e.

When the "recognized" authorities agree--among themselves at least--then
will it be time to show them collectively in the wrong. Until then,
since their respective conjectures can lay no claim to the character of
history, the "Adepts" have neither the leisure nor the disposition to
leave weightier business to combat empty speculations, in number as many
as there are pretended authorities. Let the blind lead the blind, if
they will not accept the light.*

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* However, it will be shown elsewhere that General Cunningham's latest
conclusions about the date of Buddha's death are not all supported by
the inscriptions newly discovered.--T. Subba Row.
---------

As in the "historical," so in this new "archeological difficulty,"
namely, the apparent anachronism as to the date of our Lord's birth, the
point at issue is again concerned with the "old Greeks and Romans."
Less ancient than our Atlantean friends, they seem more dangerous
inasmuch as they have become the direct allies of philologists in our
dispute over Buddhist annals. We are notified by Prof. Max Muller, by
sympathy the most fair of Sanskritists as well as the most learned--and
with whom, for a wonder, most of his rivals are found siding in this
particular question--that "everything in Indian chronology depends on
the date of Chandragupta,"--the Greek Sandracottus. "Either of these
dates (in the Chinese and Ceylonese chronology) is impossible, because
it does not agree with the chronology of Greece." ("Hist. of the Sans.
Lit.," p. 275.) It is then by the clear light of this new Alexandrian
Pharos shed, upon a few synchronisms casually furnished by the Greek and
Roman classical writers, that the "extraordinary" statements of the
"Adepts" have now to be cautiously examined. For Western Orientalists
the historical existence of Buddhism begins with Asoka, though, even
with the help of Greek spectacles, they are unable to see beyond
Chandragupta. Therefore, "before that time Buddhist chronology is
traditional and full of absurdities." Furthermore, nothing is said in
the Brahmanas of the Bauddhas--ergo, there were none before
"Sandracottus," nor have the Buddhists or Brahmans any right to a
history of their own, save the one evoluted by the Western mind. As
though the Muse of History had turned her back while events were gliding
by, the "historian" confesses his inability to close the immense lacunae
between the Indo-Aryan supposed immigration en mas