we are able to call in aid the valuable testimony not only of a few indigenous chroniclers but also of Greek and Chinese and Arab writers and travellers, as well as the authoritative evidence supplied by epigraphy and numismatics; and though for many centuries still very infrequently, the precious remains of ancient monuments.  But the original background is never effaced, for the whole religious and social system, the whole philosophic outlook upon the world of which I have sought to outline the long and laborious evolution through prehistoric ages, remained fundamentally immune against change until the advent of the British to India subjected them to the solvent of Western civilisation.

One of the most striking peculiarities of Hinduism is that its origin cannot be associated with any single great teacher or prophet, however legendary.  Still less can it be identified with the personal inspiration of a Moses or a Christ, of a Confucius or a Mahomed.  Only when we reach the firmer ground of historic times does any commanding personality emerge to leave a definite and abiding impress upon successive ages.  The first and the greatest is Buddha, and we can still trace to-day his footsteps in the places where he actually stood and delivered his message to the world.  It was at Buddh Gaya that, after fleeing from the pomp and luxury of his father’s royal palace, he sat and meditated under the Bo-tree on the vanity and misery of human life, but it was at Rajagriha, “the King’s House,” that he first began to preach.  Rajagriha, about 40 miles S.S.E. of the modern Patna, was then the capital of one of the many small kingdoms that had grown up in the broad valley of the Ganges.  It was already an ancient city of some fame, for the Mahabharata mentions all the five hills which, as the first Chinese pilgrim, Fa-Hien, puts it, “encompass it with a girdle like the walls of a town.”  It was itself a walled city, and some of the walls, as we can still see them to-day, represent most probably the earliest structure raised in India by human hands that has survived down to our own times.  They were no jerry-builders then.  Strengthened at sundry points by great square bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement, but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks not less carefully laid and packed.  They merely supplemented and completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of hills, rising to 1200 feet, which shut off Rajagriha from the plain of Bihar.  On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom