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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
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an individual of a speculative turn of mind, and not a Brahman by birth, should have set up a school of his own in opposition to the Brahmanical monopoly of religious instruction, about six centuries before Christ; at the same time there are various considerations which throw suspicion upon the narrative, and render it very problematical whether any such person as Śákya Sinha, or Śákya Muni, or Śramana Gautama, ever actually existed. In the first place, the Buddhists widely disagree with regard to the date of his existence. In a paper I published many years ago in the Calcutta Quarterly Magazine, I gave a list of thirteen different dates, collected by a Tibetan author, and a dozen others might be easily added, the whole varying from 2420 to 453 B.C. They may, however, be distinguished under two heads, that of the northern Buddhists, 1030 B.C. for the birth of Buddha, and that of the southern Buddhists, for his death B. C. 543. It is difficult, however, to understand why there should be such a difference as five centuries, if Śákya
had lived at either the one or the other date.
The name of his tribe, the Sákya, and their existence as a distinct people and principality, find no warrant from any of the Hindu writers, poetical, traditional, or mythological; and the legends that are given to explain their origin and appellation are, beyond measure, absurd. The most probable affinity of the name is to that of the Sakas, or Scythians, or Indo-Scythians, as if they were an offshoot from the race that dislodged the Indo-Bactrian Greeks, but
