68 Ancient Indian Weights. [No. 2, 
Krananda are any test of the activity of his mints and the amplitude 
of his treasure, he must have truly deserved the title. 
Whatever mythical conceptions may have first determined the out- 
lines of these various coin devices, or whenever they were incorporated 
into that religious system, it is clear that they one and all eventually 
came to be regarded as typical emblems of the Buddhist creed.* As 
such, there can be no hesitation in accepting their combined evidence 
as conclusive, that the kings who set them forth in such prominence 
two centuries after the Nirvana of Sakya-Muni, must have been votaries 
of the faith he originated or reformed. 
If the faintly preserved similarity of the names of Xandrames and 
Kand fortuitously led to their association in the person of Krananda, 
and an almost obvious sequence connected him with one of the nine 
Nandas, and alike the issuer of the coins bearing this designation, it 
was reserved for the coins themselves to contribute the most important 
item in the entire combination to the effect that these Nandas were 
Buddhists, and in this fact to explain much that the whole written his- 
tory of India, foreign or domestic, had hitherto failed to convey—the 
exact record of the State religion at the period, thus obscuring the 
right interpretation of the then impending dynastic revolution, com- 
menced and accomplished, as it would now seem, for the triumph of 
the Brahmanical hierarchy over the representatives of the more purely 
indigenous belief. 
These considerations, however, open out a larger area of Oriental 
national progress than the legitimate limits of the scope of the Numis- 
matic Society may justify my entering upon, though history must once 
again, in this case, admit a debt it owes to the archeology of money. 
And as antiquaries, we ourselves may frankly recognise the aid confer- 
red by the determination of the correct epoch of these coins, in justifying 
* The association of these symbols with a somewhat advanced phase of 
Buddhism is shown in the retention of the deer, the Bodhi-tree, the Chaitya and 
the serpent (which is placed perpendicularly on some specimens) on the reverse 
of a coin, the obverse of which displays the standing figure of Buddha himself, 
having the lotus and the word Bhagawata, his special designation, in the margin- 
allegend. (J. A. S. B. iii. pl. xxv. fig. 4., Prinsep’s “ Essays,” i, pl. vii. fig. 4.) 
There seems to have been a current tradition in the land, regarding the real 
faith of the Nandas, signs of which are apparent in Hiouen-Thsang’s notice, 
“Les hommes de peu de foi raisonnaient entre eux 4 ce sujet: Jadis, disaient 
ils, le roi Nan-tho (Nanda) a construit ces cing dépéts pour y amasser les sept 
matiéres précieuses” (vol, ii. p. 427). ' 

