NO. 46. — 1895.] ANCIENT TAMIL LITERATURE. 



39 



must confess that the argument by which he tries to establish the age 

 of Sambandha does not, to my mind, seem quite conclusive. Mere 

 semblance or identity of names cannot go for much. Among the 

 Tamils it is not unusual for a grandson or other descendant to take 

 the name of his ancestor. Such evidence as is based on mere identifi- 

 cation of names must be corroborated by evidence from other sources, 

 before it can be accepted as conclusive. I may mention one difficulty 

 (among others) which has suggested itself to my mind, by the period 

 in which my honourable friend, the author of the Paper, places 

 Sambandha. If Sambandha, the Saiva reformer, and his colleagues 

 lived about the time when Jesus Christ lived, the Jains and Buddhists, 

 according to all received accounts, must have been exterminated from 

 the Tamil country at that time. Sambandha and his colleagues carried 

 on a crusade against those heretics from one Tamil kingdom to another. 

 But according to the Chinese traveller Hwen Thsang, who visited 

 Southern India about the early part of the seventh century, there were 

 a great many Buddhists and Buddhist temples in Southern India, and 

 he also states that Nigrantha Jains were numerous. If Jainism had 

 been so completely overthrown by Sambandha and his colleagues in 

 the first century, it is improbable that the Jains should have been 

 numerous in the early part of the seventh. I do not say that it is 

 impossible. There might have been a Jain revival. But there must be 

 facts to support such an inference. All that I wish to say is that we 

 should carry a judicial frame of mind into inquiries of this kind. 



My honourable friend would have done a signal service to the Society 

 if he had placed before the Society a translation of the work on which 

 he has written a Paper. In that case the Members of the Society could 

 draw their own conclusions from facts, instead of depending on his 

 ipse dixit, however sound. As a lawyer, he must know, that if he wishes 

 to prove any facts contained in a document, the best way of proving 

 them is by the production of the document itself. I make these 

 remarks in no unfriendly spirit : it is a pleasure to me to see him devote 

 himself to such studies. But I trust that when he gives us his next 

 Paper he will also give us the benefit of having the original of the work 

 on which his Paper is based, with a translation into English. 



Messrs. J. Harward and F. C. Roles also made a few observations 

 on the Paper. 



Mr. C. M. Fernando said that the Papers that had been read 

 were in every way worthy of the Asiatic Society, and had this addi- 

 tional merit, that they supplied ample material for discussion. He 

 could assure Mr. Coomaraswamy that he brought a perfectly impartial 

 mind to bear upon that discussion, and he would venture to say a few 

 words which were suggested to him by a remark from the Chairman. 

 He was sure the Chairman did not imply the meaning which his words 

 seemed to convey, that Sanskrit and Tamil were the only forms of 

 Oriental literature worth study. The Sinhalese people could, in spite 

 of the depredations so systematically committed by the Tamil invaders 

 of Ceylon, boast of a literature which would compare favourably with 

 Tamil literature. With reference to a statement in the first Paper, 

 that some of the Pandiyan kings were literary men of a high order, he 

 would remind them that it was equally so in Sinhalese history. The 

 great Parakrama, to whom some of the Indian kingdoms paid tribute, 

 was an accomplished linguist and writer. One of the finest poems 



