The Hallisalasya painting in the Bagh Caves represents :

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of the country of his time. Option A is wrong because Faxian came in the reign of Chandragupta II of the Gupta line, two centuries earlier, and his account is of monasteries and towns rather than of study at Nalanda. Option C is wrong because Yijing came later still and wrote mainly about monastic discipline and the sea route. Option D is wrong because Song Yun came as an envoy in the Huna period and left only a brief notice. Pairing each pilgrim with the Indian ruler of his visit is the quickest way to answer such questions.

The correct answer is B, Ayutthaya, the capital of the Thai kingdom for some four centuries and now a World Heritage site of ruined temples and Buddha images. The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama. Option A is wrong because Sukhothai was the earlier Thai capital, famous for the walking Buddha image and for the first Thai script, but its name is Sanskrit for the dawn of happiness rather than a form of Ayodhya. Option C is wrong because Chiang Mai was the capital of the northern Lanna kingdom. Option D is wrong because Nakhon Pathom is an ancient Buddhist centre with a great stupa, and its name means the first city, not Ayodhya.

The correct answer is A, the Panchatantra, the collection of animal fables used to teach statecraft to young princes. It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe. Option B is wrong because the Arthashastra, the treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, was not transmitted west in this way and was rediscovered in India only in the twentieth century. Option C is wrong because the Natyashastra of Bharata is the treatise on drama, dance and music and stayed within the Indian tradition. Option D is wrong because the Ashtadhyayi of Panini is the grammar of Sanskrit, a technical work with no such career abroad.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka, the Kushan ruler who called the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir and under whose empire, stretching from the Gangetic plain into Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura styles of sculpture travelled up the trade routes to Khotan, Kucha and Dunhuang. Option A is wrong because Ashoka called the third council at Pataliputra and sent the missions abroad. Option B is wrong because Kalashoka of the Shishunaga line called the second council at Vaishali. Option D is wrong because Ajatashatru of Magadha was the ruler at the time of the first council, held at Rajagriha soon after the Buddha's death. The sequence of councils, with the ruler and the place of each, is asked so often that it should be memorised as a single table.

The correct answer is B, Bodhidharma, remembered in tradition as a prince of the Pallava country in south India who travelled to China and taught a path resting on meditation rather than on scripture; the school he founded is Chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese, and legend attaches him to the Shaolin monastery. Option A is wrong because Atisha went from Vikramashila to Tibet in the eleventh century and reformed monastic learning there. Option C is wrong because Kumarajiva, who came from Kucha in Central Asia, was the great translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese but is not the founder of the meditation school. Option D is wrong because Silabhadra was the teacher at Nalanda under whom the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied, and he remained in India. The pair to hold is Bodhidharma with China and Bodhisena with Japan.