Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/83

Rh yet in remote antiquity millions of Indians and millions of Chinese saw it, as well probably as millions of pre-Columbian Mexicans and Mayas. Such similarities can be traced between numerous characteristics of Indian folk-lore and what appear as repetitions with but slight modifications in Chinese Literature as early as the fourth century B.C. But, since no intercourse has been shown to have taken place between India and China at that early date, I am inclined to think that the connecting link lies far back in prehistoric periods when the foundations of popular tradition on both sides were laid either in China, or in India, if not elsewhere. We need not be surprised to find that these Indian traditions do not appear in the earlier Chinese Literature. The reason may be that all we know of Chinese history and popular life previous to the fourth century B.C. has been transmitted by Confucianist writers, who would not place on record ideas at variance with their own. But for this one-sidedness of the earliest historians the Chinese would perhaps appear to us entirely different in character from what they seem to have been when seen through the eyes of Confucianists. Those Indian reminiscences, first placed on record in the fourth century B.C., may have been current in China from ages immemorial. Who can tell where and when they originated? Mythological and legendary ideas and folk-lore may have been the property of a nation for a thousand years or more before they make their appearance in its literature. The mere fact of foreign ideas of any kind being thus traced in a literature need not, therefore, be looked upon as proof of their having been imported from abroad, unless it can be shown under what circumstances they traveled from one country to another. This is, however, not the case with the foreign allusions in the Chinese Literature of the fourth century B.C. As late as the end of the second century B.C. India was a terra incognita to the Chinese. Had it been known earlier, the account of Chang K'ién, the discoverer, whose attention was