandhivigrahika (minister for peace and war), kumaramatya and mahadandanayaka, and son of the mahadandanayaka Dhruvabhuti; line 33 credits the carrying out of the work to a second mahadandanayaka, Tilabhattaka. It was engraved on a polished sandstone monolith thirty-five feet high, of the third century BCE, that already carried Ashoka's edicts, and which Cunningham argued had first stood at Kausambi — the village of Kosam, about twenty-eight miles west by south of Allahabad — before a Delhi sultan moved it. From outside India come the Chinese: Fa-hien (399-414 CE), Xuanzang (c. 630-644 CE), Yijing (from 671 CE) and the Tang envoy Wang Xuance. They preserve social, religious and diplomatic detail Indian sources simply do not record, and the Sinhalese monastery at Bodh Gaya is the textbook case: the Indian record is silent, so the story reaches us only through Xuanzang.

State PCS 2023 Q79 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q79 — History PYQ with Answer