722 Examination of the Pdli Buddhistical Annals. [Sep?, 



evidence for the support of that date than a pretended prophecy, and 

 while the train of events adduced to sustain that date, incontestibly 

 shows an anachronism, in excess, of 120 years,— I can see no tenable 

 plea on which the correctness of the Buddhistical era founded on the 

 death of Sa'kya in B. C. 542 can be questioned. 



There is a chain of uninterrupted evidence in the historical annals 

 of Ceylon from B. C. 161, to the present day, all tending to the con- 

 firmation of the authenticity of the date assigned to that era. The 

 inartificial manner, also, in which that chain of evidence is evolved, is 

 so different from the guarded adjustments that take place in the four 

 preceding centuries, that it still further tends to conciliate confidence. 

 It will be seen in the Mahdwanso that the duration of the reigns of 

 all the kings subsequent to Dcjtthaga'mtni are strictly within the 

 bounds of probability ; although these terms are seldom stated with 

 such precision as to give the fractional part of the last year in each 

 reign. The absence of this minutiae of chronology must necessarily 

 conduce, in a long line of successions, to an aggregate accumulation of 

 a trifling anachronism. Accordingly when we suddenly come upon a 

 date, recorded to mark the epoch of some great religious schism, or 

 decyphered from some obscure inscription, and we apply that informa- 

 tion to the correction of the current narrative, we find, as we ought 

 to find, in the absence of artificial arrangement and falsification of 

 data, accumulations of trivial anachronisms amounting to four, five, 

 and six years, in the long intervals that have elapsed between each of 

 those dates. 



And again, when we find that these dates, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, 

 adjust themselves retrospectively with the year of Sa'kya's death, and 

 prospectively with the present year, A. B. 2380, or A. D. 1837, with- 

 out deranging (excepting to the limited and necessary extent above 

 noticed) any of that enormous mass of details involved in a history 

 extending over a duration of twenty centuries ; it is impossible without 

 rejecting incontrovertible evidence, to question the correctness of the 

 Buddhistical era. 



With this conviction, or perhaps it will be called prejudice, strongly 

 impressed on my mind, of the correctness of the date assigned to the 

 Buddhistical era, I look to the details of the three ensuing centuries 

 of the Buddhistical history of India, for the correction of the blots and 

 discrepancies which European criticism will detect and expose in its 

 comparison of the Buddhistical and European dates, assigned to the 

 era of Chandagutto's reign ; and the consequent inaccuracy of the 

 dates of the second and third convocations. 



I have not yet met in Buddhistical records with any prophecy, or 



