stly, in the Lalita Vistara, a
canonical book recognized by the Sanskritists, attributed by Max Muller
to the third Buddhist council (and translated into Tibetan), our Lord
Buddha is shown as studying, besides Devanagari, sixty-three other
alphabets specified in it as being used in various parts of India; and
secondly, though Megasthenes and Nearchus do say that in their time the
laws of Manu were not (popularly) reduced to writing (Strabo, xv. 66 and
73) yet Nearchus describes the Indian art of making paper from cotton.
He adds that the Indians wrote letters on cotton twisted together
(Strabo, xv. 53 and 67). This would be late in the Sutra period, no
doubt, according to Professor Miller's reasoning. Can the learned
gentleman cite any record within that comparatively recent period
showing the name of the inventor of that cotton-paper, and the date of
his discovery? Surely so important a fact as that, a novelty so
transcendently memorable, would not have passed without remark. One
would seem compelled, in the absence of any such chronicle, to accept
the alternative theory--known to us Aryan students as a fact--that
writing and writing materials were, as above remarked, known to the
Brahmans in an antiquity inconceivably remote--many centuries before the
epoch made illustrious by Panini.

Attention has been asked above to the interesting fact that the god
Orpheus, of "Thracia" (?) is called the "dark-skinned." Has it escaped
notice that he is "supposed to be the Vedic Ribhu or Abrhu, an epithet
both of Indra and the Sun."* And if he was "the inventor of letters,"
and is "placed anterior to both Homer and Hesiod," then what follows?
That Indra taught writing to the Thracian Pelasgians under the guise of
Orpheus,** but left his own spokesmen and vehicles, the Brahmans,
illiterate until "the dawn of Christianity?" Or, that the gentlemen of
the West are better at intuitional chronology than conspicuous for
impartial research?

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* "Chamber's Encyclopedia," vii. 127.

** According to Herodotus the Mysteries were actually brought from India
by Orpheus.
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Orpheus was--in Greece--the son of Apollo or Helios, the sun-god,
according to corrected mythology, and from him received the phorminx or
lyre of seven strings, i.e.--according to occult phraseology--the
sevenfold mystery of the Initiation. Now Indra is the ruler of the
bright firmament, the disperser of clouds, "the restorer of the sun to
the sky."