amassing all this wealth I was always afraid lest I should find no safe
and secret place to stow it away. Now that I have deposited it by
alms-giving in the Field of Happiness I know that it is for ever in
safety. I pray that in my future lives I may amass in like manner great
treasures and give them away in alms so as to obtain the ten divine
faculties in all their plenitude."

Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the
days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in
bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India,
behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be
paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates
represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this
extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the
picture left to us is singularly complete. The first day is a sort of
farewell tribute to the waning glory of Buddha, and the second to the
ancient majesty of the Vedic gods; but they only prepare the way for the
culminating worship, on the third day, of the terrific figure of Shiva,
who had already been raised to one of the highest, if not the highest,
throne in the Hindu pantheon, which he still retains--Shiva, the master
of life and death, whose favourite emblem is the phallus, and from whose
third eye bursts forth the flame which is one day to consume the world.
Around Harsha, and devouring his gifts until, at the end of two months,
they are wholly exhausted, are the Brahmans, "born above the world,
assigned to guard the treasury of duties, civil and religious," through
whom alone the wrath of angry gods can be appeased and present and
future life be made safe in the descending hierarchy of caste.

Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon
as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political
chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete
obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and
dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu
Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and
absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by
them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable
feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of
the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descend