•46 Annual Address. [Feb. 



India, the land of their home. When in the course of time, in con- 

 sequence of the change of religious tendencies which already began to- 

 operate in the seventh century A.D., at the time of the celebrated 

 Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, the recruitment of their 

 order declined ; and when, later on, the pressure of the spiritual 

 opposition of the great Brahmanic orders, founded in the ninth century 

 A.D. by paijkaracarya and his disciples, increased ; and when finally, in 

 the twelvth and thirteenth centuries A.D., the storm of the iconoclastic 

 Muhammadan conquest swept over India, and, as related in the histories 

 of Taranath and Minhaju-d-din, inflicted wholesale massacre on the 

 few still surviving monastic settlements. Buddhism simply collapsed ; 

 it utterly disappeared. 'Having maintained no inseparable bond with 

 the broad strata of the secular life of the people, it had no chance of 

 recruitment, it could neither maintain, nor recover itself. The lay-fol- 

 lowers of Buddliism, having lost their monks to whom no paramount 

 interest bound them, by a most natural process relapsed into Brahmanism, 

 in which they again found, as they had done before the advent of Bud- 

 dhism, not only their priests, but also their spiritual directors. Some 

 small portions only of the former Buddhist laity, here and there, especial- 

 ly in Bengal, preferred to keep aloof, maintaining a caricatured foina of 

 Buddhism without Buddha and his Order, in which it is only with great 

 difficulty that one can recognize the distorted traces of the once flourish- 

 ing system of Buddha. The discovery of these caricatured survivals of 

 Buddhism in Bengal is mainly due to the researches of our Joint-Philo- 

 loo-ical Secretary, Pandit Hara Prasad Shastri, who has unearthed them 

 as it were in the followers of Dharma, one of the well-known units of 

 the Buddhist Trinity, and published an account of them in the Journal 

 of our Society for 1895. From them Dharmtolla Street takes its 

 name, and their Dharma temple still stands in the modern Jaun Bazar 

 Street. 



Very different was the fate of Jainism which securely lived through 

 the stormy times that shattered Buddhism. It has maintained itself 

 quietly and unobtrusively to the present day ; and its prospering 

 monastic settlements and lay-communities are still to be found in 

 "Western and Southern India and Bengal ; one of them we have close 

 to our own doors, in the Maniktola suburb of this city. Jainism, indeed, 

 is the only one of the almost primeval monastic orders of India which 

 has survived down to the present day. But the history of an order of 

 such a retiring character can necessarily offer but few points of 

 general interest. There is really only one event in it which in its 

 ■results obtrudes itself on the notice of the outside world. This is the 

 great schism, which has been already alluded to, into the two divisions 



