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The serpent, I believe, was rejected by Buddha and his earlier followers, but cropped up again among other medieval corruptions, and, as we shall presently see, became an am porn element in Buddhist mythology. * Thave myself no doubts as to- tlie ‘correctness of the usually socio date, ‘and propose as soon as this work is published to submit my reasons for this belief to the Royal Asiatic Society. Meanwhile the conclusions T have arrived at in-my chronological researches will be found in the table at the end of this volume. "The reasoning on-which they are founded must be reserved for the journal of that society, but the results have meanwhile been adepted as data throughout this work. + Turnour, Mahawansé, XLVIL, LIT. } Turnour’s Introduction to the Mahawanso, XXXVI. Sce also Bigandet, Life of Gaudama, p. 362, et seq. 64 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. the accession of the celebrated Chandragupta (.c. 325), were Nagas or serpent worshippers pure and simple.* They certainly: were considered as of very low caste and hated by the Brahmans, and were not loved by the Buddhists. With the Mauryan kings Buddhism seems to have entered on a new phase ; at least in Agoka’s inscriptions we have no trace of the worship of either Buddha himself, nor of Trees nor Serpents. Pure abstract morality seems to have been the form it then took or was intended to take.+ But in the MahAwanso, one of the great events of Agoka’s reign, is the despatch of a branch of the Bo Tree of Buddh Gy to Ceylon, shewing that form of faith to be then prevalent; and in the Caves of Orissa, which - probably are anterior to the Christian era, we find both Tree and Serpent Worship prevailing. There are, however, few periods of Indian history during which such scanty materials exist for settling any point, either historical or mythological, as during the two centuries and a half before the Christian era. We know nothing that hap- ~ pened during that period, and we hardly see where light is to come from to illumine those dark ages. Tmmediately preceding the Christian era a great revolution took place in Buddhism under the influence of Nagdrjuna,§ one of the most important names connected with the history of the religion. Although we cannot fix the date of this patriarch with absolute certainty, we can within very narrow limits. The quotation from -the Thibetan Taranatha in Vassilief’s work|| places him between 14 years B.c.:and 28 a.D., both dates reconcileable with a not very long life. But we have another means of ascertaining it even more satisfactorily. Na&garjuna was the ruling spirit in the great ‘council or convocation-held-under Kanishka, the Tartar king of Cashmere and Northern India. ' In a tope erected by this king at Manikydla a number of Roman consular coins were found around the principal deposit. These date from 73 to 33 B.c.,f and as we cannot suppose they were deposited there till some time after the year in which they were coined, the building of the tope by Kanishka must be ee within the thirty years that preceded the Christian era. 7 At that time the Buddhists were divided into eighteen sects, g grouped into four great divisions,** a circumstance from which we may infer that Buddhism was torn by ‘internal dissensions, and. might have perished without the impulse given by this fresh importation of Tartar blood from the north. At the ‘same time also we learn that Milinda, king of Eastern Panjab, had silenced the Buddhist priests in argument, and driven them from the country across the Himalaya to Rakshita Tal and Manasarovara.t+ At this critical juncture the youthful Nagarjuna appeared. He was then a monk in the celebrated monastery of Nalanda in Behar{{—the Monte * * Maha Padma and Nanda, the only two of their | numes we -know with certainty, are both names of serpents. Their coins I believe to be those depicted, J.A.S. B., vol. VIL, pl. LX,, No.1 to 9. On all - these the serpent is the principal symbol. t J. A.S. B., VIL. p. 219; J. R.A. S., XID 153. ft Vide ante, p. 56, ; § His name is singularly suggestive, being com- pounded of “ Naga,” a serpent, and a tree, “Arjuna,” under which he was born. Vassilief, &c. Bouddhisme, 213. - Nalanda, who resided in a pool close by. Cunningham saw in 1861-62 the tank in which he | Le Bouddhisme, 201, { Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes, 130. ** ASiatic Researches, KX. 92, 297. tt Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes, 130. tt This monastery took its name and probably owed its original sanctity to a dragon or Naga called General resided. Report to GOvernment for those years, ~ p. 12. RISE OF BUDDHISM. 65 Cassino of India,—and proclaimed himself the restorer of. the old faith. According to this prophet the words uttered by Sakya Muni during his life-time had been heard and noted down by the Nagas, who had kept them to themselves in their own abode, till such time as mankind should become worthy to receive them. Nagarjuna gave out that he had received these documents from the Nagas and was commissioned to proclaim them to the world.* This gave rise to an entirely new school of Buddhism . known as Mahayana, or as M. Julien translates itt, the “ Grand Véhicule,” as opposed to Hinaydna or the “ Petit Véhicule;” the distinction between the two being in. almost every respect identical with that which exists peers nee and Medizval Christianity. This is another of those curious historical seiulensen. that exist between Christianity and Buddhism, and there are few so startling. In the first three centuries after the death of its founder, Buddhism was a struggling sect, sometimes petted, sometimes persecuted, but in spite of all we are told, in subsequent legends, never spread to any great extent among the people. Three hundred years after Buddha, Asoka did for Buddhism exactly what Constantine did for Christianity. He adopted it, made it the religion of the state, and with all the zeal of a convert, used every exertion to assist in its propagation. Six hundred years after Buddha, Nagdrjuna and Kanishka, did for the eastern faith what St. Benedict and Gregory the Great did for the western, they created a church with a Hierarchy and Doctrine. We must go on further still for four centuries more, to Buddhaghosa (a.p. 410) and to Hildebrand, before we find our Medizeval churches quite complete, and the priesthood quite segregated from the laity, and the system. perfected in all its parts. In the sixteenth century after Christ came the reformation, and with it the restoration of Evangelical Christianity. In the sixteenth century after Buddha came a reformation, but it was one of extermination of the faith, in so far as India was concerned. Sankara Acharya was the Indian Luther, but his aim was widely different. Whatever may have been the abuses and corruptions | that had crept into Buddhism in the eighth and tenth centuries of our era, they were replaced by a faith much less pure, and far fuller of idolatrous absurdities than that which it superseded. "What the western reformers aimed at, was to restore the Christian Hinayina. In the east this was not thought of, hence the different fate of the two faiths. In Europe. ey was invigorated by the struggle, in India Buddhism perished altogether. | The consequence of all this i is, ‘that we ‘are now very much in the position of a foreign investigator who might have éntered. some great conventual establishment in Europe in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to study Christianity. Worse than even this; it is as if the monasteries of the middle ages had lasted for four or five centuries longer without any reform or light from without, and that then an attempt should have been made to ascertain within their walls what primitive Christianity originally may have been. .The explorer would have found lives and legends of saints in abundance; miracles and divine communications without end; ponderous tomes of scholastic divinity, and a marvellously falsified history. Instead of the Bible, he- would have been referred to that mass of beautiful but purely legendary fictions which, in the course of centuries, had attached themselves to the name of the Virgin e * Vassilicf, Bouddhisme, 119. {. Voyages de Hiouen-Thsang, passim. (4799.) : : I 66 INTRODU CTORY ESSAY, “Mary, and to all the members of the Holy family. All ‘this, too, he Seoul have found -mixed up with stories from the Old Testament, and from the lives of Medieval saints in most marvellous confusion. If among all these works he chanced to light on the Bible, it certainly would not be pointed out to him as the one true Life of Christ, or as the basis of the Christian faith, We would, no doubt, appreciate the Gospels of Buddhism if we found them; but all that has yet been disinterved from the monasteries of Thibet, or the libraries of China or Ceylon, is subsequent to Buddhaghosa; more than one thousand years after the death of the founder of the religion, and long after the Naga revelation had superseded the original faith. We are thus precisely in the position of the student of Christianity who had only the library of some Medizeval monastery at his command. In so far as books are concerned, we depend almost ‘wholly for our knowledge of the Life of Buddha on the Lalita Vistara,* and other works of the samé. agé and class, The Lalita Vistara, however, was reduced to its present form in the fourteenth century of Buddha, and is the exact counterpart in purpose and authenticity to the Legenda Aurea, and similar works of the Christian middle ages. .