more ornate and mythological
form of religion was becoming prevalent and perhaps Kanishka's Council
arranged some compromise between the old and the new.

After Asvaghosha comes Nagarjuna who may have flourished any time
between 125 and 200 A.D. A legend which makes him live for 300 years is
not without significance, for he represents a movement and a school as
much as a personality and if he taught in the second century A.D. he
cannot have been the _founder_ of Mahayanism. Yet he seems to be the
first great name definitely connected with it and the ascription to him
of numerous later treatises, though unwarrantable, shows that his
authority was sufficient to stamp a work or a doctrine as orthodox
Mahayanism. His biographies connect him with the system of idealist or
nihilistic metaphysics expounded in the literature (for it is more than
a single work) called Prajnaparamita, with magical practices (by which
the power of summoning Bodhisattvas or deities is specially meant) and
with the worship of Amitabha. His teacher Saraha, a foreigner, is said
to have been the first who taught this worship in India. In this there
may be a kernel of truth but otherwise the extant accounts of Nagarjuna
are too legendary to permit of historical deductions. He was perhaps the
first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of
thought was not new: it was the result of applying to the external world
the same destructive logic which Gotama applied to the soul and the
result had considerable analogies to Sankara's version of the Vedanta.
Whether in the second century A.D. the leaders of Buddhism already
identified themselves with the sorcery which demoralized late Indian
Mahayanism may be doubted, but tradition certainly ascribes to Nagarjuna
this corrupting mixture of metaphysics and magic.

The third century offers a strange blank in Indian history. Little can
be said except that the power of the Kushans decayed and that northern
India was probably invaded by Persians and Central Asian tribes. The
same trouble did not affect southern India and it may be that religion
and speculation flourished there and spread northwards, as certainly
happened in later times. Many of the greatest Hindu teachers were
Dravidians and at the present day it is in the Dravidian regions that
the temples are most splendid, the Brahmans strictest and most
respected. It may be that this Dravidian influence affected even
Buddhism in the third century