ABSTRACT
Nagarjuna probably lived during the late second to the early third centuries CE, and he may well have been associated with a king of the Satavahana dynasty, a dynasty which held sway for some time over large areas of central India, the Deccan.1 As we have seen, North India during the last century or so BCE and the first three centuries CE was subject to foreign invasions and political fragmentation. A vivid sense of impermanence (‘lack of intrinsic existence’) was present in the very fabric of the socio-political environment. With the rise of the Gupta empire in the fourth century, however, all changed. For two centuries the Gupta empire dominated India, and this domination marks the high point of classical Indian civilization. India’s greatest poet and dramatist, Kalidasa, probably lived at the court of Candra Gupta II (c. 376-415). It is from this time also that Chinese pilgrims, in search of setras to take home to China and translate, started to visit India and, with fine historical sense, they have left us accounts of their travels and observations. The greatest of these pilgrims were Faxian (Fa-hsien) and Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang; the model for Tripixaka in the famous Monkey stories). Xuanzang visited India not during the Gupta period, however, but during the reign of Harwa (seventh century), one of the major post-Gupta kings of North India, and it is possible to detect already, in comparison with the Gupta visit of Faxian, a certain decline in social and political stability.
