﻿126 ON THE CHRONOLOGY 



ther the fourth age of the Hindus began about ons 

 thousand years before Christ, according to Gover- 

 dhan's account of Bud \ ; rh, or two thousand, 



according to that of Radhacant, the common opinion 

 that 4880 years of it are now elapsed, is erroneous; 

 and here for the present we leave Buddha, with an 

 intention oi: returning to him in due time ; observing 

 only, that if the learned Indians differ so widely in 

 their accounts of the age, when their ninth Avatar 

 appeared in their country, we may be assured that they 

 have no cerain chronology before him, and may 

 suspect the certainty of all the relations concerning 

 even his appearance. 



The received chronology of the Hindus begins 

 with an absurdity so monstrous, as to overthrow the 

 whole system ; for, having established their period of 

 seventy one divine ages as the reign of each Menu, yet 

 thinking it incongruous to place a holy personage in 

 times ot impurity, they insist that the Menu reigns 

 only in every golden age, and disappears in the three 

 human ages that follow it, continuing to dive and 

 emerge like a water-fowl, till the close of his Man- 

 wantara. The learned author of the Puranart'hapra- 

 casa, which I will now follow step by step, mention- 

 ed this ridiculous opinion with a serious face ; but, 

 as he has not inserted it in his work, we may take his 

 account of the seventh Menit according to its obvious 

 and rational meaning, and suppose that Vaisvaswata^ 

 the son of Surya, the son of Casyapa, or Uranus, the 

 son of Marichi, or Light: the son of Brahma, which 

 is clearly an allegorical pedigree, reigned in the last 

 golden age, or, according to the Hindus, three mil- 

 lion eight hundred and ninety-two thousand eight 

 hundred and eighty eight years ago. But they con- 

 tend that he actually reigned on earth one million seven 

 hundred and twenty-eight thousand yeats oi mortals, or 



