on the northern shores of the Sea of Milk.[1098] It was inhabited by beings white and shining like the moon who followed the rules of the Pancaratra, took no food and were continually engaged in silent prayer.  So great was the effulgence that at first the visitors were blinded.  It was only after another century of penance that they began to have hopes of beholding the deity.  Then there suddenly arose a great light.  The inhabitants of the island ran towards it with joined hands and, as if they were making an offering, cried, “Victory to thee, O thou of the lotus eyes, reverence to thee, producer of all things:  reverence to thee, Hrishikesa, great Purusha, the first-born.”  The three sages saw nothing but were conscious that a wind laden with perfumes blew past them.  They were convinced, however, that the deity had appeared to his worshippers.  A voice from heaven told them that this was so and that no one without faith (abhakta) could see Narayana.

A subsequent section of the same book tells us that Narada visited Svetadvipa and received from Narayana the Pancaratra, which is thus definitely associated with the locality.

Some writers have seen in this legend a poetical account of contact with Christianity, but wrongly, as I think.  We have here no mythicized version of a real journey but a voyage of the imagination.  The sea of milk, the white land and its white shining inhabitants are an attempt to express the pure radiance proper to the courts of God, much as the Book of Revelation tells of a sea of glass, elders in white raiment and a deity whose head and hair were white like wool and snow.  Nor need we suppose, as some have done, that the worship of the white sages is an attempt to describe the Mass.  The story does not say that whenever the White Islanders held a religious service the deity appeared, but that on a particular occasion when the deity appeared they ran to meet him and saluted him with a hymn.  The idea that prayer and meditation are the sacrifice to be offered by perfected saints is thoroughly Indian and ancient.  The account testifies to the non-Brahmanic character of this worship of Vishnu, which was patronized by the Brahmans though not originated by them, but there is nothing exotic in the hymn to Narayana and the epithet first-born (purvaja), in which some have detected a Christian flavour, is as old as the Rig Veda.  The reason for laying the scene of the story in the north (if indeed the points of the compass have any place in this mythical geography) is no doubt the early connection of the Pancaratra with Kashmir and north-western India.[1099] The facts that some Puranas people the regions near Svetadvipa with Iranian sun-worshippers[1100] and that some details of the Pancaratra (though not the system as a whole) show a resemblance to Zoroastrianism suggest interesting hypotheses as to origin of this form of Vishnuism, but more facts are needed to confirm them.  Chronology gives us little help, for though the Mahabharata was substantially complete in the fourth century, it cannot be denied that additions may have been made to it later and that the story of Svetadvipa may be one of them.  There were Nestorian Bishops at Merv and Herat in the fifth century, but there appears to be no evidence that Christianity reached Transoxiana before the fall of the Sassanids in the first half of the seventh century.