08 International Life

Although Indians were by no means cut off from the outside world before the rise of Buddhism and although their world activities had already assumed such dimensions as to give a just occasion to our patriotic poet law-givers to claim [Let all the people of the world learn their duties from the elders born in this land]; yet as far as the present arguement is concerned, the international life of India after the rise of Buddhism, requires chiefly to be considered, because it was about this time when political enterprise having exposed or exhausted all possibilities of expansion in our own land naturally began to overflow its limits to an extent unevidenced before and the communications with the outsiders began to knock at our doors more impudently and even imperatively than they ever had done. In addition to these political developments the great and divine mission that set in motion ’the wheel of the law of Righteousness’ made India the very heart-the very soul-of almost all the then known world. To countless millions of human souls from Misar to Mexico, the land of the Sindhus came to be the land of their Gods and Godmen. Thousands of pilgrims form distant shores poured into this country and thousands of scholars, preachers, sages and saints went from this land to all the then known world. But as the outside world persisted in recognizing us by our ancient name ‘Sindhu’ or ‘Hindu’ both these in-coming and out-going processes helped mightily to render that epithet to be the most prominent of our national names. The necessity of political and diplomatic correspondence with various states, who knew us as Hindus or Indus, must also have, by making it incumbent on our people to respond to it, revived the use of this epithet first side by side with and then at times even instead of the name Bharatkhand. But if the rise of Buddhism has thus enabled this epithet to grow in prominence throughout the world and made us more and more conscious of ourselves as Hindus, then strange to say the fall of Buddhism only carried this process further than ever.