to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ”; and of the Ramayana, that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.—­Is believed by whom, pray?  It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the Mahabharata, died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, was the seventh.  Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;—­it is always likely that half the circumstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case.  And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old.  So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; —­say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama’s invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,—­somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.

Why before Buddha?—­Because they are still Kshattriya works; written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;—­and because Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman ascendency well established then,—­a revolt that by Asoka’s time had quite overthrown the Brahman power.  Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period?  To Asoka’s reign itself, for example?—­Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely.  Panini in his Grammar cites the Mahabharata as an authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C.  Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. En passant, we may quote this from the Encyclopaedia Britannica as to Panini’s Grammar: “For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled in the literature of any language.”—­Panini, then, cites the Mahabharata; Panini lived certainly before Asoka’s time; the greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such period;—­and from all this I think we may argue without much fear that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long before the reign of Asoka.  Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do.  There is some;—­there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha’s claim that he taught nothing new.  But a Poem written in Asoka’s reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the Mahabharata is, martial.