Page:Wanderings of a Pilgrim Vol 2.djvu/197

 I have an illuminated painting, which I purchased at Prāg, representing Mahadēo as a black man, with a crown of glory, leading a white horse, on which is a high native saddle, with a large bag pendant from each side, and above the saddle an umbrella (chatr), the emblem of royalty, and more especially indicative of Buddha, is fixed: the legs of the animal are dyed with menhdī up to the chest, and about a foot of the end of his tail is also dyed red: the horse is ornamented in the usual oriental style with jewellery and gold. It is evident that this is not a painting of the tenth or Kalkī avatar, as the horse has no wings; the saddle-bags, which, we may suppose, contain the doctrines which he brought with him upon a white horse, and the chatr, assign it to Buddha; the figure of the man has only two arms.

"From the most ancient times," says Abu'l Fazel, "down to the present, the learning and wisdom of Hindūstan has been confined to the Brahmans and the followers of Jaina; but, ignorant of each other's merits, they have a mutual aversion; Krishna, whom the Brahmans worship as god, these consider as an infernal slave; and the Brahmans carry their aversion so far as to say, that it is better to encounter a mad elephant than to meet a man of this persuasion."

The Buddhism of Hindūstan appears formerly to have had its central seat in Buddha Gaya, a town in Bengal, as it had at Buddha Bamiyan, the northern metropolis of the sect. Ceylon appears its present refuge. Buddhism is orthodoxy in China and its tributary nations; and in the states and empires of Cochin China, Cambodia, Siam, Pegu, Ava, Assam, Thibet, Budtan, many of the Tartar tribes, and generally all parts east of the Ganges, including many of those vast and numerous islands in the seas eastward and southward of the farther Indian promontory, whose inhabitants have not been converted to Islamism.

Jayadeva, in the Gita Govinda, thus addresses Buddha (or rather Vishn[)u] or Krishna, so incarnated), in his series of eulogy on each of the avatars:—"9. Thou blamest (O wonderful!) the whole veda, when thou seest, O kind-hearted! the slaughter of