1800.] Bud&kut Monasteries and Temples, 63 



these the only remains found in Benares, they could not fail to 

 awaken much curious interest in the mind of the antiquarian ; and he 

 would naturally carry on a process of induction in regard to them, 

 and would say to himself, ' here are the stones, but where are the 

 buildings ? What was their form ? What their age ?' And with the 

 help of the ruins of other places, he would be able to answer most of 

 these questions satisfactorily, and would, to a large extent, describe 

 the buildings, to which the stones at one time belonged, and would 

 determine the epoch of their erection. Our belief is, that the most 

 ancient ruin yet discovered in India, exhibits nothing older than some 

 of these Benares stones, now embedded in modern walls and parapets, 

 and scattered about in divers holes and corners of the city. 



The fact that such old fragments are found in Benares, united with 

 tin; circumstance that such an exceedingly small number of structural 

 remains of any pretensions to high antiquity are traceable in it, goes 

 far to prove that the city has been not once, but several times, de- 

 stroyed, until, except in rare instances, and these chiefly consisting 

 of foundations and basement moulding!, not one stone of the ancient 

 city has been left upon another, and the foundations of its temples 

 and its palaces have been torn up, so that their places are no larger 

 known. Moreover, there is no manner of doubt, that the site of 

 Benares has considerably shifted, and that at one time it came quite; 

 up to the banks of the river Burna, which flows into the Ganges on 

 its northern boundary, and from which it is now distant nearly half 

 a mile, and stretched beyond the opposite bank, until perhaps it 

 coalesced with the ancient city which, if we may believe the Ceylou 

 historians, encompassed Sarnath in the age when Sakya Muni arrived 

 there to "turn the wheel of the Law," or previous to it. If this be 

 true, the Hindu pilgrim who performs bis wearisome journey of 

 perhaps many hundreds of miles, with the object of reaching holy 

 Kashi, and dying in the city of his fathers, is labouring under a prodi- 

 gious delusion, for the city which he visits, has been chiefly erected 

 under Mohammedan rule, and on a spot for the most part different 

 from that which his fathers trod ; and the fanes in which he worships, 

 are not the spacious temples which his ancestors built, but either the 

 pinched and contracted cage-like structures, which Mohammedan em- 

 perors just permitted their idol-loving subjects to erect, or modem 

 imitations of the same, 



