others of whom we have no record.

The reign of Harsha is thus illustrated by a number of contemporary
dateable works unusual in India. The king himself wrote some Buddhist
hymns,[245] and three dramas are ascribed to him but were probably
composed by some of the literary men whom he patronized. For all that,
the religious ideas which they contain must have had his approval. The
Ratnavali and Priyadarsika are secular pieces and so far as they have
any religious atmosphere it is Brahmanic, but the Nagananda is a
Buddhist religious drama which opens with an invocation of the Buddha
and has a Jataka story for its plot.[246] Bana was himself a devout
Brahman but his historical romance Harshacarita and his novel called
Kadambari both describe a mixture of religions founded on observation
of contemporary life. In an interesting passage[247] he recounts the
king's visit to a Buddhist ascetic. The influence of the holy man
causes the more intelligent animals in his neighbourhood, such as
parrots, to devote themselves to Buddhist lore, but he is surrounded
by devotees of the most diverse sects, Jains, Bhagavatas, Pancaratras,
Lokayatikas with followers of Kapila, Kanada and many other teachers.
Mayura, another literary protege of Harsha's, was like Bana a Brahman,
and Subandhu, who flourished a little before them, ignores Buddhism in
his romance called Vasavadatta. But Bhartrihari, the still popular
gnomic poet, was a Buddhist. It is true that he oscillated between the
court and the cloister no less than seven times, but this vacillation
seems to have been due to the weakness of the flesh, not to any change
of convictions. For our purpose the gist of this literature is that
Hinduism in many forms, some of them very unorthodox, was becoming the
normal religion of India but that there were still many eminent
Buddhists and that Buddhism had sufficient prestige to attract Harsha
and sufficient life to respond to his patronage.

About 600 A.D. India was exhausted by her struggle with the Huns.
After it there remained only a multitude of small states and obscure
dynasties, but there was evidently a readiness to accept any form of
unifying and tranquillizing rule and for nearly half a century this
was provided by Harsha. He conquered northern India from the Panjab to
Bengal but failed to subdue the Deccan. Though a great part of his
reign was spent in war, learning and education flourished. Hsuean
Chuang, who was his honoured guest,