The Gnostics and Their Remains

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnotes
49:* Buddhism was founded in the fifth century before our era, by Sakya Muni, son of the Raja of Kapila. At the age of twenty-nine he began to study religion, and by force of prayer became the embodiment of the Supreme Deity when thirty-five years old. He chose Benares for the centre of his mission, whence in the space of forty-five years his doctrines were diffused over the fairest districts of the Ganges from the Delta to Agra and Cawnpore. His death is placed by some writers in B.C. 477.

50:* The Buddhist "Confession of Faith," regularly set up in the temples, engraven on a stone tablet, runs thus: "Of all things proceeding from Cause their causes hath the Tathâgatha explained. The Great Sarmana hath likewise explained the causes of the cessation of existence." The essence of the religion therefore is Perfect Knowledge; the object of Virgil's aspiration-

'Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas'"

51:* Two Chinese pilgrims, Fa Hian and Hiouen Thsang, visited Benares at the beginning of the fifth, and at the middle of the seventh centuries of our era. These keen and sagacious observers have left records of their travels in India of the utmost importance to the historian and antiquary. Their narratives are, for the most part, plain matter-of-fact productions, free from the haze and uncertainty of Hindoo writings; and whenever they have been tested by extraneous evidence, have been found to be to a large extent singularly correct. See 'Mémoires de Hiouen Thsang,' translated from the Chinese by Stanislas Julien.

51:† Asoka's zeal was so ardent that he sent his son and daughter, Mahendra and Saugamitra, as missionaries to Ceylon; who in a short time effected the conversion of the island to their new religion.

51:‡ The Persian envoy in Aristophanes’ Acharnians used the same word, Ἱαόναυ, for the Greek nation.

53:* Who composed his very interesting 'Life of Apollonius' at the request of the Empress Julia, about a century after the death of the philosopher.

55:* Which of course their theologians claim to be, and treat the Brahmins as corrupters of the true faith. For example Hionen Thsang: "They reckon (in the kingdom of Benares) a hundred temples of gods, inhabited by about ten thousand heretics, who for the most part are worshippers of Siva." And yet he candidly owns that the Buddhists possessed no more than thirty monasteries, numbering only three thousand members, in the same place.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------