[Footnote 1:  See TRENCH on the Study of Words.]

[Footnote 2:  See DE ALWIS, Sidath-Sangara, p. xlviii.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 543.]

Whatever momentary success may have attended the preaching of Buddha, no traces of his pious labours long survived him in Ceylon.  The mass of its inhabitants were still aliens to his religion, when, on the day of his decease, B.C. 543, Wijayo[1], the discarded son of one of the petty sovereigns in the valley of the Ganges[2] effected a landing with a handful of followers in the vicinity of the modern Putlam.[3] Here he married the daughter of one of the native chiefs, and having speedily made himself master of the island by her influence, he established his capital at Tamana Neuera[4], and founded a dynasty, which, for nearly eight centuries, retained supreme authority in Ceylon.

[Footnote 1:  Sometimes spelled Wejaya.  TURNOUR has demonstrated that the alleged concurrence of the death of Buddha and the landing of Wijayo is a device of the sacred annalists, in order to give a pious interest to the latter event, which took place about sixty years later.—­Introd Mahawanso, p. liii.]

[Footnote 2:  To facilitate reference to the ancient divisions of India, a small map is subjoined, chiefly taken from Lassen’s Indische Alterthumskunde.

[Illustration:  MAP OF ANCIENT INDIA.]]

[Footnote 3:  BURNOUF conjectures that the point from which Wijayo set sail for Ceylon was the Godavery, where the name of Bandar-maha-lanka (the Port of the Great Lanka), still commemorates the event.—­Journ.  Asiat. vol. xviii. p. 134.  DE COUTO, recording the Singhalese tradition as collected by the Portuguese, he landed at Preature (Pereatorre), between Trincomalie and Jaffna-patam, and that the first city founded by him was Mantotte.—­Decade v. l. 1. c. 5.]

[Footnote 4:  See a note at the end of this chapter, on the landing of Wijayo in Ceylon, as described in the Mahawanso.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 543.]

The people whom he mastered with so much facility are described in the sacred books as Yakkhos or “demons,"[1] and Nagas[2], or “snakes;” designations which the Buddhist historians are supposed to have employed in order to mark their contempt for the uncivilised aborigines[3], in the same manner that the aborigines in the Dekkan were denominated goblins and demons by the Hindus[4], from the fact that, like the Yakkhos of Ceylon, they too were demon worshippers.  The Nagas, another section of the same superstition, worshipped the cobra de capello as an emblem of the destroying power.  These appear to have chiefly inhabited the northern and western coasts of Ceylon, and the Yakkhos the interior[5]; and, notwithstanding their alleged barbarism, both had organised some form of government, however rude.[6] The Yakkhos had a capital which they called Lankapura, and the Nagas a king, the possession of whose “throne