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OF THE HINDUS.
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will not carry is back above ten centuries. It is also to be observed, that the objects of the attacks of the Sútras and of SANKARA are philosophical and speculative tenets, and these may have been current long before they formed part of a distinct practical system of faith, as promulgated by a class of Bauddhas, the germ of the Jains.
However, we may admit from these authorities the existence of the Jains as a distinct sect, above ten or twelve centuries ago; we have reason to question their being of any note or importance much earlier. The Bauddhas, we know from CLEMENS of Alexandria, existed in India in the second century of the Christian æra, and we find them not only the principal objects of Hindu confutation and anathema, but they are mentioned in works of lighter literature referable to that period, in which the Jains are not noticed, nor alluded to: the omission is the more worthy of notice, because, since the Bauddhas disappeared from India, and the Jains only have been known, it will be found that the Hindu writers, whenever they speak of Bauddhas, shew, by the phraseology and practices ascribed to them, that they really mean Jains: the older writers do not make the same mistake, and the usages and expressions which they give to Bauddha personages are not Jain, but Bauddha; with the one they were familiar, the other were yet unknown.
The literature of the Jains themselves is unfavourable to the notion of high antiquity. HEMACIIANDRA, one of their greatest writers, flourished in the end of
