Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/52

50 to be in the south after the lapse of nine centuries, and locates Mahendra in a monastery to the south of the Kâviri, within easy reach of Ceylon, goes a long way to support the hypothesis that Mahendra really passed over to the island from a southern port on the mainland. That hypothesis is certainly much more probable than the Ceylonese story that he came flying through the air, 'as flies the king of swans.' Nor is it likely that his first discourse converted the king and forty thousand of his subjects.

But, notwithstanding the mythology which has gathered round his name, Mahendra or Mahinda, the younger brother of Asoka, was a real, historical personage, and there can be no doubt that he was a pioneer in the diffusion of Buddhism in Ceylon. The concurrence of Indian and Ceylonese traditions, and the existence of monuments bearing his name both in the island and on the mainland do not permit of scepticism as to his reality. But the Ceylonese version of the story which represents him as an illegitimate son of Asoka is unsupported, and is opposed to the Indian tradition as current in both Northern and Southern India, at Pâtaliputra and at Kânchî (Conjeeveram), and reported by Fa-hien at the beginning of the fifth century, as well as by Hiuen Tsang in 640. Even the monks of Ceylon, who met the later pilgrim at Kânchî, and told him the accepted legend of the conversion of their country, knew Mahendra as the younger