Page:A Record of the Buddhist Religion as practised in India and the Malay Archipelago.djvu/18

 even Mexican races. To say that the art of writing was kept secret, that the Brâhmans probably kept one copy only of each work for themselves, learnt it by heart and taught it to their pupils, shows what imagination can do in order to escape from facts. The facts on which I base my negative vote are these:—

The inscriptions of Asoka are still the earliest inscriptions in India which can be dated, and the tentative character of the local alphabets in which they are written forms in my eyes a proof of the recent introduction of alphabetic writing in different parts of India. I see no reason to doubt the possibility that the Brâhmans were acquainted with alphabetic writing at an earlier time, and I should hail any discovery like that of Major Deane (if indeed they are Indian inscriptions) as an important addition to the history of the migrations of the Hieratic or so-called Phenician alphabet. But that is very different from asserting that writing was known, or must have been known, whether for monumental or literary purposes, before say 400 B.C. I have still to confess my ignorance of any book having been written on palm leaves or paper before the time of Vattagâmani (88-76 B.C.), or of any datable inscription before the time of Asoka.

But though the works of Chinese pilgrims throw little light on the ancient literature, or even on what I called the Renaissance period up to 400 A.D., they have proved of great help to us in fixing the dates of Sanskrit writers whom they either knew personally or who had died not long before their times. I pointed this out in a paper on the Kâsikâvritti published in the Academy, October 2, 1880.

Professor von Boehtlingk, in the introduction to his edition of Pânini's Grammar (p. iv), referred the Kâsikâ-vritti to about the eighth century A. D., on the supposition that Vâmana, the author of the Kâsikâ,