TKAN'SACTIONS OF THK SECTIONS. 169 



ledge. The Hindus liad elaborate poetry, subtle philosophies, logic, gi'amniar, pro- 

 sody, mathematics, and astronomy, but, as has already been said, no history. Yet 

 that this influence was flowing out in pulses eastward from an early date, and per- 

 haps long before our era, there can be no question. 



Take the island of Java as an example. The people now universally profess 

 Mahomedanism, and Mecca is the quarter to which they are taught to look in 

 prayer. But throughout the island are still found the most abundant traces of in- 

 tercourse ^\-ith India, and of the settlement of highly civilized colonies of Hindus. 

 The language, radically quite distinct, is largely engrafted with Sanskrit words ; 

 the names of the sacred lands of Hindu tradition are attached to the districts of the 

 island ; the legendary poems of the people embody the substance of tlie great 

 Hindu epics, the Mahabharat and the Ramayana. The soil of the island is strewn 

 with Hindu idols ; the Indian system of ^-il'lage communities stands there with a 

 completeness rarely now to be found on its native soil ; the ancient Hindu institu- 

 tion of the Jury of Five was found implanted among the immemorial usages of 

 Java ; and numerous architectm-al remains of great magnificence, adorned some of 

 them with sculptured galleries to which I scarcely know a parallel, show in aU 

 their details the presence of Indian art and Indian worship. The art is dead ; the 

 worship is dead ; and no coherent histoiy relates their migration across the seas. 

 But there are the remains of both, pointing unerringly to their source. 



That which is true in this respect of Java is true also in a degree and with Varia- 

 tion of Ai-acan, Pegu, Burma, Siam, Laos, Camboja ; it is true, in part, of Sumatra 

 and the Malay peninsula, faintly, and probably with only a reflex origin in Borneo, 

 wliere temples of Hindu type are said to exist far in the interior. Nay, traces of 

 Hindu language have passed at some uncertain period, but probably through Malays 

 or Javanese, into the languages of the Philippine Islands and of remote Madagascar. 



China itself came under the potent influence of Hindu religion in the form of 

 Buddhism. Indian words and the forms of Indian architecture could only exist 

 in China after thorough assimilation to the fantastic stjde of that peculiar people ; 

 but I believe both are to be ti-aced. Sanskrit inscriptions may be seen on monu- 

 ments of antiquity not far from Peking. Thousands of volumes of Sanskrit works 

 on Buddhistic divinity were carried to China in the early centuries of oiu- era, 

 there earnestly studied and translated into Chinese. For a space of several 

 centuries a succession of devout Chinese pilgi-ims accomplished, by sea or by land, 

 the long journey westward to India as the Holy Land of their faith, and travelled 

 from shrine to shrine, from spot to spot consecrated by the events in the life of the 

 Hindu Sakya Buddha, just as contemporary pilgrims in Christendom made their 

 journeys by sea and land to the Holy Sites of Palestine, or the Convent of St. 

 Catharine on Sinai. 



A distinguished. Indian archaeologist, a brother oflicer of mine, has lately pub- 

 lished a learned volume on the Ancient Geogi-aphj' of India. And of what does it 

 consist ? Almost entirely of an endeavour to track the steps of one of those Chi- 

 nese pilgi-ims of the 7th century, and, by the aid of the memoirs that he left behind 

 him, to locate and identify the cities and kingdoms of India at that epoch. 



In something, one might fancy, of propiietic strain, and in dim presentiment of 

 our English Empire in India, the great King Alfred sent one of his Thanes, Sig- 

 helm of Shirebm-n, with oflerings to the tomb of St. Thomas the Apostle on the 

 surf-beaten shore of Coromandel. Near the same shore stood a magnificent shrine 

 of Buddhist worship, one of the sacred places visited hj those pilgrims fi-om Cathay — • 

 a shrine whose gorgeous sculptures, rescued from destruction by the zeal of one 

 Scotchman, Sir Walter Elliot, and rescued from oblivion by the skill and learning 

 of another, Mr. Fergusson, now stand in dumb amazement in the court of the India 

 oflice at Westminster ! 



The Chinese pilgrim from the far East, and the Saxon envoy from the far West, 

 might easily have met upon those shores. What a subject for an imaginary con- 

 versation suggests itself ! 



Buddhism imdoubtedly, with its spirit of propagandism, was a most powerful 

 agent in the development of Indian influence among the Indo-Chinese nations ; but 

 probably that influence had been felt at a still earlier date. Among the names of 

 towns and islands on the coasts and seas of the fui'ther East, as given by Ptolemy, 



