... the conclusion
there arrived at is that the date of its composition is to be placed at
the commencement of the Christian era in an epoch when the operation of
the Greek influence upon India had already set in!" (p. 194.) The case
is hopeless. If the "internal chronology" and external fitness of
things, we may add presented in the triple Indian epic, did not open the
eyes of the hypercritical professors to the many historical facts
enshrined in their striking allegories; if the significant mention of
"black Yavanas," and "white Yavanas," indicating totally different
peoples, could so completely escape their notice;* and the enumeration
of a host of tribes, nations, races, clans, under their separate
Sanskrit designations in the Mahbharata, had not stimulated them to try
to trace their ethnic evolution and identify them with their now living
European descendants, there is little to hope from their scholarship
except a mosaic of learned guesswork. The latter scientific mode of
critical analysis may yet end some day in a consensus of opinion that
Buddhism is due wholesale to the "Life of Barlaam and Josaphat," written
by St.
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