Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/414

390 and Oojein, and still the first meridian of Indian astronomers. It also bore the name of Avantî = "the Protecting," from the circumstance of its having given refuge to this Vikramâditja in his infancy.

9. This length of reign is actually ascribed to him in the Chronological Table out of the Kalijuga-Râgakaritra, given in Journ. of the As. Soc. p. 496.

10. This resolution was quite in conformity with the prevailing religious teaching. In the collection of laws and precepts called the Manû, many rules are laid down for this kind of life, and were followed to a prodigious extent both by solitaries and communities; e. g. "When the grihastha = 'father of the house,' finds wrinkles and grey hairs coming, and when children's children are begotten to him, then it is time for him to forsake inhabited places for the jungle." It is further prescribed that he should expose himself there to all kinds of perils, privations, and hardships. He is not to shrink from encounters with inimical tribes; he is to live on wild fruits, roots, and water. In summer he is to expose himself to the heat of fierce fires, and in the rainy season to the wet, without seeking shelter; in the coldest winter he is to go clothed in damp raiment. By these, and such means, he was to acquire indifference to all corporeal considerations, and reach after union with the Highest Being. Manû, v. 29; vii. 1–30; viii. 28; x. 5; xi. 48, 53; xvii. 5, 7, 24; xviii. 3–5, &c., &c. It is impossible not to be struck, in studying such passages as these, with a reflection of the inferiority which every other religious system, even in its sublimest aims, presents to Christianity. If, indeed, there were a first uniform limit appointed to the hand of death at the age of threescore years and ten, then it might be a clever rule to fix the appearance of wrinkles, grey hairs, and children's children as the period for beginning to contemplate what is to come after it; but, as the number of those who are summoned to actual acquaintance with that futurity before that age is pretty nearly as great as that of those who surpass it, the maxim carries on the face of it that it is dictated by a very fallible, however well-intentioned, guide. Christianity knows no such limit, but opens its perfect teaching to the contemplation of "babes;" while, practically, experience shows that those who are called early to a life of religion are far more numerous than those in advanced years.

11. Given in W. Taylor's Orient. Hist. MSS., i. 199.

12. "The Indians have no actual history written by themselves." (Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 357, note 1.)

13. Klaproth, Würdigung der Asiatischen Geschichtschreiber.