Buddhist India c19.68

c19.68

Many of the Topes had been opened, in search of treasure, and the urns in them ruthlessly destroyed, before the archæologists examined them; so the evidence is incomplete. Even as it stands the evidence of the old characters on those preserved to us will be estimated in different ways by different minds. With these, and similar facts before them, some still consider the literature as a tissue of mendacious fictions; others still consider that the Buddha is only a sun myth, and his disciples merely stars. I must humbly confess myself unable to follow speculations so bold. The Ceylon scholars knew, of course, nothing of these long-buried inscriptions; and could not have read or understood them, even had they had access to them. What we have to explain is how they came, centuries afterwards, to record precisely the same names in precisely the same connection. It is only the wildest credulity that could ascribe this to chance. And, dull as it may seem, I see no better explanation than the very simple one that these men really went as missionary teachers to the Himālaya region, and that the fact that they had done so was handed