the continent, but recovered some years later by King Parakrama III., who went in person to treat for it.  In 1560 the Portuguese got possession of it and took it to Goa.  The King of Pegu, who then reigned, probably the most powerful and wealthy monarch who has ever ruled in Further India, made unlimited offers in exchange for the tooth; but the archbishop prevented the viceroy from yielding to these temptations, and it was solemnly pounded to atoms by the prelate, then cast into a charcoal fire, and finally its ashes thrown into the river of Goa.

The King of Pegu was, however, informed by a crafty minister of the King of Ceylon that only a sham tooth had been destroyed by the Portuguese, and that the real relique was still safe.  This he obtained by extraordinary presents, and the account of its reception at Pegu, as quoted by Tennent from De Couto, is a curious parallel to Marco’s narrative of the Great Kaan’s reception of the Ceylon reliques at Cambaluc.  The extraordinary object still so solemnly preserved at Kandy is another forgery, set up about the same time.  So the immediate result of the viceroy’s virtue was that two reliques were worshipped instead of one!

The possession of the tooth has always been a great object of desire to Buddhist sovereigns.  In the 11th century King Anarauhta, of Burmah, sent a mission to Ceylon to endeavour to procure it, but he could obtain only a “miraculous emanation” of the relique.  A tower to contain the sacred tooth was (1855), however, one of the buildings in the palace court of Amarapura.  A few years ago the King of Burma repeated the mission of his remote predecessor, but obtained only a model, and this has been deposited within the walls of the palace at Mandale, the new capital. (Turnour in J.A.S.B. VI. 856 seqq.; Koeppen, I. 521; Tennent, I. 388, II. 198 seqq.; MS. Note by Sir A. Phayre; Mission to Ava, 136.)

Of the four eye-teeth of Sakya, one, it is related, passed to the heaven of Indra; the second to the capital of Gandhara; the third to Kalinga; the fourth to the snake-gods.  The Gandhara tooth was perhaps, like the alms-bowl, carried off by a Sassanid invasion, and may be identical with that tooth of Fo, which the Chinese annals state to have been brought to China in A.D. 530 by a Persian embassy.  A tooth of Buddha is now shown in a monastery at Fu-chau; but whether this be either the Sassanian present, or that got from Ceylon by Kublai, is unknown.  Other teeth of Buddha were shown in Hiuen Tsang’s time at Balkh, at Nagarahara (or Jalalabad), in Kashmir, and at Kanauj. (Koeppen, u.s.; Fortune, II. 108; H.  Tsang, II. 31, 80, 263.)

[Illustration:  Teeth of Budda.

1.  At Kandy, after Tennent. 2.  At Fu-Chau from Fortune.]

NOTE 7.—­Fa-hian writes of the alms-pot at Peshawar, that poor people could fill it with a few flowers, whilst a rich man should not be able to do so with 100, nay, with 1000 or 10,000 bushels of rice; a parable doubtless originally carrying a lesson, like Our Lord’s remark on the widow’s mite, but which hardened eventually into some foolish story like that in the text.