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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
resplendent residents of this land have no sense (organs), live without nourishment, are exuberantly odoriferous and are sinless; they blind by their lustre the eyes of sinful men and are further described with other fabulous particularities (XII. 12,704, and ff.; see specially Sama-mushka chatuskah.) When we now remember that the Indians had had in their own land, for centuries together, sufficient contact with the Greeks, it appears to me unbelievable that an Indian mission in Alexandria, Asia Minor or Parthia should have brought back home impressions, which could have served as the basis of any such legend, developed in relatively so short a time. In favour of the supposition, [p. 32] that nothing substantial seems to lie at the back of the story, might be mentioned this circumstanceamongst others that the sages Ekata, Dvita and Trita are called the sons of the god Brahman, and more especially the fact that it is Narada who makes that fruitful journey to Svetad vipa; because Narada often emerges forth in the Indian literature serving as the intermediary between gods and men, and his home is as much in the heaven of the gods as on the earth of mortals. Moreover, the whole narration, in spite of the apparently Christian traces referred to above, bears a thoroughly Indian character.
Weber, loc. cit., is further of the opinion that the name Christ, son of the divine (?) Virgin after it became famous in India, might have reminded the Indians of (the name of) Krishna, the son of Devaki (i.e.. evidently of the divine goddess,) and thus it might as well be "that numerous Christian themes and legends, specially those of the birth of Christ amongst cowherds, of the stable and the asylum being the place of his birth, of the Bethlehamite slaughter of children, of the taxation of Emperor Augustine and such others reappear in the Indian legends of Krishna." According to the showing of Weber's suggestive essay "On the Krishnajanmashtami," however, the Christian elements in the Krishna-myth are to, be referred to so late a period that they hardly need be considered in connection with the question here treated of; and some traces, for which Weber supposes a Christian origin, are with certainty ascribed to a pre-Christian period (cf. Bhandarkar, Indian Antiquary, III, p. 14 ff.). Weber's opinion that we have probably to recognise even in the first century A.D. an influence of Christianity on India and more particularly on the doctines of Pâåñcharâtras is already refuted sufficiently by Lassen, I. A. K., II. 1121-1128; further, other weighty authorities have raised their weig Weber's theory.
No shadow of evidence has therefore upto now been brought forward to support the theory that [p. 88] the conception of Bhakti, with which we are immediately concerned, is derived from Christianity. The religious significance contained in the word Bhakti has nothing exclusively about it that is specifically Christian. Not only have devotion to God and faith in Him developed themselves gradually in other monotheistic religions: but even beyond the circle of monotheistic ideas, the two conceptions are to be found." And particularly in India we possess all the essentials on (the strength of) which we have to regard Bhakti as an "indigineous" fact as Barth says; since monotheistic ideas are to be found prevalent from (the time of) the Rigveda onward through almost all the periods of the religious history of India, and the powerful longings after the Divine, peculiar to the Indian soul from yore, must have developed such sentiments as Divine Love and Divine Faith in a popularly conceived monotheism.
Barth, Religione de l'Inde, 132 (= English Translation, p. 220-1).
