History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period v1.c14.3.3

v1.c14.3.3

Buddhism enters the stage at a much later period of the history, while Jainism does not appear at all. The absence of Jain throughout Further India and Indonesia is extremely significant in view of the fact that the province of their origin, Orissa, was a stronghold of Jainism. In fact, not a single Jain image has been recorded to have been discovered in any province of British Burma, Federated Malaya States, Siam, Annam or Cambodia. The case is slightly different in the case of Indonesia. Though Upper Indonesia has been visited from time to time by Dutch or French scholars like Krom, Finot and Vogel the majority of the islands of the South Pacific remain unvisited by any Indologist; yet, from time to time, claims are put forward by sensation-mongers or American scholars to connect the ancient Mayan civilisation with that of India. The connecting link or the route still remains to be discovered and two hypotheses have been put forward. The first of these is the time-honoured theory of the Mongolian origin of the American Indian. It is generally supposed that the Reds crossed from Asia to North America by the land bridge now represented by the Aleutian island or a vanished isthmus which originally joined Siberia to Alaska. The second theory is that some Asiatic Culture was carried across the South Pacific by traders. The islands of the Southern Pacific contain numerous remains of an extinct race.