796 Review of Uhistoire [No. 167. 



tions to Brtfhmanic monuments of the same class in Sanscrit, it may be 

 inferred, not that the Pali is prior to the Sanscrit, which is impossible, not 

 that Buddhism is prior to Brahmanism, which it is not less impossible, 

 but that the regard for history and historical proceedings has been earlier 

 displayed amongst the Buddhists than amongst the Brahmans. What 

 more can, however, now be adduced in the presence of the formal evidence 

 of the sacred texts of Nepal, in which the whole Brahmanic society with 

 its religion, castes and laws appears ? Can it be pretended, that the 

 society the existence of which is borne out by these books, was origi- 

 nally Buddhist, and that the Brahmans, who afterwards became its 

 masters, have borrowed from it certain elements to which they gave the 

 form, in which we find them in the laws of Manu, or in the time of the 

 Ramayana and Mahabharata ? Or rather, is it imagined, that the names 

 of the gods and the Brahminical castes, of which the Sutras are full, have 

 been introduced all at once ? And if so by whom ? By the Buddhists 

 perhaps, to give themselves the honour of superiority, or at least of 

 equality with regard to the Brahmans, which they could not retain in 

 India ; or perhaps by the Brahmans to assign their existence to a much 

 more ancient epoch that it really was ? In the first place, as if the 

 compilers of the Buddhist books could have had any object in showing 

 Buddhism separating itself from Brahmanism, unless the Brahmanism 

 had existed in their time ; or in the second place, as if they would have 

 allowed the Brahmans to bring in by stealth their abhorred name among 

 the names of Sakya and his disciples. We cannot escape the following 

 alternative : The Sutras, attesting the existence of the Brahmanical 

 society, are either written about the period of Sakya, or a long time after- 

 wards. If the first, the society, which they describe, must have existed, 

 because one cannot conceive for what purpose they should have given all 

 the detail of a society, which did not exist, at the time of Sakya ; if the 

 second, one cannot better understand, why the gods and Brahminical 

 personages occupy there so vast a place, because a long time after Buddha, 

 Brahmanism was totally separated from Buddhism, and they had 

 then only one common territory, that of polemical discussion and of 

 discussion with the sword. Mr. Burnouf does not enter into all the in- 

 dications which prove, that at the period when Sakya traversed India to 

 teach his law, the Brahminical society had approached its acme, but 

 he notes two points, its religion and its political organisation. 



