﻿122 ON THE CHRONOLOC.Y 



assured me lately that the Cashmirians admitted an 

 interval of twenty-four years (others allow only 

 twelve) between these two divine persons. The best 

 authority, after all, is the Bhagawat itself, in the first 

 chapter of which it is expressly declared, that " Bud- 

 *.' dha, the son of Jina, would appear at Cicata for 

 t( the purpose of confounding the demons, just at 

 " the beginning of the Caliyug" I have long been 

 convinced, that, on these subjects, we can only rea- 

 son satisfactorily from written evidence, and that our 

 forensick rule must be invariably applied to take the de- 

 clarations of the Brahmans most strongly against them- 

 selves ; that is, against their pretensions to antiquity ; 

 so i hat, on the whole, we may safely place Buddha 

 just at the beginning of the present age : but what is 

 the beginning of it ? When this question was propos- 

 ed to Radhacant, he answered, " Of a period com- 

 " prising more than four hundred thousand years, 

 " the first two or three thousand may reasonably be 

 < c called the beginning" On my demanding written 

 evidence, he produced a book of some authority, com- 

 posed by a learned Goswami, and entitled Bhagawa- 

 tamarita, or the Nectar of the Bhagazvat, on which 

 it is a metrical comment ; and the couplet which he 

 read from it deserves to be cited. After the just men- 

 tioned account of Buddha in the text, the commen- 

 tator says, 



Asau vyactah calerabdasahasradwlt aye gate, 

 Murtlh patalavernd'sya dwibhuja chicurojfhita. 



f He became visible, the-thousand-and-second-year-of- 

 thc-Czli-age being past ; his body of-a-colour-be- 

 * tween-white and ruddy, with-two-arms, without- 

 ' hair on his head* 



Cicata, named in the text as the birth-place of 



