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VIIIL.—A Disputation respecting Castxr by a Bupputst, in the form of a Series 
of Propositions supposed io be put by a Sarva and refuted by the Disputant. 
—Communicated by B. H. Hoveson, Esq., M.R.A.S. 
Read January 1, 1831. 
To the Secretary of the Asiatic Society. 
Nepal Residency, 
Sir: 3 July 11th, 1829. 
A few days since my learned old Bauddh«a friend brought me a little tract in 
Sanscrjt, with such an evident air of pride and pleasure, that I immediately asked him 
what it contained. ‘Oh, my friend !” was his reply, “I have long been trying to pro- 
cure for you this work, in the assuranee that you must highly approve the wit and 
wisdom contained in it; and, after many applications to the owner, I have at length 
obtained the loan of it for three or four days. But I cannot let you have it, nor evena 
copy of it, such being the conditions on which I procured you a sight of it.” These 
words of my old friend stimulated my curiosity, and with a few fair words I engaged 
the old gentleman to lend me and my pandit his aid in making a translation of it; a 
task which we accomplished within the limited period of my possession of the original, 
although my pandit (a Brahman of Benares) soon declined co-operation with us, full of 
indignation at the author and his work! Notwithstanding, however, the loss of the 
pandit’s aid, I think 1 may venture to say that the translation gives a fair representation 
of the matter of the original, and is not altogether without some traces of its manner. 
It consists of a shrewd and argumentative attack, by a Bauddha, upon the Brah- 
manical doctrine of caste: and what adds to its pungency is, that throughout, the truth 
of the Brahmanical Writings is assumed, and that the author’s proofs of the erroneous- 
ness of the doctrine of caste are all drawn from those writings. He possesses himself 
of the enemy’s battery, and turns their own guns against them. To an English reader 
this circumstance gives a puerile character to a large portion of the Treatise, owing to 
the enormous absurdity of the data from which the author argues. His inferences, how- 
ever, are almost always shrewdly drawn, and we must remember that not he but his 
antagonists must be answerable for the character of the data. To judge by the effect 
produced upon my Brahman pandit—a wise man in his generation, and accustomed for 
the last four years to the examination of Bauddha literature—by this little Treatise, it 
would seem that there is no method of assailing Brahmanism comparable to that of 
“judging it out of its own mouth:” and the resolution of the Committee of the Seram- 
