676	RENAISSANCES
universal state, and of its Iranian inhabitants into the Sinic Society's
internal proletariat, at this date opened the way for the Mahayana to travel
on eastwards in search of the fortune that awaited it in a wider world.
The subterranean proletarian channels through which the Mahayana
permeated were social counterparts of those masterpieces of hydraulic
engineering, called qanat or kariz, through which, in the thirsty climate
of Central Asia, the life-giving waters of the mountain springs were con-
veyed over vast distances underground in order, at the end of their long
hidden course, to emerge at last on the surface of the plain and there to
transfigure a desert into a garden through the far-borne waters' fruitful
marriage with a soil whose latent fertility had been awaiting this magic
rite of baptism. The geographical route along which a spiritually re-
juvenating Indo-Hellenic higher religion made its way to the Far East
was the narrow corridor of Sinically cultivated territory between the
southward-looking inner face of the western extremity of the Great Wall
and the northward-pointed foot of the northern escarpment of the great
Tibetan Plateau. In crossing the watershed between the Upper Yellow
River Basin and the Wei tributory of the Lower Yellow River on the eve
of the Han Empire's debacle, the Mahayana impinged on the northern
cradle of the Sinic Civilization, rose to the surface of a Sinic Society
whose social crust was at that moment caving in, burst into spiritual
flower, and at the same time encountered the barbarians who were like-
wise taking advantage of the collapse of the Sinic dominant minority's
universal state in order to break into the Wei Basin and the Lower
Yellow River Basin out of a Eurasian Steppe from which those home-
lands of the Sinic culture were now no longer screened by any effective
defence of the Great Wall
This simultaneous invasion of the North of the Sinic World by the
Eurasian Nomads and by the Mahayana plunged the Confucian litterati
there into a sea of troubles. The breakdown of the Han regime had
already been a disaster for them in itself, since it had deprived them,
outside the bounds of the southern citadel, of the authority and emolu-
ments deriving from a monopoly of the imperial civil service which they
had been enjoying since the reign of their first imperial patron Han Wuti
(imperabat 140-87 B.C.).1 To accentuate their discomfiture, these un-
employed Confucian civil servants now lost whatever moral influence
they might previously have been able to exert on the internal proletariat
of the Sinic Society; for the collapse of a Sinic oecumenical empire
which threw these representatives of a ci-devant Sinic dominant minority
out of official employment also brought appalling tribulations on the
rank-and-file of a Sinic body social that had been relieved of the rela-
tively efficient and benevolent rule of the Confucian litterati only to fall
into the rough and clumsy hands of parvenu barbarian war-lords; and
these cruel experiences moved the masses to look to non-Confucian
quarters for relief and solace. A third blow suffered by the Confucian
litterati in the North was their new barbarian masters' disinclination to
re-employ them in the administrative service of the Han Empire's
nascent barbarian successor-states.
1 See V. v. 418-19, 654-5, afid 7°8; and VI. vii. 355.