in nothing, and contradicts the history of both Buddhists and
Brahmans. The Brahmans began persecuting and banishing the Buddhists
precisely because they had begun a crusade against idol-worship. The
few Buddhist communities who remained in India and deserted the pure,
though, maybe--for a shallow observer--somewhat atheistic teachings
of Gautama Siddhartha, never joined Brahmanism, but coalesced with the
Jainas, and gradually became absorbed in them. Then why not suppose that
if, amongst hundreds of Brahmanical gods, we find one statue of Buddha,
it only shows that the masses of half-converts to Buddhism added this
new god to the ancient Brahmanical temple. This would be much more
sensible than to think that the Buddhists of the two centuries before
and after the beginning of the Christian era dared to fill their temples
with idols, in defiance of the spirit of the reformer Gau-tama. The
figures of Buddha are easily discerned in the swarm of heathen gods;
their position is always the same, and the palm of its right hand is
always turned upwards, blessing the worshipers with two fingers. We
examined almost every remarkable vihara of the so-called Buddhist
temples, and never met with one statue of Buddha which could not have
been added in a later epoch than the construction of the temple; it does
not matter whether it was a year or a thousand years later. Not being
perfectly self-confident in this matter, we always took the opinion of
Mr. Y----, who, as I said before, was an experienced architect; and he
invariably came to the conclusion that the Brahmanical idols formed a
harmonic and genuine part of the whole, pillars, decorations, and
the general style of the temple; whereas the statue of Buddha was an
additional and discordant patch. Out of thirty or forty caves of Ellora,
all filled with idols, there is only one, the one called the Temple
of the Tri-Lokas, which contains nothing but statues of Buddha, and
of Ananda, his favourite disciple. Of course, in this case it would be
perfectly right to think it is a Buddhist vihara.

Most probably, some of the Russian archeologists will protest against
the opinions I maintain, that is to say, the opinions of the Hindu
archeologists, and will treat me as an ignoramus, outraging science. In
self-defence, and in order to show how unstable a ground to base one's
opinions upon are the conclusions even of such a great authority as Mr.
Fergusson, I must mention the following instanc