1849.] Brahmans and Buddhists. 103 



where shall we look for it, at least before Sanscrit became the language 

 of the Buddhists ? If the Pali and Sanscrit characters be originally the 

 same, then the antiquity of the brahmans in Hindustan would either 

 be thrown back to a remoter period than orientalists might be disposed 

 to admit, or the brahmans would be considered as a colony which had 

 imported with them to that country a form of the same character used 

 by the earlier occupiers of it, and which from having arrived at a more 

 advanced stage of improvement than the Pali, gradually superseded it, 

 while the Sanscrit language took the place of the Magadhi for a similar 

 reason. 



The primeval worship of Hindustan may have been that of demons, 

 spirits and genii, being that natural religion, which in every age and 

 under every stage, from savage life up to the dawn of civilization, has 

 been the result of fear, and of the instructive impulse towards the pre- 

 servation of life. 



It is very probable that the mental obscurity was first brightened by 

 emigrations from the west, at periods long antecedent to the arrival of 

 the brahmans, and that the latter may have pursued the same track. 

 It is hardly possible that any emigrants from the west, however differing 

 in the periods of their arrival, should not have had something common 

 in their civil organization, religious dogmas, and metaphysical subtleties. 



Thus it appears to me easy to account for the Buddhists having in 

 their system of religion the earlier gods of the brahmans, Brahma, Ish - 

 wara, Indra, with a similar train of Devatas deities probably venerated 

 under other names in Arabia and Central Asia. I allude to Sakya 

 Buddhists, for of previous Indian Buddhism we may be said to be 

 almost totally ignorant, unless we can prove that some of the volumes of 

 Buddhist theology which now exist were extant before Buddha Sakya' s 

 advent. 



The corruptions of polytheism seem to have begun amongst the In- 

 dians long before Sakya' s time ; and to have modified Buddhism. This 

 last took shortly after his death a more corrupted form ; not that of 

 simple hero-worship, which it probably was at first, but as that of a 

 man converted into a demigod. 



We have only to turn towards the west to be convinced how prone 

 all the nations of antiquity were to man-worship in the first instance, and 

 to that of his apotheositical form in the second. But there may 



