[ 98 ] 



tively recent in their romantic annals; and, in fact, Buddha is to be 

 found in a preceding page at the head of the great lunar dynasty 

 of India. His Avatar is asserted to have taken place for the ex- 

 press purpose of putting a stop to the bloody sacrifices with which 

 the Brahmins had polluted the pristine purity and simplicity of 

 their religion. A rock-altar, therefore, that altar on which the 

 blood of animals had profusely flowed, was sacred to him through- 

 out Asia ; and he himself was often represented by a huge columnar 

 black stone, black being among the ancients a colour emblematical 

 of the inscrutable nature of the Deity. How wide his fame and 

 the mild rites of his religion were diffused will be evident, when 

 it is considered that the Indian Buddha is the Budso and Dai-Bod, 

 that is, Deva-Buddha, of the Japanese, whose history and super- 

 stitious rites are detailed at great length by Kaempfer. Among 

 other circumstances, he relates, that, in the reign of the eleventh 

 emperor from Syn Mu, Budo came over from the Indies into Ja- 

 pan, and brought with him, upon a white horse, his religion and 

 doctrine.* Kaempfer here evidently confounds the two last Ava- 

 tars, the tenth being a warrior with a winged white horse. Chrono- 

 logy marks him for the undoubted Fot of China, the name being 

 thus softened down by a race who have neither a B nor D in their 

 alphabet. He was the Wod, or original Oden, of the Scandinavi- 

 ans, proved to have been so by the rock-worship in use among 

 them and their Druid-descendants in Europe. For the same rea- 

 son he is known to be the elder Thoth and Hermes of Egypt, 

 pyramids and certain pillars called Herma being sacred to that 

 deity. He is also known to be the Taut, or Mercury, of Phoeni- 

 cia, as well by the same species of rude worship and symbols, (the 

 Mercurial heaps,) as by the very curious circumstance, often be- 



* Ksempfer's Japan, lib. ii. p. 163. 



