“The mythology of the orthodox Hindus,” says this venerable and good man, “their present chronology, adapted to astronomical periods, their legendary tales, and their mystical allegories, are abundantly extravagant, but the Jains and the Bauddhas surpass them in monstrous exaggerations of the same kind. In this rivalship of absurd fiction it would not be unreasonable to pronounce that to be the most modern which has outgone the rest.”
His second position is, that “the Greek writers who mention the Bramins, speak of them as a flourishing society, whereas the Budhists they represent as an inconsiderable handful: therefore,” etc.
To the first I shall oppose Dr. Buchanan’s testimony, who states that “however idle and ridiculous the legends and notions of the worshippers of Bouddha may be, they have been in a great measure adopted by the Brahmins, but with all their defects monstrously aggravated.”
And even had we not this rebutting evidence the inference in itself is decidedly weak; for it would go equally to establish that Romanism is more recent than Protestantism, as containing a greater number of ceremonial observances than this latter does: whereas the reverse is what reason would lead us to conclude, namely, that ritual multiplications are the growth of longevity, and that the retrenchment of their number is what reformation aspires to.
I make a free-will offering, unrestricted and unimpeded, of all the value that can belong to Grecian historians—the Greeks, whom their own countryman, Lucian, so justly banters as distinguished for nothing so much as a total indifference to truth! But admitting them to be as veracious as they were notoriously not so, the intercourse, of the very earliest of them, with India and its dependencies, was much too modern, to allow their statements to be further conclusive, than as refers to the time being: and I am very ready to allow that, at the particular moment described, the Budhists were in the wane, while the Brahmins ruled ascendant—nay, that there were but a few straggling votaries of the former creed then existing at all in that country, the latter, though schismatics from the ecclesiastical root, having, by gaining over the civil power on their side, effected their expulsion many ages before.
The subterranean temples of Gyah, Ellora, Salsette, Elephanta, and those other monuments of piety and civil eminence which still shed a lustre over India, and which no subsequent state of the arts could rival, much less eclipse, owe their existence to an era anterior to this catastrophe. The Budhists were the architects when in the zenith of human power. The sculptures and devices establish this fact: for of the whole list of deities personated in those inscriptions, the Brahmins have retained none but such as suited their purpose. These, in all conscience, were numerous enough; and as the Brahmins, when at the helm, permitted not the introduction of “strange gods,” it is evident that those, which they have in common with the Budhists, are but cullings from the “mother-church,” ill-understood and worse interpreted; the similarity, however, being still so great as, after a lapse of centuries, to give rise to the question of, whether the stem or the branch, the sire or the offspring, had the priority in point of time!
“J’ai remarqué,” says the philosopher Bailly, “que les Brames aimaient à être appellés Paramènes, par respect pour la mémoire de leurs ancêtres, qui portoient ce nom.”[235] Monsieur Gebelin is more explicit. “Pausanias nous dit, que Mercure, le même que Butta, ou Budda, un des fondateurs de la doctrines des Paramènes, ou Brames, est appellé Paramon.”[236]
This Paramon, who had seceded from the Budhist doctrine, and placed himself at the head of that sect who still bear his name, was the son of Budh-dearg, a religious denomination, most painfully inexplicable to inquirers into those matters, but which one, at least, from his acquaintance with the Irish language, should have better known. “I think,” says Vallancey, “dearg is a contraction for darioga, rex supremus, which corresponds with the Chaldæan darag, dux, an epithet given to Budya!”
All those words, in fact, dearg, darioga, and darag, are one and the same, adjuncts, it is true, of Budya, but meaning neither dux, rex, nor supremus, except inasmuch as they were his epithets, the correct rendering being red, which, added to Budh, signifies the Red Lingam, the Sardana-palus, the Eocad, the Penis sanctus, the god of nature, the ruber palus, the Helio-go-balus, the corporeal spirit, the agent of production, the type of life, as it is also the concurrent symbol of universal dissolution.
These several terms, which are, each and all, convertible, pourtray not only the procreative powers of the male world personified, but likewise its symbols, which were the Round Towers; and not these only, but Obelisks[237] also, and naturally erect stones,[238] which though not circularly fashioned, yet typified, in their ascension, the upward bent of all vegetable growth.