1864] 



On the Hums of Buddha Gray a* 



188 



This place is renowned ; and it is celebrated by the name of Buddha- 

 Gaya. The forefathers of him who shall perform the ceremony of the 

 Sr&ddha at this place shall obtain salvation. The great virtue of the 

 Sraddlia performed here is to be found in the book called Vdyu purdna ; 

 an epitome of which hath by me been engraved upon stone." The 

 inscription writer then goes on to say that Vikramaditya was certain.. 

 ly a renowned king ; that there lived in his court nine learned men who 

 were celebrated as the " nine jewels ;" that one of them was Amara 

 Deva, and it certainly was he who built the holy temple. The con- 

 cluding paragraph states that " in order that it may be known to learned 

 men that he (Amara) verily erected the house of Buddha," the writer 

 " recorded upon stone the authority of the place as a self-evident testi- 

 mony," on Friday the 14th of the wane in the month of Chaitra in 

 the year 1005 of Vikramaditya=A. D. 948. 



The writer leaves his readers entirely in the dark as to who he was ; he 

 does not even deign to give his name, and he talks of things which hap- 

 pened a thousand years before him. Such testimony can have no claim to 

 any confidence. The value of an inscription depends upon its authenticity 

 and contemporaneousness — upon being a record of circumstances that 

 happened in the time of the writer, who must be a trustworthy person., 

 But here we have none of those conditions fulfilled. We have a tradi- 

 tion a thousand years old, if any such tradition then existed, served up by 

 an anonymous writer on the testimony of so unveracious a witness as 

 the Vayu Purana. The tradition itself bears the stamp of fabrication 

 on its very face. Buddha Gaya, whatever it was in the time of the 

 writer, could not have been " a dreadful forest" " infested by tigers 

 and destitute of human society" in the first century before Christy 

 when Buddhism in India was in the zenith of its splendour, and when 

 the place of Buddha's apotheosis was held the most sacred spot on 

 earth. Nor could Amara Sinha of the Court of Vikrama who was 

 known to have been a 3 staunch Buddhist* and. a clever scholar, be so far 



* General Cunningham calls Amara a brahmana. But in the invocation at the 

 beginning of his Dictionary the great lexicographer has given no reason to his 

 readers to describe him as such. The invocation itself is as follows : 



" To him who is an ocean of wisdom and mercy, who is unfathomable, and 

 whose attributes are viceless, even to him, O intelligent men, offer ye your 

 adorations for the sake of prosperity and immortality." 



2 b 2 





