[Footnote 1:  HARDY’S Buddhism, ch. v. p. 98.]

The other Pali works[1] embrace subjects in connection with cosmography and the Buddhist theories of the universe; the distinctions of caste, topographical narratives, a few disquisitions on medicine, and books which, like the Milindaprasna, or “Questions of Milinda,"[2] without being canonical give an orthodox summary of the national religion.

[Footnote 1:  A lucid account of the principal Pali works in connection with religion will be found in the Appendix to HARDY’S Manual of Buddhism, p. 509, and in HARDY’S Eastern Manichian, pp. 27, 315.]

[Footnote 2:  The title of this popular work has given rise to a very curious conjecture of Turnour’s.  It professes to contain the dialectic controversies of Nagannoa, through whose instrumentality Buddhism was introduced into Kashmir, with Milinda, who was the Raja of an adjoining country, called Sagala, near the junction of the rivers Ravi and Chenab.  These dicussions must have taken place about the year B.C. 44.  Now Sagala is identical with Sangala, the people of which, according to Arrian, made a bold resistance to the advance of Alexander the Great beyond the Hydraotes; and it has been supposed by Sir Alexander Burnes to have occupied the site of Lahore.  Its sovereign, therefore, who embraced the doctrines of Buddha, was probably an Asiatic Greek, and TURNOUR suggests that the “Yons” or “Yonicas” who, according to the Milinda-prasna, formed his body-guard, were either Greeks or the descendants of Greeks from Ionia.—­Journ.  Asiat.  Soc.  Beng. v. 523; HARDY’S Manual of Buddhism, p. 512; REINAUD, Memoire sur l’Inde, p. 65.]

But the chefs d’oeuvre of Pali literature are their chronicles, the Dipawanso, Mahawanso, and others; of these the most important by far is the Mahawanso and its tikas or commentaries.  It stands at the head of the historical literature of the East; unrivalled by anything extant in Hindustan[1], the wildness of whose chronology it controls; and unsurpassed, if it be equalled, by the native annals of China or Kashmir.  So conscious were the Singhalese kings of the value of this national monument, that its continuation was an object of royal solicitude to successive dynasties[2] from the third to the thirteenth century; and even in the decay of the monarchy the compilation was performed in A.D. 1696, by an unknown hand, and, finally, brought down to A.D. 1758 by order of one of the last of the Kandyan kings.

[Footnote 1:  LASSEN, Indis.  Alt., vol. ii. p. 13-15.]

[Footnote 2:  COSMAS INDICO-PLEUSTES, EDRISI, ABOU-ZEYD, and almost all the travellers and geographers of the middle ages, have related, as a trait of the native rulers of Ceylon, their employment of annalists to record the history of the kingdom.—­EDRISI, Clim. i. sec. 8, p. 3.]

Of the chronicles thus carefully constructed, which exhibit in their marvellously preserved leaves the study and elaboration of upwards of twelve hundred years, PRINSEP, supreme as an authority, declared that they served to “clear away the chief of difficulties in Indian genealogies, which seem to have been intentionally falsified by the Brahmans and thrown back into remote antiquity, in order to confound their Buddhist rivals."[1]