act of grace and benevolence of the great Emperor Chandra Gupta, generally known among his subjects as Deva raja [Indra].

"As long as the sun and moon [shall endure] so long shall these five ascetics enjoy the jewel-adorned edifice, lighted with many lamps. For endless ages after me and my descendants, may the said ascetics enjoy the precious building, and the lamps. Whoso shall destroy the structure, his sin shall be as great, yea, five times as great as that of the murderer of a Brahman. In the Samvat, [or year of his reign], [in the month of Bhadrapada], the tenth [day]."

There is no year or era; and the period of the Gupta's, in the opinion of different antiquaries, ranges from the time of Alexander the Great to the tenth century. Dr. Mill considers those mentioned on the Allahabad column as contemporary with Charlemagne. Capt. Smith, who describes the tope, says, the inscription is evidently more modern than the building, and is an irregular addition to the sculpture of the gate. Capt. Cunningham conjectures A.D., 475. The character of the Deva Nagari appears to me to be that in use between the sixth and ninth centuries, and the mention of the sin of the murder of a Brahman would imply, that period of the rising Brahmanical influence consequent on the decline of Buddhism; but the sin, be it remarked, was not one-fifth so great as taking away the lands from these five Buddhist ascetics. We know that the inscription must be centuries after its precursors the twenty-five inscriptions in the Lât character which are engraved in the same tope or chaitya; and of the existence and use of which character, in the time of Alexander's immediate successors, we have indubitable proof in the inscriptions upon the coins of Agathocles and Pantaleon. The exact date, however, matters not to me; it suffices for my purpose, that, between 300 years B.C. and the tenth century, the great Emperor Chandra Gupta, through his agent, bought the land which he gave to the Buddhist temple, with the current coin of the time; which appears to have been the Dinar1! Had the sovereign considered himself the owner of the soil, he would have taken what he wanted from the occupants, and not bought it. I trust these facts and examples will have their due weight with the supporters of the doctrine of the omnipotence of Indian governments.

The Chinese traveller Fahian mentions king Prasene's minister of Sravasti, B.C. 543, having bought a piece of ground to attach a garden to a temple of Buddha; and we find in the Bible that the Egyptians sold their land to Pharaoh, in Joseph' time, during the famine.

ART. XIV.-Notes on the Religious, Moral, and Political State of India before the Mahomedan Invasion, chiefly founded on the Travels of the Chinese Buddhist Priest Fa Hian in India, A.D. 399, and on the Commentaries of Messrs. Remusat, Klaproth, Burnouf, and Landresse. By LIEUT.-COLONEL W. H. SYKES, F.R.S.

OUR Sanskrit scholars have sought, in the depths of Brahmanical literature, for the means of illustrating the political, the religious, the moral, and social condition of that ancient people, over whose minds it has hitherto been believed that Brahmans exercised from the earliest times unbounded sway. The inquirers sought for facts and they found fables; they looked for historic lights', and they found poetic coruscations, which served only to render the darkness in which truth was enveloped more impenetrable. An Orientalist, Mr. Wathen, has said, that on the Mussulman conquest of India the Brahmans destroyed all previous historical documents; they seem, nevertheless, to have carefully preserved, or invented, or adapted, such compositions in Sanskrit, as attested their own religious supremacy or established their cosmogony; and which have fettered the minds of Indians, as well as foreigners, to an unreserved admission of such pretensions as in their arrogance, caprice, or selfishness, they chose to advance.

In this state of hopelessness, with respect to the means of elucidating the ancient history of India, there break upon us lights from a most unexpected source-from the literature of that remarkable people, the Chinese-which will go far to dissipate the mists which have hitherto obscured our view, and which will give our judgments a wider scope of action, and our deductions a stabler basis than we have hitherto possessed. Of the value and character of these

Professor Wilson says, "The only Sanskrit composition yet discovered, to which the title of history can with any propriety be applied, is the Raja Taringini, a history of Cashmir.”—Introductory observations to the History. This history nevertheless has the proved anachronisms of 796 years [Mr. Turnour thinks 1177 years,] and 1048 years, and it is a comparatively modern work, having been compiled A.D. 1148.

Professor Wilson also, in his notes on the Mudra Rákshasa, says, "It may not here be out of place to offer a few observations on the identification of Chandragupta and Sandracottus. It is the ONLY point on which we can rest with any thing like confidence in the history of the Hindus, and is therefore of vital importance in all our attempts to reduce the reigns of their kings to a rational and consistent chronology."

lights, I leave M. Landresse, one of the translators from the original Chinese into French, to speak for himself:

"If the most pure sources were for ever dried up; if there did not even remain a solitary sacred book, written in the idiom in which the Divinity had chosen to transmit his laws to men, or if these books had not yet for ages to come issued from the monasteries of China and Thibet, in which they are preserved; if the texts in the language of the Brahmans, written subsequently to the period at which they were at the head of religion in India, were absolutely rejected; if it be objected, that the Singhalese versions do not per mit of the origin or etymology of the terms which constitute the language of religion being traced; if it were no longer possible to discover the roots of the names appertaining to gods, saints, or heroes, to understand their signification; if the books of the Thibetans were rejected in consequence of certain discrepancies in the classification of their cosmogony, and those of the Mongols, in consequence of their comparatively recent date, and the national legends which are introduced; in one word, if it were desired to recover the entire doctrine of Buddha, in its primitive purity, and almost its original language, without the mixture of formulas, or of the traditions of strangers; there still would remain these translations from the highest antiquity, transmitted to us by the Chinese, made directly from the holy books of the most authentic character, where the words, before being interpreted, are reproduced by analogous consonances always to be recognised, and where the grammatical forms are preserved."

Such is the character of these Chinese translations from Indian originals, illustrative of the principles and state of Buddhism in the seats of its origin, progress, glory, and extinction. But there are yet other sources of information of not less interest and value respecting the moral, political, and topographical state of India in the early centuries of the Christian era. These sources come from pious Chinese travellers, who, moved by the same feeling which carries Christians on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mahomedans to the Kiblah, and Hindús to their Teerts, (Tirthas,) braved the dangers, the privations, and the sufferings in the route, through Tartary, and over the Himalaya mountains, from China to India, to visit the scenes endeared to them, by being associated with the lives and miracles of their Buddhas, but chiefly to collect the sacred texts of their religion; and who, subsequently to their return to their country, gave an account of their travels to their countrymen'. But M. Landresse so fully

1 The chief of these works, is that of Fa-Hian, on which are founded the notes I venture to lay before the Society, but others will also be quoted.

characterises Foë Kouë Ki and the other works, that I beg to have recourse to his language:-"The description of the Buddhist kingdoms, which is the object of the present publication, has reference to the half of the second period of M. Remusat." In many other works, M. Remusat endeavoured to show that the Chinese had learnt to make the tour of Asia, long before Europeans had doubled the Cape of Good Hope; and that they were not so ignorant in practical geography, as people are generally disposed to believe. Numerous texts prove in an incontestible manner the part which they had taken, two centuries before our era, in the events and commerce of Western Asia. From that time they never ceased to entertain either amicable or hostile, commercial or political relations with the inhabitants of those two lines of towns which seemed to trace through Tartary the road from China to Persia. In the century that preceded the birth of Christ, they sought to contract an alliance with the kings of Bactriana; and subsequently the last members of the Sassanides, overthrown in Persia by the Arabs, sought refuge with the Emperor Taï-tsoung. The Chinese profited by all these events to obtain a knowledge of the places of which they were the theatre; but above all, it is to the religious communications established and entertained by Buddhism that they owe the most precious part of the knowledge which they collected respecting foreign nations. Never did the ambition of conquest, nor the appetite of gain, conduct into countries so far removed as those into which the zeal of proselytism penetrated; and it is not without admiration, mixed with astonishment, that we see humble ecclesiastics cross the rivers and the seas which had stopped armies, traverse deserts and mountains into which no caravan had dared to penetrate, and brave perils, and surmount obstacles, which had set at nought the all-powerful will of emperors: some of them to sow at a distance the belief to which they themselves were attached; and others to verify the principles of their faith, in the country which gave them birth, and to visit the places rendered sacred by events in the life of Buddha."

"The most ancient of these religious undertakings, of which history preserves mention, is that of the travels of Lao-tseu to the west, in the sixth century before our era. Whatever opinion may be entertained of the authenticity of this tradition, and particularly as the circumstances that he reports are not all equally worthy of credence, it is beyond all doubt that at extremely remote periods there was a kind of reciprocity in the importations into China of the doctrine of Buddha, and in the propagation beyond the limits of this country of the precepts of Lao-tseu. It follows from many passages in Foë

1 M. Remusat divides his history of Buddhism into three periods.

Kouë-ki that the philosophical sect which acknowledged Lao-tseu as its head and founder was, at the commencement of the fifth century before our era, already from an early period dispersed in the countries situated to the west and south-west of China, and even in India. Moreover, we could not well deny the analogy which exists between the opinions of the Doctors of Reason (Lao-tseu) and those of the Buddhists-an analogy which extends to the very base of their doctrines, as well as to the details of the popular belief, and which is removed too far from the circle of truths and of errors, which constantly lead men to the same point, to permit us to believe that this analogy should have sprung up in two countries independent of all communication, or of some traditional influence. A Buddhist priest, of the name of Chi li fang, appears to have been the first Buddhist missionary who came to China from the westward to propagate his faith. He arrived in Chan si in the year 217 before our era; thus this province, which passes for having been the seat of the government of the first sovereigns of China, and where there is every reason to believe that Chinese civilization had its birth, was also the first to become acquainted with Buddhism. Chi li fang was accompanied by eighteen ecclesiastics, and had some sacred books with him. Under Ai ti, of the dynasty of Han, in the first year of Youan Chiou, (two years before Jesus Christ,) some other books were taken by I tsun Keow, who was sent from the nation of the Getes'; and about the same time the king of their country ordered a learned disciple of the sect of Buddha, named King lou, to proceed to India to study [verify the precepts of Buddhism. At this period, says the Chinese historian, the Buddhist sectaries were dispersed throughout our frontiers, and their doctrine was known in the empire, but it was not professed. That which may be called its official adoption did not occur until about sixty years afterwards. Buddha having manifested himself in a dream to the Emperor Mingti, this prince charged several learned individuals to collect in Hindústan information respecting the Buddhist religion, to copy its precepts, and to draw its temples and images. They returned accompanied by two ecclesiastics. It was then that Central China commenced to possess Buddhist priests, and that their religion was publicly professed. By frequent and regular communications from China to India it reached most of the nations of interior Asia: some received it from the labours of zealous missionaries; and others sent pious pilgrims to search for it in the countries where it was known to have been long held in honour.