and exist even now in Orissa.  Taranatha says that the immediate result of the Moslim conquest was the dispersal of the surviving teachers and this may explain the sporadic occurrence of late Buddhist inscriptions in other parts of India.  He also tells us that a king named Cangalaraja restored the ruined Buddhist temples of Bengal about 1450.  Elsewhere[278] he gives a not discouraging picture of Buddhism in the Deccan, Gujarat and Rajputana after the Moslim conquest of Magadha but adds that the study of magic became more and more prevalent.  In the life of Caitanya it is stated that when travelling in southern India (about 1510 A.D.) he argued with Buddhists and confuted them, apparently somewhere in Arcot.[279] Manuscripts preserved in Nepal indicate that as late as the fifteenth or sixteenth century Bengali copyists wrote out Buddhist works, and there is evidence that Bodh-Gaya continued to be a place of pilgrimage.  In 1585 it was visited by a Nepalese named Abhaya Raja who on his return erected in Patan a monastery imitated from what he had seen in Bengal, and in 1777 the Tashi Lama sent an embassy.  But such instances prove little as to the religion of the surrounding Hindu population, for at the present day numerous Buddhist pilgrims, especially Burmese, frequent the shrine.  The control of the temple passed into the hands of the Brahmans and for the ordinary Bengali Buddha became a member of India’s numerous pantheon.  Pandit Haraprasad Sastri mentions a singular poem called Buddhacaritra, completed in 1711 and celebrating an incarnation of Buddha which apparently commenced in 1699 and was to end in the reappearance of the golden age.  But the being called Buddha is a form of Vishnu and the work is as strange a jumble of religion as it is of languages, being written in “a curious medley of bad Sanskrit, bad Hindi and bad Bihari.”

It is chiefly in Orissa that traces of Buddhism can still be found within the limits of India proper.  The Saraks of Baramba, Tigaria and the adjoining parts of Cuttack describe themselves as Buddhists.[280] Their name is the modern equivalent of Sravaka and they apparently represent an ancient Buddhist community which has become a sectarian caste.  They have little knowledge of their religion but meet once a year in the cave temples of Khandagiri, to worship a deity called Buddhadeva or Caturbhuja.  All their ceremonies commence with the formula Ahimsa parama dharma and they respect the temple of Puri, which is suspected of having a Buddhist origin.

Nagendranath Vasu has published some interesting details as to the survival of Buddhist ideas in Orissa.[281] He traces the origin of this hardy though degraded form of Mahayanism to Ramai Pandit,[282] a tantric Acarya of Magadha who wrote a work called Sunya Purana which became popular.  Orissa was one of the regions which offered the longest resistance to Islam, for it did not succumb until 1568.  A period of Sivaism in the tenth and eleventh centuries is indicated by