o reveal it;
and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point;
--say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the
thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier;
and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere
between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,--somewhere between 2500
and 5000 years ago.

Why before Buddha?--Because they are still Kshattriya works;
written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when
the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;--and because
Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman
ascendency well established then,--a revolt that by Asoka's time
had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not
ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's
reign itself, for example?--Well, it has been done; but probably
not wisely. Panini in his _Grammar_ cites the Mahabharata as an
authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is
disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C.
Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. _En passant,_
we may quote this from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ as to
Panini's _Grammar:_ "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic
facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the
vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled
in the literature of any language."--Panini, then, cites the
_Mahabharata;_ Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the
greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period
of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary
creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such
period;--and from all this I think we may argue without much fear
that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long
before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written
during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more
Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;--there are ideas that
would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth
of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem
written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been
structurally and innately, as the _Mahabharata_ is, martial.

There is this difference between the two epics,--I speak of the
nucleus-poems in each case;--the _Mahabharata_ seems much more a
natural growth, a national epic,--the work not of one man, but of
many poets celebrating through m