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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
writings of the Fathers of the Church, which though meagre are in the main correct. We need not be surprised at this: there is no doubt that Buddhism was in a highly flourishing state in India in the first centuries of Christianity, and it is not extraordinary that some indications of its diffusion should have found their way to Syria and Egypt.
Clemens of Alexandria, who lived towards the close of the second century, liad evidently heard of the monastic practices, and of the peculiar monuments or Topes of the Buddhists. When he speaks of the Brachmanai and the Sarmanai as two distinct classes of Indian philosophers, he uses the very words of Megasthenes, and merely, therefore, repeats his statement; but that he does not understand Buddhists by Sarmanes is clear enough, for he proceeds to add, “there are of the Indians some who worship Buddha, or Boutta, whom they honour as a yod”; and in another passage he observes: “those of the Indians who are called Semnoi cultivate truth, foretell events, and reverence certain pyramids in which they imagine the bones of some divinity are deposited, they observe perpetual continence; there are also maidens termed Semnai.” Semnoi and Semnai might be thought to have some relation to Sramanas, but the words, perhaps, bear only their original purport, “venerable or sacred”.
About the middle of the following century, Porphyry repeats information gathered from Bardesanes, who obtained it from the Indian envoys sent to Anto
