se across the Hindoo
Kush, and the reign of Asoka. Having nothing more solid, he uses
contradictory inferences and speculations. But the Asiatic occultists,
whose forefathers had her tablets in their keeping, and even some
learned native Pundits--believe they can. The claim, however, is
pronounced unworthy of attention. Of the late Smriti (traditional
history) which, for those who know how to interpret its allegories, is
full of unimpeachable historical records, an Ariadne's thread through
the tortuous labyrinth of the Past--has come to be unanimously regarded
as a tissue of exaggerations, monstrous fables, "clumsy forgeries of the
first centuries A.D." It is now openly declared as worthless not only
for exact chronological but even for general historical purposes. Thus
by dint of arbitrary condemnations, based on absurd interpretations (too
often the direct outcome of sectarian prejudice), the Orientalist has
raised himself to the eminence of a philological mantic. His learned
vagaries are fast superseding, even in the minds of many a Europeanized
Hindu, the important historical facts that lie concealed under the
exoteric phraseology of the Puranas and other Smritic literature. At
the outset, therefore, the Eastern Initiate declares the evidence of
those Orientalists who, abusing their unmerited authority, play ducks
and drakes with his most sacred relics, ruled out of court; and before
giving his facts he would suggest to the learned European Sanskritist
and archeologist that, in the matter of chronology, the difference in
the sum of their series of conjectural historical events, proves them to
be mistaken from A to Z. They know that one single wrong figure in an
arithmetical progression will always throw the whole calculation into
inextricable confusion: the multiplication yielding, generally, in such
a case, instead of the correct sum something entirely unexpected. A fair
proof of this may, perhaps, be found in something already alluded to--
namely, the adoption of the dates of certain Hindu eras as the basis of
their chronological assumptions. In assigning a date to text or
monument they have, of course, to be guided by one of the pre-Christian
Indian eras, whether inferentially, or otherwise. And yet--in one case,
at least--they complain repeatedly that they are utterly ignorant as to
the correct starting-point of the most important of these. The positive
date of Vikramaditya, for instance, whose reign