The Wheel and its Tracks: A History of Buddhism in Early Andhra

Sometime in the 5th century before the birth of Christ, sixteen disciples of the venerable sage Bavari made a sojourn up north from Kavitivana on the middle course of the River Godavari to meet Gautama, the enlightened, sheltered for the monsoon at Savatthi in the Gangetic plain. That is the earliest known mention of the Andhakas in Buddhist liturgy. The fate of the sixteen disciples is not very clear with only one of them making it back home after the Master’s Nirvana. It was the time when the prosperity of ancient Andhra, which is now Telangana and Vidarbha, prompted expansion towards the eastern coast that was mostly uninhabited. In the next few centuries the wheel of the Buddha had swivelled and dawdled at a pace yet to be comprehended more then two millennia later. This book, first in a series on the history of religion in Andhra, tries to perceive the pace of the wheel and its tracks focussing on the terrain of early Andhra, centred on archaeology and linear interpretation of data. The task involved over 18 seasons of examining and analysing material running into several hundreds of books, reports, articles, epigraphs, coins, oral testimonies of people living in vicinities of ruined Buddhist establishments while exploring the different sub-regions in Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring states of Maharasthra, Chattisgarh and north Tamilnadu, covering nearly eight centuries of the proto and early historic period of Andhra with thousands of photographs.