and 12,000 captives. Six years later, this invasion was avenged by Gajabáhu, the captives recovered, and a similar number of Solíans led prisoners to Ceylon. Respecting these transactions however, the Malabar and Sinhalese annalists give dissimilar accounts, the former asserting that the Solíans voluntarily migrated to Ceylon at the request of Gajabáhu, who made them large grants of land for the support of a temple to Sivá, by way of expiation for a sin of intention, he having at one time purposed to pull the said temple down. It is at any rate certain that at the time alluded to a Solían colony was established in Trincomalee, and that the colonists were Sivaites. Another Malabar invasion took place a. D. 433, and the invaders again held possession of the land for six-and-twenty years. Anarchy and internal discord more or less prevailed from this time to the seventh century, in which the Malabars every now and again took part. In A. D. 838 these inveterate invaders once more overran the country. Driven back after awhile, they remained quiet until a. D. 954, when war broke out afresh. A short peace ensued, and again the Solíans ravaged the country; and the number of Malabars increased so much in successive reigns that A. D. 1023, they menaced the throne, and an army of Solíans coming to their aid, the king Mihindu IV. was captured, and with his queen died a prisoner in the country of his foes. The Solíans after this held the northern and mountain districts for upwards of fifty years, when they were reduced by Wejayabáhu, who died A. D. 1126; and during this period the Dhamilos [Tamils] succeeded in driving almost all the

Buddhist priests out of the island. Seventy years of peace followed, when a fresh period of internal discord tempted the Solíans to a fresh invasion, and the whole island became the prey of confusion, irreligion and anarchy, in which state it continued a third of a century. In other words, Hinduism prevailed, and Buddhism was all but extirpated under the strong hand of Mágha Rájá, the Malabar king. He reigned for twenty-one years, when A. D. 1240 Wijaya succeeded in expelling the Malabars from the Máyá and Ruhuna divisions of the island; but they were too numerous and too firmly rooted in the Pihiți or northern kingdom to be driven thence; and their descendants remain there to the present day.†

The readiness with which the Sinhalese associated the worship of Hindu divinities with that of their national faith is easily to be accounted for. Buddha, while neither

*The term "Malabar" is the common but improper name applied by Europeans to the Tamils of Ceylon, whether they come from Malabar proper, in the southwest of the Dekkan, from Tanjore, or from parts as far north as Cuttack and Orissa. The word never occurs in Sinhalese writings. The term used in the Mahawansó and other Páli works is

Dhamilá, and in Sinhalese works og Demalu, corresponding to the Sanskrit word Dravida, Tamils. The king Mágha Rájá, was a native of Kalinga or Telegu, in the Northern Circars.

The District of Nuwarakaláviya, however, which formed a large portion of the Kingdom of Pihiți, and in which was included Anuradhapura, the ancient capital, is still, as it always has been, occupied by the Sinhalese, but with a large admixture of the Tamil race.

denying nor disputing the claims of these divinities to godship, asserted his own immeasurable superiority over each and all in every godlike attribute they were supposed to be invested with his followers therefore could worship whom they pleased, so long as they acknowledged and took refuge in him as the All-Supreme. But this assumption

of superiority was intolerable to those who rejected his doctrines, and in their eyes his system was abominably obnoxious-in short, it was a most pestilent heresy. It nevertheless made its way, for its originator was a king's son, and kings and princes were its nursing fathers; and ere long it became the dominant religion in the land of its birth. In process of time, however, there came a reaction. Brahmanism again prevailed, and proselytes were made with facility; for when argument failed to convince, the sword was brought to bear, and in the hands of its warlike wielders, it wrought such effectual conversions, that ultimately Buddhism was either expelled from or extirpated throughout the whole of Central India.

But, while the Hindus rejected Buddhism as heretical, and extirpated it wherever they could, they have all along manifested as ready a tendency as the most tolerant of Buddhists to add to the number of their gods, though their name already be legion. The ancient Tamil Poet Pudattazhvár, a native of Mávilipuram near Sadras, has thus been deified by the Vaishnavas, worshippers of Vishnu; in like manner the two poctesses Uppei and Uruvei, who lived in the ninth century of the Christian era, have been numbered

1

with the goddesses, and obtained elevated niches in the Hindu Pantheon; while in more recent times the founder of a temple at Nellore, in the north of the island, has become the divinity worshipped within it walls.

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Such a tendency, it is but reasonable to suppose, would develope itself in connection with the Samanala peak, when the country in which it is situated became subjected to Hindu rule. The conquerors found the mountain dedicated to Saman, and its summit reverenced by Buddhists. Sivaite fakeers or ascetics discovered upon it medicinal trees and plants well known to them on the Himalayan ranges, the peaks of which are supposed to be Sivá's favorite abodes. They sought upon its slopes and surrounding valleys,-as their successors still continue the search for, the plant Sansévi," the tree of life and immortality, whereof whoso eateth he shall live for ever. Amongst them the mountain came to be called "Swargarrhanam," the ascent to heaven; and as all those whom Sivá destines to celestial bliss are said to receive upon their heads the impress of his sacred foot, by an easy process of transition the belief would become prevalent among the uneducated mass of his worshippers, that the foot-print upon the mountain top, alleged by the Sinhalese to be that of Buddha, was none other than Siva's own. When once such a belief obtained a hold upon the Hindu mind, the legend to account for it would speedily be framed.

As already stated, however, many of the most orthodox of the Hindus repudiate the legend and decline to accept the

rock-mark as a tangible memento of the presence of Sivá on the spot. In the Tiruvathavar Purana, generally supposed to have been written about the eighth century A. D.,* there is a chapter entitled "the vanquishing of the Buddhists in disputation," in which an account is given of a certain ascetic visiting Ceylon, (then called "the spotless kingdom of Ilá”),† and vexing the righteous souls of the "beautiful-shouldered" king, and the Buddhist hierarch, by proclaiming Sivá's superiority to Buddha. The king and the thero decided to go over to India and hold a public disputation upon the subject; but were there defeated and converted by the convincing arguments of the Sage Vathavuren. As this account appears in one of the works the Hindus esteem divinely inspired, and there is in it no mention whatever of the sacred foot-print or the Siván-oli-padam, it may be concluded that so late as the eighth century, both legend and belief were non-existent, so far at least as the Hindus are concerned.

The oldest probable period from which to date the legend, is that immediately following the invasion of the Solíans, A. D. 1023. The Sinhalese king was then captured, and for fifty years after, the Hindu race held possession of the Máyá, or mountain, as well as the northern province of the

* A translation of this chapter, by S. C. Chitty, Esq., was published in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1846.

† At that date, and previously, the old form of Sinhalese, known as the "Elu," would doubtless be the language commonly spoken by educated natives.