ld Brahmanic ritual rather than the modern temple cultus. The
result of this may have been that piety and learning were diverted
from art, so that architecture and sculpture ceased to be in touch
with the best religious intelligence.

The debt of Sankara to Buddhism is an interesting question. He
indited polemics against it and contributed materially to its
downfall, but yet if the success of creeds is to be measured by the
permanence of ideas, there is some reason for thinking that the
vanquished led the conqueror captive. Sankara's approval both in
theory and in practice of the monastic life is Buddhistic rather than
Brahmanical.[520] The doctrines of Maya and the distinction between
higher and lower truth, which are of cardinal importance in his
philosophy, receive only dubious support from the Upanishads and from
Badarayana, but are practically identical with the teachings of the
Madhyamika School of Buddhism and it was towards this line of thought
rather than towards the theism of the Pasupatas or Bhagavatas that he
was drawn. The affinity was recognized in India, for Sankara and his
school were stigmatized by their opponents as Buddhists in
disguise.[521]

2

The reader will perhaps have noticed that up to the career of Sankara
we have been concerned exclusively with northern India, and even
Sankara, though a native of the south, lived much in the north and it
was the traditional sacred lore of the north which he desired to
establish as orthodoxy. Not only the older literature, Brahmanic as
well as Buddhist, but most of the Puranas ignore the great stretch of
Dravidian country which forms the southern portion of the peninsula
and if the Ramayana sings of Rama's bridge and the conquest of Lanka
this is clearly an excursion into the realms of fancy. Yet the
Dravidian districts are ample in extent, their monuments are
remarkable, their languages are cultivated, and Tamil literature
possesses considerable interest, antiquity and originality.
Unfortunately in dealing with these countries we experience in an
unusually acute form the difficulties which beset every attempt to
trace the history of ideas in India, namely, the absence of
chronology. Before 1000 A.D. materials for a connected history are
hardly accessible. There are, however, many inscriptions and a mass of
literature (itself of disputable date) containing historical
allusions, and from these may be put together not so much a skeleton
or framework as