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* However, it will be shown elsewhere that General Cunningham’s latest
conclusions about the date of Buddha’s death are not all supported by
the inscriptions newly discovered.—­T.  Subba Row.
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As in the “historical,” so in this new “archeological difficulty,” namely, the apparent anachronism as to the date of our Lord’s birth, the point at issue is again concerned with the “old Greeks and Romans.”  Less ancient than our Atlantean friends, they seem more dangerous inasmuch as they have become the direct allies of philologists in our dispute over Buddhist annals.  We are notified by Prof.  Max Muller, by sympathy the most fair of Sanskritists as well as the most learned—­and with whom, for a wonder, most of his rivals are found siding in this particular question—­that “everything in Indian chronology depends on the date of Chandragupta,”—­the Greek Sandracottus.  “Either of these dates (in the Chinese and Ceylonese chronology) is impossible, because it does not agree with the chronology of Greece.” ("Hist. of the Sans.  Lit.,” p. 275.) It is then by the clear light of this new Alexandrian Pharos shed, upon a few synchronisms casually furnished by the Greek and Roman classical writers, that the “extraordinary” statements of the “Adepts” have now to be cautiously examined.  For Western Orientalists the historical existence of Buddhism begins with Asoka, though, even with the help of Greek spectacles, they are unable to see beyond Chandragupta.  Therefore, “before that time Buddhist chronology is traditional and full of absurdities.”  Furthermore, nothing is said in the Brahmanas of the Bauddhas—­ergo, there were none before “Sandracottus,” nor have the Buddhists or Brahmans any right to a history of their own, save the one evoluted by the Western mind.  As though the Muse of History had turned her back while events were gliding by, the “historian” confesses his inability to close the immense lacunae between the Indo-Aryan supposed immigration en masse across the Hindoo Kush, and the reign of Asoka.  Having nothing more solid, he uses contradictory inferences and speculations.  But the Asiatic occultists, whose forefathers had her tablets in their keeping, and even some learned native Pundits—­believe they can.  The claim, however, is pronounced unworthy of attention.  Of the late Smriti (traditional history) which, for those who know how to interpret its allegories, is full of unimpeachable historical records, an Ariadne’s thread through the tortuous labyrinth of the Past—­has come to be unanimously regarded as a tissue of exaggerations, monstrous fables, “clumsy forgeries of the first centuries A.D.”  It is now openly declared as worthless not only for exact chronological but even for general historical purposes.  Thus by dint of arbitrary condemnations, based on absurd interpretations (too often the direct outcome of sectarian prejudice), the Orientalist has raised himself to the eminence of a philological mantic.