Art and Culture with Devdutt | Southward spread of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism

Amaravati Stupa is the largest Buddhist stupa in South Asia (Left). Colossal sized monolithic statue of the Jain God Bahubali or Gomateshwara at the Jain pilgrimage site of Shravanabelagola near Bangalore (right). (Wikimedia Commons)Traditionally, Arya-varta or the land of the Aryan people was triangulated by the Himalayas, the Ganga and the Yamuna. We know this from the early Dharma-shastra texts, composed around the time of Ashoka. While Ashokan edicts spoke of the land of Jambudvipa that he ruled over, and later Kharavela in Odisha spoke of Bharata as a land north of Odisha, the Brahmin texts kept referring to Arya-varta. They referred to the Punjab region as Brahma-varta, the old land of Saraswati, where the Rishis once lived. Arya-varta remained in the Ganga river basin. It expanded o