One of the most curious and interesting illustrations of this is found in the existence of the celebrated iron pillar of Dhava, in the courtyard of the mosque at the Kutub, near Delhi. This consists of a solid shaft of wrought iron, standing 22 feet 6 inches out of the ground and is 5 feet 6 inches in circumference at about 5 feet from its base. When I visited it, the report was that Colonel Baird Smith had dug down and found its base 16 feet below the surface. Lieutenant Cole[568] now brings home a report that it is 26 feet deep in the ground. Taking, however, the more moderate dimension, a single forging nearly 40 feet long and 5 feet circumference was not made, and could not have been made, in any country of Europe before the introduction of steam-machinery, nor, indeed, before the invention of the Nasmyth hammer.

There is an inscription on the pillar which, unfortunately, bears no date; but from the form of the characters, the nature of the event it describes,[569] coupled with the architecture of the capital of the pillar, it leaves no doubt that it was erected in the third or fourth century of our era.

It must be left to those practically skilled in the working of metals to explain how any human being could work in close proximity to such a mass heated to a welding heat, or how it was possible without steam-machinery to manipulate so enormous a bar of iron. The question that interests us here is, how long must the Hindus have been familiar with the use of iron and the mode of working it before they could conceive the idea of such a monument and carry it into execution? It could hardly have been centuries, it must have been nearer thousands of years, and yet they erect rude-stone monuments in India at the present day![570]

One other instance, at the lower end of the scale, may be quoted as also bearing directly on this subject. Of all the people of India the Khassias are probably the most expert in extracting iron from its ores and manufacturing it when made; and their mode of doing this is so original, and, though rude, so effective, that there can be no doubt that it is the result of long experience among themselves.[571] They have, in fact, practised the art from time immemorial; yet though possessing iron tools for, it may be, thousands of years, they at the present day adhere to the practice of using rude unhewn-stone monuments, like the Jews, in preference to those "which any iron tool had touched at any time."[572] Nor can it be argued that they do this because they do not know better. As just mentioned, at any time, certainly within the last thousand years, they might have seen the Buddhist or Hindu stonemasons of Kamarupa erecting the most elaborately carved stone temples, and can now see the domes of the mosques which the Mahommedans erected in the cities of Sylhet three or four centuries ago.

Although it thus happens that all these à priori reasonings and mistaken analogies, drawn from our own progressive state, which are so familiar to European antiquaries, break down at once when applied to India, still there are a few indications from which approximate dates may be obtained, and many more could, no doubt, be found if looked for. One of these is, that the greater number of the dolmens of the Nilgiri hills are sculptured; but only one of the drawings on them, so far as I know, has been published,[573] and though it is ungracious to say so, I fear that it is not a very faithful representation. It is, however, sufficiently so to enable us to recognise at once a similarity to a class of monuments very common in the plains. These are called Viracull, if destined to commemorate men or heroes, and Masteecull if erected in honour of women who sacrifice themselves on their husband's funereal pile. Colonel Mackenzie collected drawings of more than one hundred of these, which are now in the India Office, and photographs of many others have been made but not published.

The similarity in the costume and style of art displayed in the preceding woodcut with that of the memorial stones leaves little or no doubt of their being approximately of the same age. As most of the memorial stones are inscribed and their dates at least approximately known, if the identity can be established the date of the dolmens can also be determined. Till, however, some one will take the trouble of photographing the cairns, so as to enable us to compare them with the standing stones, no certainty can be obtained; but as none of the sculptured stones go back a thousand years, and those most like the woodcut cannot claim five centuries of antiquity, these sculptured cairns in the Nilgiris cannot be so very old as is sometimes assumed.

The second instance is curious and instructive. In the centre of the courtyard of a now ruined Sivite temple at Iwullee, in Dharwar, in the very centre of the dolmen country, now stands a regular tripod dolmen of the usual shape (woodcut No. 218). The question is, how got it there? No one who knows anything of India will, I presume, argue that the Brahminical followers of Siva would erect the sanctuary of their god in front of the tomb of one of the despised aboriginal tribes, if still reverenced by them, or would have neglected to utilize it if neglected. One of two things therefore only seems possible. Either a Korumber, or native chief of some denomination, stipulated that on his conversion to the faith of the Brahmins, if he erected a temple in honour of his newly-adopted god, he should be allowed to be buried, "more majorum," in the courtyard. This is possible, but hardly probable. It seems more likely that, after the temple was desecrated and neglected, some native thought the spot fit and appropriate for his last resting-place, and was buried there accordingly. From its architecture, there is no doubt that the age of the temple may be carried back as far as the thirteenth century, but it more probably belongs to the fourteenth. According to the first hypothesis, the age of the dolmen would be that of the temple; according to the second, one, two, or three centuries more modern.

A third indirect piece of evidence is derived from Colonel Meadows Taylor's paper in the 'Irish Transactions.' He represents a tolerably extensive group of these monuments as placed immediately outside the city gate at Shahpoor, and from what he says of them they are evidently of the same age as the other examples he quotes. From their position and arrangement, it does not seem doubtful that they are the usual extramural cemetery so generally attached to Indian cities, and they are, in fact, subsequent in date to the erection of the gate in front of which they are placed. The gateway, I learn from a letter from Colonel Meadows Taylor, undoubtedly belongs to the Mahommedan period. It is a regular arch, of the usual pointed form, and consequently subsequent to 1347 A.D., when the Bahmany dynasty first established themselves in this quarter. This being so, the masons who built the gate would certainly have utilized the tombs of the pagans had they existed previously. They must, therefore, be subsequent to the gate; and as it cannot be five centuries old, we have a limit to their age beyond which we cannot go.

Our next example is still more curious and interesting. In the cold weather of 1867-8, Mr. Mulheran, when attached to the Trigonometrical Survey of India, came accidentally across a great group of "cromlechs," situated on the banks of the Godavery, near Nirmul, about halfway between Hyderabad and Nagpore, in Central India. Some of these he photographed, and sent an account of them to the Asiatic Society of Bengal,[574] from which the following particulars are gleaned. "The majority of the cromlechs consist of a number of upright stones, sunk in the ground in the form of a square, and covered with one or two large slabs of sandstone. In some two bodies appear to have been interred, and in others only one. The crosses are found in the neighbourhood of Malúr and Katapur, two villages on the Nizam's side of the river. The crosses at Katapur (woodcut No. 220) are, with one exception, uninjured. All are situated to the right of the cromlechs near which they have been erected. Judging from the one lying exposed at Malúr, they are all above 10 feet in length, although only 6 to 7 feet appear above ground. They all consist of one stone, and are all of the latest form. No information of any kind could be obtained regarding the people by whom the crosses or cromlechs were erected. There can be no doubt, however, that the crosses are memorials of the faith of Christians buried in their vicinity." Close by is a cave, before which a cross was erected, which Mr. Mulheran assumes was thrown down by the Brahmins when they took possession of it; and he adds, "I enclose a note from Captain Glasfurd, who sent a packet of implements, rings, and utensils, found in two of the cromlechs he opened, to the Asiatic Society." No such packet, however, ever arrived, and we are, therefore, left to his photographs and descriptions from which to draw our conclusions.

In the first place, I think it can hardly be doubted that the crosses are Christian emblems; and secondly, that the cromlechs and crosses are of the same date. Their juxtaposition and whole appearance render escape from this conclusion apparently inevitable. The question, therefore, is, when could any community of native Christians have existed in India who would bury in dolmens and use the cross as their emblems? Their distance from the coast and the form of the cross seem at once to cut them off from all connexion with St. Thomas's mission or that of the early apostles, even assuming that the records of these are authentic. My impression is that this form of cross was not introduced as an out-of-doors self-standing sign till, say, the sixth or seventh century.[575] On the other hand, it is extremely improbable that any such community could have existed after the Mahommedan invasion at the end of the thirteenth century. Between these limits we know that the Nestorians had establishments as far east as China, and extending in a continuous chain westward as far at least as the Caspian;[576] and there seems to be no difficulty in assuming that, between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries a form of Taiping Christianity may have been introduced from the north and established itself extensively in the western and central parts of India, but, owing allegiance only to the potentate we know of as Prester John, may have entirely escaped the knowledge of the Western world. Besides helping to fix the date of the dolmens in India, this discovery opens out a wide field for those who would investigate the early history of the Christian Church in India. There can be little doubt that this group is not solitary. Many more will be found, when people open their eyes and look for them. Meanwhile it is a curious illustration of the policy of Pope Gregory in his advice to Abbot Mellitus, alluded to in the Introduction (page 21). It is the same thing as the dolmen at Kerland (woodcut No. 131), and that at Arrichinaga (woodcut No. 161), repeated in the centre of India, though probably at a somewhat later date.

There is still another point of view from which these Indian monuments may be regarded, so as to throw considerable light on the history of their analogues in Europe, and perhaps to modify to some extent our preconceived views regarding their history. In Ceylon there is a class of dagoba, which, in some respects, is peculiar to the island. Two of these will suffice for our present purposes, both in the city of Anuradhapura, which was the capital of the country from about B.C. 400 till the eleventh century. The first of these, the Thupa Ramayana, was erected B.C. 161; the second, the Lanka Ramayana, A.D. 231.[577] For the sake of the argument it would be best to select the first for illustration; but it was, unfortunately, so completely restored about forty years ago that, as in the case of our unfortunate cathedrals, it requires considerable knowledge of the style to discriminate between what is old and what new. Notwithstanding the four centuries that elapsed between their dates, however, they are so like one another in all essentials that it is of little consequence which we select. Neither is large, and both consist of nearly hemispherical domes, surmounted by a square box-like appendage called a Tee, and both are surrounded by three rows of tall stone pillars, as shown in the accompanying woodcut.

That the domical part of the dagoba is the lineal and direct descendant of the sepulchral tumuli or cairns, which are found everywhere in Northern Asia and probably existed in India in primæval times, is hardly open to doubt. This the Buddhists early refined into a relic shrine, probably immediately after the death of the founder of the religion, B.C. 543; and we know from numerous excavations[578] that the relic was placed in a cist in the centre of the mound, nearly on the level of the soil, exactly where, and in the same manner as, the body-containing kistvaens of our sepulchral tumuli. To this, however, the Buddhists added a square box on the top, which either was invented by them or copied from some earlier form; but no dagoba was complete without it, and all the rock-cut examples and sculptured representations of topes, with many structural ones, still possess it. That it represented a wooden relic-casket may be assumed as certain, but whether it was ever used as such is not quite clear. The relics were sometimes accessible, and shown to the public on festal occasions,[579] and unless they were contained in some external case like this it is not easy to see how they could be got at. A third indispensable part of a perfect dagoba was an enclosing rail. All the early dagobas and all the sculptured representations possess this adjunct. In the rock-cut examples and in the later structural ones the rail becomes attached to the building as a mere ornament, but is never omitted.

If we compare such a sepulchral mound as this at Pullicondah, near Madras,[580] or that represented in section, woodcut No. 211, with the Lanka or Thupa Ramayana dagobas, we cannot fail to be struck with their similarity. Both possess the mound, the rail, and the tee; and in this last instance it is a simulated tomb, such as many in Europe are suspected of having been. That a people might both bury in barrows and erect domical cairns to contain relics would not necessarily involve a proof of the one form being copied from the other; but that both should be surmounted by a simulated sarcophagus or shrine, and both surrounded by one, two, or three rows of useless stones, points to a direct imitation of the one from the other which can hardly be accidental.

Assuming for the nonce that the one is copied from the other, the ordinary mode of reasoning with which we are familiar in Europe would be then something like this. If the Thupa Ramayana were erected B.C. 161, this cairn at Pullicondah must probably be as old as B.C. 1000, for it would take many centuries before so rude a style of architecture could be reformed into so polished an example as the Thupa Ramayana, which, as before stated, we may assume as identical with the Lanka Ramayana (woodcut No.223).

The conclusions I have arrived at are diametrically opposed to this view. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the architectural material of India was wood, down to B.C. 250 or 300. It then became timidly lithic, but retained all its wooden forms and simulated carpentry fastenings down, at all events, to the Christian era. The rail at Sanchi, which was erected in the course of the two centuries preceding our era, is still essentially wooden in all its parts, so much so that it is difficult to see how it could be constructed in stone, [581] and these pillars round the Ceylonese dagobas are copies of wooden posts, and not such forms as in any number of centuries would have grown out of rude-stone forms. Had they been derived from the latter original they would have been thick, strong and massive, and never have assumed forms so curiously attenuated as we find here. It is difficult to see what these stone pillars or posts were originally intended for. It may have been either that garlands might be hung upon them on festal occasions, as we see represented in the sculptures, or that pictures might be suspended from them, as Fa Hian, who visited this place in the year 400, tells us was done all the way from Anuradhapura to Mehentele on the occasion of a great procession in honour of the Tooth relic which was there exposed to public view. [582]

Be all this as it may, the question which this comparison raises is simply this: If we admit the similarity between the Pullicondah cairn and the Lanka Ramayana Tope, and that the one grew out of the other, it seems to me perfectly evident that the adjunct of the Tope grew out of a wooden and not out of a rude-stone original. If this is so, and if the Tope did not grow out of the cairn, the conclusion seems to me inevitable that the cairn is only a rude copy of a polished original.

The same conclusion hinted at above was forced on me by the examination of the rude-stone circles which crowd round the elaborate tope at Amravati. Generally, I know of no hypothesis by which the phenomenon of polished-stone buildings, with known dates, existing in India for the last 2000 years side by side with rude-stone monuments which are being erected at this day, can be accounted for, unless we give up our favourite system of sequence and are content to take facts as we find them.

It is quite certain there were no hewn-stone buildings in India before the year 250 B.C., and my impression is that none of the rude-stone monuments now existing there were erected till five, it may be ten centuries from that time, and when they once began that there is no break in the sequence to the present day.

I know nothing that can be fairly urged against this reasoning, except our own ignorance, and that of the natives themselves, with regard to the origin and date of these monuments. Neither is much to be wondered at, as it is only so lately that Europeans have turned their attention to the subject, and the natives know so little about their own monuments that it would be strange indeed if they knew anything at all about those of the hated and despised Dasyus. Any one who has travelled in India knows what sort of information he gets even from the best and most intelligent Brahmins with regard to the dates of the temples they and their forefathers have administered in ever since their erection. One thousand or two or three thousand years is a moderate age for temples which we know were certainly erected within the last two or three centuries. Or ask any native about the date of the rock-cut temples at Ellora or Elephanta, he at once glibly answers, they were erected by the Pandus, 3101 B.C.; and if he breaks loose from that landmark, ten or twenty thousand years is the least you can expect. Yet we know now, from inscriptions and other data, that no rock-cut temple can be carried further back than the second century B.C.

In this infantile state of the native mind it costs them nothing to hide their ignorance in the mists of thousands of years when questioned about these rude stones, but their testimony is absolutely worthless, and it is only by processes like those just described that we can hope to arrive at the truth. Among races so unchangeable as some of those existing in India they may carry us back to a time prior to the Christian era with some classes of monuments; but, unless I am very much mistaken, it will be found that all those mentioned in the preceding pages are of comparatively recent date and are members of an unbroken series which continues to the present day.

Comparison of Eastern with Western Dolmens.

We are now in a position to approach one of the most interesting, but at the same time most difficult, branches of the inquiry we are engaged upon, which is the connexion, if any, that exists between these Indian rude-stone monuments and those we find in Europe. The difficulties, however, do not appear to be so much inherent in the essence of the subject as in its novelty. It has never fairly been approached by any modern writer, and would consequently require an amount of illustration incompatible with such a work as this to make it clear, or, on the other hand, it is necessary to assume an amount of information on the part of the public which it is feared hardly anywhere exists.

The architectural evidence, as detailed in the preceding pages, seems of a nature difficult to resist. It is easy and generally correct to assume that men in certain stages of civilization will do the same thing or things, in a manner so similar that it is difficult to discriminate between them. There would thus be no improbability in assuming that all men would raise a mound of earth over the dead bodies of their buried ancestors, or that they would protect their bodies from being crushed by the superincumbent weight, by a cist or coffin more or less artificially formed of stone or wood. It may even further be granted that when having got so far they would naturally improve and enlarge this cist into a dolmen or chamber and provide it with an external entrance. All these things being found together would by no means prove a necessary connexion between two races using them, further than that the races using or inventing these forms must have belonged to the same family of tomb-building ancestral-worshipping people. But when we find two distinct people putting this cist outside, on the tumulus in the open air, and piercing one of the slabs in it with a circular hole 6 or 8 inches in diameter, we come to a coincidence that can hardly be considered accidental. As there was no writing and no post, either some tribe must have migrated from the east to the west and introduced the form, or vice versâ, some European must have taught the Indians the advantages of this hole, whatever they were; and having been once taught to adopt, they afterwards continued to employ it.

A still more striking instance is that already pointed out, of the combination of a central cistvaen containing a body inside a mound with a simulated cist on the top outside, and several circles of stones on or around the mound externally. All this is so complicated and shows so much design that it cannot possibly be the result of accident, if it is found in two distinct lands. The examples quoted above are perhaps sufficient to establish this similarity, but they are only a fraction of those which might be adduced if the subject were carefully followed out. It evidently was much more common in the East than we have hitherto had reason to suspect—for this reason alone, if for no other—that it continued to last so long. In this example from Burmah (woodcut No. 226) we have first an external mound encircling the tope, then the circles of rude stones replaced by a complicated rail, and above all, in the centre, a simulated dagoba replacing the simulated cist. These are great changes, it must be confessed, but hardly so great as we might expect when we consider that the Senbya dagoba was only erected fifty-five years ago, and that the interval between it and the rude-stone monuments is consequently considerable. Another striking instance of the modern form this primæval sepulchre assumes is found in the celebrated tomb of Akbar the Great at Agra. There the king is buried in a vault below the level of the ground, but his simulated tomb is on the top of the pyramid, exposed to the air outside; and on each stage, externally, little pavilions replace the stones which his progenitors had previously employed for a like purpose.

The one passage that seems to bear directly on the subject, strange to say, comes this time from India itself. Among the edicts that Asoka engraved on the rocks in various parts of India, the last or thirteenth is to the following effect, so far as it can be made out. It is unfortunately the nearest to the ground, and consequently in all the published copies appears more or less injured. Two more copies of the edicts are known to exist,—one in the Dehra Doon, the other in Orissa: when they are copied and published, perhaps a more perfect translation may be possible. Meanwhile, Mr. Prinsep's translation runs thus:—"There is not in either class of the heretics of men a procedure marked by such grace ... nor so glorious nor friendly, nor even so extremely liberal, as Devanampiyo's (Asoka's) injunction for the non-injury and content of living creatures.... And the Greek king besides by whom the kings of Egypt, Ptolemaios, Antigonus and Magas.... Both here and in foreign countries wherever they go, the religious ordinances of Devanampiyo effect conversion. Conquest is of every description, but the conquest that bringeth joy, springing from pleasant emotion, becometh joy itself. The victory of virtue is happiness. Such victory is desired in things of this world and things of the next world."[583] In other copies of this edict the names of Antiochus and Alexander are found, making five well known names, and curiously enough all five are mentioned by Justin within a few lines of one another in the last chapter of his twenty-sixth book and the first chapter of his twenty-seventh book. There is thus no doubt who the kings were, nor of more than a year as to the date of this edict, which must have been within a year or so of 257 B.C.

The great interest, however, for our present purpose is that an Indian emperor, in the middle of the third century before Christ, should be in a condition to form an alliance with Magas of Cyrene so near the African dolmen-field. As before mentioned (ante, p. 410), we are still very deficient in our knowledge of the Megalithic remains of this country; but we do know that they exist, and that those which have been illustrated are of a singularly Indian type. It is also nearly certain that many of the rock-cut chambers about his capital are monasteries or temples, not tombs, as has always been too hastily assumed. Whether, on further investigation, these will prove to be so essentially Indian as they at present appear to be, remains to be seen, but meanwhile the possibility of an alliance of this sort two or three centuries before Christ, takes away much of the improbability that would otherwise exist in assuming that Indian influence might have extended further westward at some subsequent period, and that the African dolmens might be proved to be allied to, and possibly contemporary with, those of India.

Buddhism in the West.

The great basis, however, on which any proof of the existence of a connexion between the East and West must eventually rest, will probably be found in the amount of pure Buddhism which crept into Christianity in the early age of the Church. The subject has not yet been fairly grappled with by any one capable of doing it justice. It has been frequently alluded to by travellers, who have been struck with resemblances which could hardly be accidental, and used sometimes by scoffers in order to depreciate Christianity; but no serious historian of the Latin Church has had sufficient knowledge of Buddhism or of its forms to be able to appreciate correctly either the extent or the cause of its introduction; and till some one does this, it will be treated by the general reader as an idle speculation. Yet it probably is not too much to assert, that at least nine-tenths of the institutions and forms which were engrafted on pure evangelical Christianity in the middle ages, are certainly derived from Buddhist sources.

Of these, one of the most striking is the introduction of monastic institutions, which exercised so important an influence on the forms of Christianity during the whole period of the middle ages. It is in vain to look for their origin in anything that existed in Europe before the Christian era. Nothing can be more forced than the analogies it has been attempted to establish between the Vestal virgins and the nuns of the middle ages, and no trace of conventual life can be found among the semi-secular priesthood of classical times. According to the usually received opinion, Antony (A.D. 305[584]) was the first monk, and from him and about his time a prolific progeny are traced to the Thebais, which is usually assumed to be the cradle of the institution. Monastic life was, however, absolutely antithetical to the religious institutions of the ancient Egyptians, amongst whom the king was high priest and god, and where civil could hardly be distinguished from religious rank. It was equally opposed to the feelings of the Arabic or at least Semitic races, that superseded the Coptic in that country, and could consequently hardly have existed at all, unless introduced from some foreign source and maintained by some extraneous influence. The Essenes are the only sect to whom in the ancient world in the West anything like the peculiar institutions of monasticism can be traced; but unfortunately we do not know how or when they adopted them. Josephus represents them as only one of the three principal sects into which the Jews in his time were divided; but the silence not only of the Bible but of the Rabbis weakens the force of his statement, while his unfortunate omission of the name of their Lawgiver[585] leaves us in the dark on the most essential point. That it was not Moses, whose name is usually interpolated, is quite certain. He never inculcated any such doctrines, and one hardly dares to suggest the Indian name, which would clear up the whole mystery at once. Be this as it may, the sect only arose apparently in the time of the Maccabees, and practically disappeared with the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus; all which would accord perfectly with the hypothesis of their Indian origin, but would hardly suffice to support the idea that they were the sect from whom, in the fourth century, the Christian Church adopted the principles and practices of Asceticism.

When from these sparse indications we turn to the East, we are met by the difficulty that none of the books we possess were reduced to writing in their present form till the time of Buddhaghosa, A.D. 412,[586] or even later; and any one who knows what wild imaginings can in the fertile East creep into works during the remodellings of a thousand years, will easily understand with what caution they must be used. Fortunately in this instance the monuments and inscriptions come to our assistance, and we are enabled to form a fair idea of the progress of monasticism in India from what they tell us.

Before the first monuments, the books tell us of three great convocations: the first held immediately on the death of the founder of the religion, B.C. 543, at Rajagriha; the second 100 years afterwards, at Vaisali; and the third by Asoka, 250 B.C., at Pataliputta, or Patna. These we are told were attended by thousand and tens of thousands of monks.[587] But Asoka's edicts give no countenance to any such extension of the system in his day. Shortly after this, however, the earlier caves show cells appropriated to hermits, or even for the reunion of a limited number of monks under one roof. These Viharas or monasteries are small at first, and insignificant as compared with the Chaityas or church caves to which they are attached, as at Karlee, Baja, Bedsa and elsewhere; but shortly afterwards, at Nassick and Jooneer, in the first or second centuries they become more important; and when we reach such a series as that at Ajunta or Baug, for instance, we find the Vihara becoming all important, the Chaitya sinking into comparative insignificance. This great change took place apparently about the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century of our era, and continued till Buddhism actually perished, smothered under the weight of its enormously developed hierarchy some three centuries later.

The sculptures tell the same story. There are no representations of priests in the form we afterwards find them in at Sanchi, in the first century of our era. Ascetics there are, dwelling in woods and lonely places, but not congregated in monasteries, nor jointly performing ceremonies. But at Amravati, three centuries later, we have shaven priests in their distinctive robes, and every symptom of a well developed system.

If this is so, it could hardly have been before the era of the Roman Empire that these peculiar institutions penetrated to the West; nor could they have done so during its supremacy without attracting attention. But in the great "débacle" which followed the change of the seat of government and the destruction of the old faith, it is easy to see how these forms may have crept in, together with the new Eastern faith, which an illiterate people were adopting, without much knowing whence it came, and without being able to discriminate what was Christian and what Buddhist in the forms or doctrines that were being presented to them.

Among the peculiarities then introduced, one of the most remarkable was the segregation of the clergy from the laity, and the devotion of the former wholly to the performance of religious duties. Still more so was their seclusion in monasteries, living a life of the most self-denying asceticism, subsisting almost wholly on alms, and bound by vows of poverty, chastity and temperance, to a negation of all the ordinary enjoyments of life. That the two systems are identical no one has doubted, and no one, indeed, can enter now a Buddhist monastery in the East and watch the shaven priests in the yellow robes at matins, or at vespers, issue from their cells and range themselves on either side of a choir, on whose altar stands an image of the Queen of Heaven, or of the three precious Buddhas, and listen to their litanies, chanted in what to them is a dead or foreign tongue, without feeling that he is looking in the East on what is externally the same as he had long been familiar with in the West.[588] If he follows these monks back to their cells and finds them governed by a mitred abbot, and subordinated as deacons, priests, and neophytes, learns that they are bound by vows of celibacy, live by alms, and spend their lives in a dull routine of contemplation and formal worship, he might almost fancy he was transported back into some Burgundian convent in the middle ages, unless he is prepared, like Huc and Gabet, to believe that it is a phantasm conjured up by the author of all evil for the confusion of mankind. We know from the form and arrangement of the great Chaitya caves, that these forms prevailed as early at least as the first century B.C., and, as they are practised without change in the East to the present day, it seems clear that it is thence that they were introduced into Europe.

Canonization is another remarkable institution common to the Buddhist and Christian Churches, and to them only. It has frequently been attempted to draw a parallel between the demigods of Greece and Rome and the institution of Saints in the mediæval Church; but this argument has always failed, because in fact no two institutions could in their origin be more essentially different. The minor gods of the heathen pantheon, though sometimes remarkable for their prowess or virtues, were all more or less connected by ties of blood or marriage with the great Olympic family, and owed their rank rather to their descent than to their merits. It is true that in later times the deification of Roman emperors and others of that class, which the abject flattery of a corrupt age had introduced, was a nearer approach to the practice of Buddhism, which was then flourishing in the East, than anything before known in the pagan world. But canonization in its purity, as practised both in the East and West, is not to be attained through either birth or office, but by the practice of ascetic virtues on the part of the clergy, and by piety coupled with benefactions to the Church by those outside its pale. In these casteless institutions any man, however obscure his origin, by devotion to the interests of his adopted order, and the practice of the asceticism, heightened if possible by the endurance of self-inflicted tortures, might attain to Buddhahood or saintship. But such a path to adoration in this world, or to worship hereafter, was utterly unknown in Europe until it was introduced from the East, after the Christian era.

Relic-worship is another peculiarity which the mediæval Church certainly borrowed from the East. No tradition is more constant than that which relates that the relics of Buddha were, after cremation, divided into eight parts, and distributed to eight different kingdoms, and the history of some portions of these can be traced to comparatively modern times. Perhaps too much reliance should not be placed on these very early traditions, as no material evidence of them exists, nor in the often-repeated assertion that Asoka built 84,000 dagobas,[589] to receive relics. That he built several is quite certain. The fact of the relics of two of the favourite disciples of Buddha—Mogalana and Sariputra—and of ten of the principal dignitaries of the Buddhist Church in the time of Asoka having been found at Sanchi in topes certainly anterior to the Christian era, [590] is quite sufficient for our present purpose. As is well known, the Tooth relic, whose history can be traced back with certainty for more than fifteen centuries, is now worshipped under British protection in Ceylon.

No such form of worship existed in classical antiquity, nor is it quite clear how it came to be adopted by the Christian Church. Buddhism was a reform of a material, ancestral-worshipping, body-respecting form of religion. The sepulchral tumulus with them became in consequence a dagoba, or relic shrine, containing a bone, or a vessel, or rag, or something that belonged to Buddha or some of his followers; and all the grosser superstitions of the Turanian natives, whose faith he was trying to elevate and refine, were sublimated into something immaterial and more pure. But Christianity never could have wanted this, and its adoption of relic worship was either a piece of blind imitation adopted without thinking, among other things, for which there was more excuse, or it was one of the many instances of the toleration of foreign elements which characterized the Christian priesthood in the early age of the Church.

It is as little clear when this worship was introduced as why it was done, for Christian legends in regard to relics are not more to be depended upon than those of the Buddhists. It could not have been common in the days of Clemens of Alexandria, or he would not have mentioned as a wonder that the Indians worshipped a bone enclosed in a pyramid;[591] but shortly after Constantine's time the fashion became prevalent, and the miracles performed by the touch of relics became one of the favourite delusions of the middle ages. If this is correct, and we are justified in assuming that the Buddhism which we find in mediæval Christianity was introduced after Constantine's time, we may take it for granted that any influence which the East exercised on the Western rude-stone monuments was also subsequent to that monarch's reign. If this is so, a considerable portion, at least, of those found in both countries must also belong to the dark ages that closed with the Crusades.

It would be easy to go on multiplying instances of Eastern customs introduced into the Western Church were this the place to do it. All that is required here, however, is to adduce sufficient evidence to accentuate an assertion which no one, probably, who knows anything of the subject would be found to dispute. It is, that the mediæval Church borrowed many of its forms from pre-existing Buddhism, and that these were introduced not before but after the time of Constantine. If, after having reached conviction on this point, we turn to our books to ascertain what light they throw on the subject, we find them absolutely silent. You may wade through all the writings of the Fathers, all the ponderous tomes of the Bollandists, without finding a trace, or even a hinted suspicion, that such a transference of doctrine took place. Except from one or two passages in Clemens of Alexandria, we should not be able to show that before the time of Constantine the nations of the West knew even the name of Buddha,[592] much less anything of his doctrines. While this is so it is obviously idle to ask for written evidence with regard to the influence of either country on the architectural style of the other. Men write volumes on volumes with regard to doctrines and faiths, but rarely allude to anything that concerns mere buildings; and while written history is so absolutely silent respecting the introduction of Buddhist forms into the West, it is in vain to hope that any allusion will be found to the influence Eastern forms may have had on the sepulchral monuments of Northern Africa or Europe. In this case, the "litera scripta" is not to be depended upon, but the monuments and their inscriptions are, and it is from them and them only, that either correct dates or reliable materials for such an investigation can be obtained. So far as I am capable of forming an opinion, their evidence is amply sufficient, in the first place, to take away all à priori improbability from the assumption that there may have been a direct influence exercised by the East on the Western rude-stone monuments. But it seems to me at the same time sufficient to render it extremely probable that while influencing to so great an extent the religious institutions of the country, they should also have modified their sepulchral forms so as fully to account for all the similarities which we find existing between them.

It may not be possible, in the present state of our knowledge, to explain exactly how this influence was exercised, and we must, consequently, rest content with the fact that as Buddhism did so influence the religion of the West in those early ages, the same agency may equally have acted upon the architectural or sepulchral forms of the same class in our population.

To explain this it is necessary to revert for a moment to a proposition I have often had occasion to advance, and have not yet seen refuted—that Buddhism is the religion of a Turanian race, using that word, as used by its inventors, in the broadest possible sense. The Persians say Iran and Turan, and Iran and Aniran, terms equivalent to our Aryan and non-Aryan; and Buddhism is not and never was, but exceptionally, the religion of the Aryan race, and is not now professed by any Aryan people in any quarter of the globe. It is essentially the faith of a quiescent, contemplative race, with no distinct idea of a god external to this world, or of a future state other than through transmigrations accomplished in this world, leading only to eternal repose hereafter; its followers, however, still believing in the direct influence of the temporarily-released spirits of their forefathers in guiding and controlling the destiny of their offspring, thus leading directly to ancestral worship. In India this primitive faith was refined and elevated into one of the most remarkable and beneficent of human institutions by the Aryan Sakya Muni and his Brahmin coadjutors, and did at one time nearly obliterate the Aryan faith which it superseded. After, however, a thousand years of apparent supremacy, the old faith came again to the surface and Buddhism disappeared from India, but still remains the only faith of all the Turanian nations around it and wherever the Aryan races never seem to have settled.

If any Turanian blood remained in the veins of any of the various races who inhabited Europe in the middle ages, it is easy to understand how the preaching or doctrines of any Buddhist missionaries or Turanian tribes must have struck a responsive chord in their hearts, and how easily they would have adopted any new fashion these Easterns may have taught. As we have had occasion to point out above, the dolmen-builders of Europe certainly were not Aryan. Nor, if we may trust M. Bertrand and the best French antiquaries, were they Celts; but that an old pre-Celtic people did exist in those parts of France in which the dolmens are generally found appears to me indisputable. Though the more active and progressive Celts had commenced their obliteration of this undemonstrative people at the time when written history first began in their country, there is no reason to suppose that their blood or their race was entirely exterminated till a very recent period, and it may still have been numerically the prevalent ingredient in the population between the fourth and the tenth centuries of our era.

Of course, it is not intended to assert or even to suggest that the Western nations first adopted from the East the practice of using stone to accentuate and adorn their sepulchral monuments. The whole evidence of the preceding pages contradicts such an assumption. But what they do seem to have borrowed is the use or abuse of holed stones, and the arrangement of external dolmens on the summit of tumuli combined with two or three circles of rude stones. These I fancy to have been among the latest of the forms which rude-stone architecture adopted, and may very well have been introduced in post-Constantinian times; and when we become more familiar with the peculiarities of these monuments, both in the East and the West, there may be other forms which we may recognize as modern and interchangeable, while many others, such as the great chambered tumuli and the tall solitary menhirs, seem as original and as peculiar to the West.

Having now made the tour of the Old World, it will be convenient to try to resume, in as few words as possible, the principal results we have arrived at from the preceding investigation.

First, with regard to their age. It seems that the uncivilized, ancestral-worshipping races of Europe first borrowed from the Romans—or, if any one likes, from the Phœnicians or Greeks of Marseilles—the idea of using stone to accentuate and adorn the monuments of their dead. In like manner, it certainly was from the Bactrian Greeks that the Indians first learned the use of stone as a building material. How early the Eastern nations adopted it in its rude form we do not know. In its polished form it was used as early as the middle of the third century B.C., but we have no authentic instance of the rude form till at least a century or two after Christ; but, once introduced, its use continued to the present day. Its history in the West seems somewhat different. The great chambered tumuli at Gavr Innis, and others in France, as well as those at Lough Crew, in Ireland, seem to belong to a time before the Romans occupied the states of Western Europe; but no stone monument of this class has yet made out its claim to an antiquity of more than two centuries, if so much, before the Christian era. Some of those in Greece about Mycenæ, and those at Saturnia, may be earlier, but they are as yet undescribed scientifically, and we cannot tell. From shortly before the Christian era, till the countries in which they are found became entirely and essentially Christian, the use of these monuments seems to have been continual, whenever a dolmen-building race—or, in other words, a race with any taint of Turanian blood in their veins—continued to prevail. This, in remote corners of the world, seems to have extended in France and Britain down to the eighth or ninth century. In Scandinavia it lasted down to the eleventh or twelfth, and sporadically, in out-of-the-way and neglected districts, as late both in France and Great Britain.

These results do not, of course, touch the age of the earthen tumuli or barrows, for the determination of whose age no scale has yet been invented; still less do they approach the question of the antiquity of the Cave men or the palæolithic stone implements, the age of which we must, for the present at least, leave wrapped in the mists of the long prehistoric past.

Their uses seem more easily determined than their dates; with only a few rare and easily-recognizable exceptions, all seem originally to have been intended for sepulchral or cenotaphic purposes. Either, like the great chambered tumuli and the dolmens, they were actually the burying-places of the illustrious dead; or, like the greater circles and the alignments, they marked battle-fields, and were erected in honour of those slain there, whether their bodies were actually laid within their precincts or not; or, like the rude stone pillars of the Khassia hills, they were offerings to the spirits of the departed.

With the fewest possible exceptions[593] and these of the most insignificant character, their connexion with the relics of the dead can be proved from all having become places for ancestral worship and having under various forms been used for commemorating or honouring departed spirits. No single instance has been authenticated of either circles or dolmens in any other form, except perhaps single stones, having ever been used for the worship of Odin, or of the gods called Mercury, Mars, Venus, or the other gods of the Druids, still less is there any trace of the worship of the sun or moon or any of the heavenly host; nor, I am sorry to think, can the serpent lay claim to any temple of this class. Honour to the dead and propitiation of the spirits of the departed seem to have been the two leading ideas that both in the East and West gave rise to the erection of these hitherto mysterious structures which are found numerously scattered over the face of the Old World.