seem to have finished at the pyre, and the subsequent disposal of the remains to have been thought of little importance. The consequence is, that in India the tumulus is only a simulated tomb, and generally contains merely a relic of the deceased, a bone, a tooth, a lock of hair,-it may be only a garment, or some household article. It bore, in fact, exactly the same relation to a real tomb as the sarcophagus containing relics and forming the stone altar in Catholic churches bears to a stone coffin used for the inhumation of a body. It can not be doubted but that both these kinds of relic-shrines are a refinement on the practical modes of burial used before they came to be adopted. Although, therefore, there seems to be no the river or dispersed in the air. The rites great difficulty in fixing a date to these buildings with a tolerable degree of approximate certainty, and although we may feel sure that the people who erected them were Celts, we are not much further advanced in the object of our researches, for we know so little of the history of this people at that period, and are so deficient in correct information as to their manners and customs, and the particular forms of their worship or religion, that we are more inclined to look to the monuments to supply us with the particulars we are seeking, than to attempt to explain the uses of the buildings from the stores of our extraneous learning. In fact there does not appear to be any source from which light can be thrown on the question, unless it should be that we can discover a cognate style of architecture among some more civilized people, whose writings or sculptures should enable us, by comparing the known with the unknown, to solve the riddle. It is evident that neither Greece, nor Rome, nor Egypt, will supply this deficiency, All the styles of the ancient Roman world have long been familiar to the learned, and every conceivable analogy has been exhausted without any approach to success; but there is one style still existing in India, which has only recently been examined, and which promises a better result. The Buddhist architecture in India, as practised from the third century B.C. to the seventh A.D., is essentially tumular, circular, and external; possessing the three great characteristics of all the so-called Drudical remains. The analogies of the two styles are not, it must be confessed, particularly apparent at first sight, for the obvious reason, that, though practised contemporaneously, the eastern style is the utterance of a highly civilized people, possessing an extensive literature, fond of sculpture and carrying ornament in architectural detail to a most lavish extent, whereas the western style is that of a rude uncivilized race, who, if they knew of letters, have left no trace of them, never re presented the human figure, and have not set up a single stone with a sculptured moulding upon it. To compare the two styles is, consequently, no easy task, and requires an intimate knowledge of their essentials which few possess, and which it is difficult to impart without entering into elaborate details. The difficulty is further increased by the fact, that inhumation of the bodies of dead persons was rarely practised in India by any section of the population. Cremation seems vacuum ys to have been the general practice, and hes were commonly either thrown into In India the tumulus is sometimes, though rarely, of earth, but generally of rubble masonry internally, and of hewn stone or brick on the external surface, and originally was apparently always surrounded by a circular enclosure of upright stones, though in later times this came to be attached to the building as an ornamental band, instead of an independent feature. In the most celebrated example in India, that at Sanchee, the circle consists of roughly-squared upright stone posts, joined at the top by an architrave of the same thickness as the posts, exactly as at Stonehenge; the only difference being the insertion of three stone rails between each of the uprights, which is a masonic refinement hardly to be expected among the Celts. What adds to their interest is, that almost every upright bears a short inscription to say that it is the "Danam" (Donum) or gift of some pious individual who is named. The tope or tumulus itself was raised either by an individual or a body of men; and although the principal one contained no relic, those around it did contain relics of Buddhist saints and missionaries who lived in the third century B.C., and whose names and acts are familiar to Indian antiquaries. The surrounding pillars were the offerings of the people afterwards, but, as far as can be judged from the characters used in the inscriptions, and other circumstances, they are all earlier than the Christian era. Besides being used as burial-places, or as relic-shrines, the tumuli of India were frequently erected to mark spots where great events, either sacred or secular, had occurred. Of those which have been dug into and explored, hardly one-half have yielded relics; the rest denote battle-fields, or the localities visited by Buddha or his successors, and where they performed miracles, or some other noteab act. Besides tumuli with their enclosing circles, there are in India circles of upright stones, which apparently enclose nothing. |ished, their enclosures must have perished Of these, the most celebrated is that at with them. The similarity of the Menhirs Amravati, on the Kistna. It now surrounds and lâts need hardly be insisted upon, nor a tank, which certainly in modern times has the general peculiarity of the pyramid and been enlarged, but may have been a place relic worship so distinctly described by Clemwhere some one bathed, or where some mir-ens of Alexandria. This form of religion acle was wrought, which the stones were seems to be that which has covered the set up to commemorate and sanctify. Like greater part of Europe and of Asia with the every structure in India, the stones are cov- tumuli which meet the traveller's eye on ered with sculpture, but they are, otherwise, every plain, and have hitherto been considsimply two concentric rows of upright stones, cred merely as the depositories of the dead without any joining lintel, enclosing a space bodies of extinct races of men. 193 feet in diameter. In its immediate These coincidences are too striking to be proximity are numberless little circles of accidental, and would no doubt have been rude unhewn stones, identical with those in perceived long ago, but for the want of any this country, but smaller. All which have recorded historical connection between the been opened have been found to enclose races and the religions of two nations situated funereal remains. There are also in South- so far apart from each other. The answer is ern India cromlechs so like those which exist on everybody's lips, the one class of monu both here and in France, that they could ments belongs to a Buddhist people, and they not be distinguished if placed side by side. are adapted to the rites of that religion; the There are again kistvacns, sometimes simi- other belongs to a people whose priests were lar to our own, but generally consisting of four Druids, and were used for their sanguinary upright slabs, with a flat one on the top, but rites. Unless it can be shown that the all more or less squared either by splitting Druids came, as has often been suspected, or hewing. Single obelisks, or as we should from Dravida Desa, or the Madras country, call them Menhirs, are among the common- or that the Buddhist religion once prevailed est forms of Buddhist architecture. They in these islands, the analogies, however ingenare either isolated pillars, then called Lâts, ious, fail entirely in conveying conviction to put up to commemorate events or to bear the mind. inscriptions, or stand in pairs before the gates or temples. Another form, but only now found in rockcut examples, is the oblong choir, shaped into an apse at the altar end, and having an aisle winding around in, so as to admit of a circulation of processions around the sacred spot. Some hundreds of these exist cut in the rock in various parts of India, but there is only one example in a structural form, and that is among the tumuli at Sanchee. Here then we have a group of monuments which, if not identical, must be admitted to bear a strong resemblance to those found in this country. We have tumuli which are burying-places, but more rarely in both countries than is generally supposed; tumuli which are relic-shrines, which many of those opened in this country certainly are; and tumuli which, like Silbury Hill, and many other blind barrows, are commemorative of the acts of living men, not depositories of their bones.. We have circles which enclose sacred spots, circles which enclose tombs, circles which enclose tumuli, like that at New Grange in Ireland, and the one destroyed at Avebury, but unfortunately we have in India no example of a circle enclosing a choir like that at Stonehenge. That such there may have been is more than probable, but they could not exist in rock-cut examples, and all the structural choirs except one having per We have intimated that it is by no means clear that the Druids were the priests of the inhabitants of the south-eastern parts of this country; but that their votaries were to be found principally in the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains and the forests of Anglesea, and possibly also in the less cultivated forestdistricts throughout the island. The truth seems to be, as is clearly expressed by Edwin Norris, the best and safest of our ethnogra phers and philologists, that, — "All the accounts left us by ancient writers indicate two different races simultaneously inhabiting Britain; the one a tribe who went naked and painted their bodies, who dwelt in tents, and indulged in promiscuous intercourse, were ignorant of agriculture, used stone hatchets and arrows, and probably were cannibals; the others, men who built houses, dressed in black garments or skins, coined money, constructed chariots, grew a great deal of corn, extracted metals from the ore, made bronze tools, and probably had some use of letters. It seems difficult to believe that these were one people, though confounded by classical writers, who received without criticism the accounts brought home by casual travellers. But this was in early times, and the less civilized race may have been destroyed or absorbed by the time the Romans became better acquainted with the island; and yet Saint Jerome in his youth, about the middle of the fourth century, saw the Attacotti, gens Britannica,' feeding on human flesh; and he says that these savages, though they had plenty of swine and cattle in their forests, preferred the flesh of men and over the whole peninsula. We know that women for their horrid feasts." ("Cornish they came across the Indus, because they Drama," vol. ii. p. 461.) have left a fragment of their race in the Brahui, on this side of that great stream. They belong, as we now know, to the Tartar family of mankind, and constitute the whole population of the southern parts of India, and still underlie the more recent immigrants on the north of the Vindhya Mountains. Next to them came the great Sanscrit-speaking tribes of the Arians. Like the Tartar Tamuls, they too came across the Indus, and at the time when the Vedas were reduced to their present form, some twelve or thirteen centuries B. C., as we learn from the researches of St. Martin, they possessed the Punjab, and extended from the Jumna in the cast to Cabul in the west, but subsequently occupied the whole of the Gangetic valley, and, as a dominant and superior race, spread their influence, if not their conquests, over the entire peninsula.* These two races still remain perfectly distinct; and it is hardly too bold a generalization to say that all that has been built in India has been built by the Tartar races, all that has been written has been written by the Arians. They were two people, in fact, occupying nearly the same relative positions that the Red Indians of America do to the European colonists, not indeed different to the same extent, but still so far dissimilar that the Roman and Greek geographers treated the more savage aboriginal race as the Britons par excellence, and dwelt on their peculiarities with zest, and described them in detail, while they seem to have passed over in silence the familiar habits and customs of the Belgic and other settlers, which offered no novelty to point a description or adorn a tale. Or it may be that the unscientific habits of that age prevented them from discriminating between the two races, and that, recording those facts which seemed most strange and interesting, they ascribed to the whole population peculiarities that belonged only to a small section. This ought not to astonish us when we reflect that, although we, with our boasted science, have possessed India for more than a century, and been familiar with it for twice that period, it is only now that we are beginning to be conscious that India is inhabited by two The great fact, however, which interests totally distinct races of men. The learned, us most in the present instance, is the rise of it is true, have been for some time aware of the Buddhist religion, which is one of the this fact, but it has not yet found its way into most important events, though one of the our popular books. Even those who know least understood, of those which have occurred The true India personally, and have made it their in the history of the human race. special study, are not so completely impressed explanation of this phenomenon appears to with the importance of the circumstance as be that in the sixth century B. C., Sakya Sinto take it as the guide to their speculations, ha, the son of a chief of the race of Sakas, as and the ultimate test of all the reasonings on his name imports, living near the foot of the this subject. Yet without it India is a mys-Himalayas, being disgusted at the supremacy tery, and neither its history, its religion, nor its arts can be understood. Whether it is that human life is shorter in India than elsewhere, or that the enervating effects of the climate prevent families reaching the extent necessary to keep up the population to the required standard, or whether it arises from any other cause, certain it is that the great phenomenon of Indian history is, that, from the earliest period to the present hour, nation after nation, horde after horde, has been poured into her fertile plains without the cup ever overflowing, or even being full. The principal migration has been across the Indus, but tribes have leaked in through the passes of the Himalayas, and small bodies have crept in by sea, but, with one most insignificant exception, no colony is known ever to have left her shores, nor any Indian army ever to have crossed her borders in search of foreign conquests. Before the dawn of the earliest light of tradition the vast Tamul race seem to have penetrated apparently in successive waves, and spread themselves of the hated Arians, gathered together the The Greeks seem to have been aware of this distinction of the two races, inasmuch as Arrian, quoting from Megasthenes, says, "From Bacchus to Sandracottus the Indians reckon 153 kings, who reigned during a space of 6042 years, in all which time they had only the liberty of being governed by their own laws twice, first for about 300 years, and after that for about 120." of India was irresistible, and its success pro-cidate this; for though travellers have hitherportionately great. For ten centuries Budd-to called every excavation a tomb, there can hism was the religion of India; but the Brab-be no doubt that many of those at Petra and mins had kept their books and the old records Cyrene and elsewhere were the abodes of of their former faith; and when the unwritten living ascetics, and not burial-places at all. Tartar faith became corrupt and feeble, from The spread of Pythagoreans everywhere, and its innate want of vitality, and its uncertainty of the Essenes in Judea, is also an indication of doctrine, the old faith cropped out again, of some such form of faith; and it is also but, "heu quantum mutatus!" mixed with curious, though not conclusive, that all the Sivaism and Vishnuism, and every form of barbarous coinage of Britain can be traced absurd fetichism which it could gather from back to that of Philip of Macedon and his local superstitions, and by which it hoped to successors.* enlist the feelings of the people. This is the shape in which it now exists in India. All this, however, unfortunately stops short exactly at the point where it would be most Among the mixed populations of Hindostan interesting; for though it may show that at the Buddhist religion has been entirely sup- an early period some form of Buddhism explanted by this strange medley of absurdities; tended to the castern shores of the Mediterbut wherever it has been preached to a pure-anean, it does not show that it ever penetratly Tartar people, there it remains unaltered ed farther westward; and unless some thread to the present day. In Tartary, in Siam, in Burmah, and in China, throughout the whole of Northern Asia, wherever there are Tartars or people nearly allied to them there Buddhism still flourishes unimpaired. can be found to connect the two, the historical proof of the connection of eastern and western Buddhism must remain imperfect. The question is by no means new, and has over and over again been investigated by It would be extremely interesting if any modern inquirers, but without much success. Indian record told us of the rise and spread Northern antiquarians were early struck with of this wonderful form of faith. Nothing, many of the points of similarity between the however, was written by its founder, nor ap- Woden of the Scandinavians and the Buddha parently by his immediate successors, and we of the east; and though there can be little should know little about it but for the fortu- doubt that they originally meant one and the nate mania of the first great regal convert, same person, the Woden, as we now know which induced him to carve his edicts on the him, as a god of the stirring, energetic, warrocks of Cuttack, in Guzerat, and on the like Arian races of the north, was a very difbanks of the Upper Indus, besides engraving ferent person from the quiet, contemplative, them on pillars all over the country. From unhopeful prophet of the Tartars. In Europe these we learn that Asoka's first care after we find him associated with a whole heirarchy his conversion was to send missionaries to of gods of war and peace, of the earth and proclaim his new faith in the neighboring sky, etc., as well as with a distinct idea of a lands. It does not seem, however, that they future state, and other peculiarities of Arian penetrated beyond Cabul or Balkh westward. faith. Notwithstanding this, men were early The most interesting record is that contained in the 13th edict of the rock-cut inscriptions, where he mentions having formed treaties or alliances with Ptolemy, Antiochus, Antigonus, Magas, and Alexander;-not treaties of war or peace, but for the protection or aid of hiscoreligionists in the dominions of those kings. Owing to the imperfections of the stone and of the record it is not easy to make out what is exactly intended; but this much is certain, that about the year 256 B. C., Asoka did make arrangements for religious purposes with Ptolemy Philadelphus, Antiochus Theos, Antigonus Gonatus, with Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander, who could only be the king of Epirus and Macedonia, mentioned by Justin in the same passage in which he relates the death of Magas.* The existence of rockcut Viharas, or Monasteries at Petra, in the dominions of Antiochus, and of similar excavations at Cyrene, go far to confirm and elu * Justin, "Historiæ," XXVI. c. ii. struck by the similarity of the names. It appeared a strange coincidence that Buddhbar in the east, should be Wodensday, or, as wo now call it, Wednesday, in the west. They saw in the sacred tree at Upsala, the counterpart of the Bo-tree at Budhgya. The tumuli, spread all over Asia and northern Europe, seemed to have a common origin, and fifty other little circumstances seemed to point more or less distinctly to the same conclusion. Then the Edda told how Woden, flying from the oppression of the Romans, after the Mithridatic war, had fled from the Crimea, carrying his faith with him to the north, and bequeathing his vengeance to his successors, while the caves of Inkermann and the tumuli According to Davies, the Triads bring the in the land of Hav, and this is understood to imply Cymry, under the conduct of Ilu, from Defrobani the neighborhood of Constantinople in the eastern part of Thrace (page 98); and again Ilu, the lord of Mona, is styled Buddwas, the dispenser of good (page 118). of Kherson bore silent testimony to the truth of this record. able portion of their book to an attempt to explain how it arose. The explanation on which they principally relied was the tradition that the reformer Tsong Kaba had been, in the fourteenth century, educated by a Christian priest, and from him had learned the ritual and the doctrines which he is said to have introduced into his native country. Unfortunately for their theory, we know from architectural remains in India, which date back as far as the Christian era, and from the writings of Chinese travellers who visited India from the fourth to the seventh centuries, that this form of worship existed in all essential particulars, exactly as it now does, at least 1,000 years before the reformer was born. M. Huc's other suggestion, "que le diable y est pour beaucoup," is less open to objection, but can hardly be accepted as either a philosophical or complete explanation of the mystery. A third suggestion, which has been frequently put forward, both in this country and abroad, is that Christianity is borrowed from Buddhism. A more unfounded assertion never was advanced, nor one that will less stand the test of even the hastiest examination. It may be safely asserted that there is not a trace of Buddhism in the Bible itself: all that is Buddhist is found in mediæval and more modern Christianity. It was introduced long after the age of the Evangelists, and if we are not mistaken can be traced to the barbarous nations who were incorporated with the Roman Church at the downfall of the Roman empire. The evidence has been repeatedly sifted, and all that can be said of it seems to be this, that it is sufficient for the purposes of any one who knows that Buddhism did and does exist in the cast, and believes that he finds it in the Wodenism of the west. Feeling certain that the one must have sprung from the other, the slight traces of its progress along the valley of the Borysthenes is all that he cares for; but unless the explorer is convinced that the religions are identical, this class of proof will scarcely prevail with him. If, however, it can be shown that there is something in the religion of the west which is identical with that of the cast, and so peculiar that the identity cannot be accidental, the conclusion is inevitable that the one must be borrowed from the other, and it only remains to show which was the earliest. Now the fact of there being a most remarkable similarity between the religious forms of Buddhist countries and those of Christianity as practised in the Middle Ages, is so striking that no one now seems inclined to dispute it, though the causes that gave rise to this coincidence are little understood, and the most various, and, it may be added, the most absurd, theories have been proposed to account for it. No traveller ever entered a Buddhist monastery in the cast, and saw a long line of shaven priests issue at matins and at vespers from their monastery, and range themselves on each side of the choir in the temple, where incense is burning on the altar in front of an image of the queen of heaven or the statues It is not necessary, even if it were possible of the three precious Buddhas, nor ever heard here, to enumerate all the similarities bethe low monotonous chant in which they tween Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. A drawl forth their liturgy in an unknown and few of the principal resemblances and easiest long-forgotten tongue, without being aware to be understood will suffice for our arguthat he has seen something very like it in the ment. One of the most prominent is found far west. If he follows these monks back to in the institution of an infallible head, who is their cells, sees them governed by a mitred not only the chief of the hierarchy, but the abbot, and arranged as deacons, priests, and vicegerent of God on earth. The idea of neophytes, learns that they are bound by conferring infallibility by election to an office vows of celibacy, are separated from the laity, did not exist, either in the religions of Greece live by alms, and spend their lives in a dull or Rome, nor in any of the religions of the routine of contemplation and formal worship, West; nor is it, so far as we can judge, sanche must fancy that he is transported back to tioned by any thing in the New or Old Testasome Burgundian convent in the middle ages, ment, but belongs essentially to the Buddhist or that the unchangeable east has retained cismes, l'encensoir soutenu par cinq chaînes, et what has passed away in the more progressive pouvant s'ouvrir et se fermer à volonté; les bénédictions données par les Lamas en étendant la main droite sur la tête des fidèles; le chapelet, le célibat ecclésiastique, les retraites spirituelles, le culte des bénite: voilà autant de rapports que les bouddhissaints, les jeûnes, les processions, les litanies, l'eau tes ont avec nous. Maintenant, peut-on dire que ces rapports sont d'origine chrétienne? Nous le ponsons ainsi; quoique nous n'ayons trouvé ni dans les traditions, ni dans les monuments du pays, aucune preuve positive de cet emprunt; il est permis néanmoins d'établir des conjectures qui portent tous les caractères de la plus haute probabilité. west. When those enterprising travellers Huc and Gabet were sojourning among the Lamaserais of Thibet, they were so struck with the identity of the forms of worship and of monastic habits that they devoted a consider*La crosse, la mitre, la dalmatique, la chape ou pluvial, que les grands Lamas portent en voyage, ou lorsqu'ils font quelque cérémonie hors du temple; l'office à deux choeurs, la psalmodie, les exor |