1849.] Br ahmans and Buddhists. 113 



In the Vedas the sun and sky were worshipped, and Sir W. Jones* 

 acquaints us that the popular worship of the Persians under Hushang 

 was purely Sabian, having succeeded to pure Theism. 



It is hardly necessary perhaps to speculate deeply as to where the 

 brahmans obtained the ideas of their later gods. 



In the year of Christ 50, there were astrologers from India practising 

 their profession at Rome, and in the first centuries the Hindus (q. 

 brahmans rather) sent many embassies to the Greeks and Romans, and 

 some of these reached Spain, Alexandria, and Egypt. f 



The term first centuries is somewhat vague, but it may still permit us 

 to suppose that the pantheistic rabble of the Hindus had not then been 

 created, and the Greeks, Romans, and the people of Egypt and other 

 countries they visited may have supplied them with the conceptions, 

 which they afterwards matured. Nay, we do not know that the earliest 

 Indian travellers were not those men who were then or who afterwards 

 became Buddhists. Buddhism was general throughout India very long 

 before and during the first centuries, and its votaries being embued 

 with a spirit of inquiry, it is more likely that they should have travelled 

 to the west than that brahmans should. Dr. Buchanan acquaints us 

 that certain Jain tribes affirm that they came from Arabia. This 

 may be true, and we may suppose that they brought with them the 

 worship of Brahma, and perhaps of the other gods of that country, for 

 they were not then Jainas, these being a heretical Buddhist sect, al- 

 though it is possible they may have been originally hero-worshippers. 

 This emigration, if true, would support the ideal or theoretical case I 

 have already proposed. "To this day," (1811) observes Wilford, " there 

 are certainly followers of Brahma, and brahmans in Arabia, where many 

 old names of places are Sanscrit or Hindi. 



Wilford observes that " the Mahrattas, a numerous and respectable 

 tribe of brahmans and Khattris, are acknowledged all over India to be 

 foreigners from the western parts of Tersia, who left their native coun- 

 try not 1200 years ago," (before 1811.) Does this not shew that they 

 only followed a long beaten road ; and if it be true, it bears me out in the 

 supposition that emigrations from the earliest ages fled to India from 

 the horrors of war in the west, or from the love of change. In A. D. 



* Tr. A. S. B. Vols. IX. and X. p. 99. f Ditto Vol. X. p. 99, 100. 



% Ibid, 98, * Ibid, Vol. II. Disc: the Persians. 



Q 



