as a peculiar growth,
native to the soil in all their essential characteristics.[22]

But to the other side of India's contact with the West we have as yet
barely alluded. India has given as she has received. What influence
has she had upon Western cults and beliefs? The worship that
substituted idols for ideal forms we have traced back to the end of
the Vedic period. It is not, however, a mark of early Brahmanism, nor
is it a pronounced feature before the age of Buddhism. But in Buddha's
time, or soon after, flourished the worship of images, and with it the
respect for relics. The latter feature of the new religion made
necessary shrines to keep the holy objects, sacred museums, which soon
became the formal _st[=u]pas,_ above-ground
and under-ground, and these made the first temples of India.[23] Fully
developed, they became the great religious buildings affected by
Buddhism, with their idol service, prostrations, repetitions of
prayers, dim religious light (lamp-service), offerings of flowers,
fruits, etc. From this source may have been derived many of the
details in the Roman Catholic worship, which appears to have taken
from Buddhism the rosary, originally a mark of the Civaite.[24] By
what is, to say the least, an extraordinary coincidence, each of these
churches is conspicuous for its use of holy water, choirs, sacred
pictures, tonsure, vestments, the bell in religious service, the
orders of nuns, monks, and the vows of the monastic system.[25] The
most curious loan made by the Roman and Greek churches is, however,
the quasi-worship of Gotama Buddha himself (in so far as a Romanist
worships his saints), for, under cover of the Barlaam and Josaphat
story, Buddha has found a niche as a saint in the row of canonized
Catholic worthies, and has his saint-day in the calendar of the Greek
and Roman churches.[26] But it is not his mother who is the Virgin of
Lamaism, which has made of Buddha the Supreme God.

Besides external phases of the religious cult, India has given
to the West a certain class of literary works and certain
philosophical ideas. The former consists, of course, in the
fable-literature, which spread from India to Eastern Europe (Babrius)
and has preserved in many tales of to-day nothing more than Buddhistic
Birth-stories or other Indic tales (the Pa[.n]catantra) and
legends.[27] Of these we can make only passing mention here, to turn
at once to the more important question of philosophical and religiou