Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1.5

c7.t1.5

The Aryan population of India came into the peninsula, as is well known, from the north-west. This immigration lay already in the remote past at the time to which the oldest monuments which we have of religious poetry belong. The Indians had as completely lost the memory of this as the corresponding events had been forgotten by the Greeks and Italians. Fair Aryans pressed on and broke down the strongholds of the aboriginal inhabitants, the "black-skinned," the "lawless," and "godless." The enemy was driven back, annihilated, or subjugated. When the songs of the Veda were sung, Aryan clans, though perhaps only as adventurous, solitary pioneers, had already pressed on to where the Indus in the west, and possibly also to where the Ganges in the east, empty their mighty waters into the sea; inexhaustibly rich regions in which the flocks of the Aryans grazed and the Aryan deities were honoured with prayer and sacrifice.