illed up
by the labours of European scholars who have collected numerous data
from an examination of inscriptions, monuments and coins, from the
critical study of Hindu literature, and from research in foreign,
especially Chinese, accounts of ancient India.

At first sight the history of India seems merely a record of invasions,
the annals of a land that was always receptive and fated to be
conquered. The coast is poor in ports and the nearest foreign shore
distant. The land frontiers offer more temptation to invaders than to
emigrants. The Vedic Aryans, Persians, Greeks and hordes innumerable
from Central Asia poured in century after century through the passes of
the north-western mountains and after the arrival of Vasco da Gama other
hordes came from Europe by sea. But the armies and fleets of India can
tell no similar story of foreign victories. This picture however
neglects the fact that large parts of Indo-China and the Malay
Archipelago (including Camboja, Champa, Java and even Borneo) received
not only civilization but colonists and rulers from India. In the north
too Nepal, Kashmir, Khotan and many other districts might at one time or
another be legitimately described as conquered or tributary countries.
It may indeed be justly objected that Indian literature knows nothing of
Camboja and other lands where Indian buildings have been discovered[108]
and that the people of India were unconscious of having conquered them.
But Indian literature is equally unconscious of the conquests made by
Alexander, Kanishka and many others. Poets and philosophers were little
interested in the expeditions of princes, whether native or foreign. But
if by India is meant the country bounded by the sea and northern
mountains it undoubtedly sent armies and colonists to regions far beyond
these limits, both in the south-east and the north, and if the expansion
of a country is to be measured not merely by territorial acquisition but
by the diffusion of its institutions, religion, art and literature, then
"the conquests of the Dhamma," to use Asoka's phrase, include China,
Japan, Tibet and Mongolia.

The fact that the Hindus paid no attention to these conquests and this
spread of their civilization argues a curious lack of interest in
national questions and an inability to see or utilize political
opportunities which must be the result of temperament rather than of
distracting invasions. For the long interval between the defeat of the
H