whom no more blundering (geographically, chronologically, and historically) writer ever lived—­form along with the Greek history of Arrian the most valuable source of information respecting the military career of Alexander the Great—­then the only wonder is that the great conqueror was not made by his biographers to have—­Leonidas-like—­defended the Thermopylean passes in the Hindu Kush against the invasion of the first Vedic Brahmins “from the Oxus.”  Withal the Buddhist dates are either rejected or only accepted pro tempore.  Well may the Hindu resent the preference shown to the testimony of Greeks—­of whom some, at least, are better remembered in Indian history as the importers into Jambudvipa of every Greek and Roman vice known and unknown to their day—­against his own national records and history.  “Greek influence” was felt, indeed, in India, in this, and only in this, one particular.  Greek damsels mentioned as an article of great traffic for India—­Persian and Greek Yavanis—­were the fore-mothers of the modern nautch-girls, who had till then remained pure virgins of the inner temples.  Alliances with the Autiochuses and the Seleucus Nicators bore no better fruit than the rotten apple of Sodom.  Pataliputra, as prophesied by Gautama Buddha, found its fate in the waters of the Ganges, having been twice before nearly destroyed, again like Sodom, by the fire of heaven.

Reverting to the main subject, the “contradictions” between the Ceylonese and Chino-Tibetan chronologies actually prove nothing.  If the Chinese annalists of Saul in accepting the prophecy of our Lord that “a thousand years after He had reached Nirvana, His doctrines would reach the north” fell into the mistake of applying it to China, whereas Tibet was meant, the error was corrected after the eleventh century of the Tzina era in most of the temple chronologies.  Besides which, it may now refer to other events relating to Buddhism, of which Europe knows nothing, China or Tzina dates its present name only from the year 296 of the Buddhist era* (vulgar chronology having assumed it from the first Hoang of the Tzin dynasty):  therefore the Tathagata could not have indicated it by this name in his well-known prophecy.  If misunderstood even by several of the Buddhist commentators, it is yet preserved in its true sense by his own immediate Arhats.  The Glorified One meant the country that stretches far off from the Lake Mansorowara; far beyond that region of the Himavat, where dwelt from time immemorial the great “teachers of the Snowy Range.”  These were the great Sraman-acharyas who preceded Him, and were His teachers, their humble successors trying to this day to perpetuate their and His doctrines.  The prophecy came out true to the very day, and it is corroborated both by the mathematical and historical chronology of Tibet—­quite as accurate as that of the Chinese.  Arhat Kasyapa, of the dynasty of Moryas, founded by one of the Chandraguptas near Ptaliputra, left the convent of Panch-Kukkutarama, in consequence of a vision of our Lord, for missionary purpose in the year 683 of the Tzin era (436 Western era) and had reached the great Lake of Bod-Yul in the same year.  It is at that period that expired the millennium prophesied.