Buddhism and Christianity are essentially unlike, no two religions more so, but no other worldwide religions have so many points of superficial resemblance. Some of these resemblances are natural or accidental. For instance, Christ and Buddha taught in parables, because, as Galen says, parables are the most instructive form of teaching for simple men. Again, Buddhism and Christianity lay stress on right conduct; and although Buddhists and Christians do not mean exactly the same thing by these words, both lay hold of great ethical principles. Such coincidences are in the nature of things. But the greater number are undoubtedly due to the secular contact of the two religions in Central Asia from the second to the twelfth century a.d., and they are confined of necessity to legend and to ritual.

The small cosmological tract I here publish, and which is attributed to Dionysius, Bishop of Athens, I have taken from the MS. marked 7192 Rich., now Add. 7192, of the British Museum. This is a MS. in quarto on vellum, containing not more than seventy-six folios, and belongs probably, so far as we can judge from the good esṭrangĕlô character in which it is written, to the eighth century. The treatise begins on f. 57c—there are two columns of thirty-one lines on every page—and ends on f. 63b at the bottom. It is followed by another tract from the hand of the same author—the contents and the style, and especially the concluding lines which are nearly identical to the last ones of the tract we publish, at least point to the same author—that bears the following inscription:

It is an anti-astrological and anti-magical tract, as it undertakes to demonstrate that divination by means of the “stars, the zodiacal signs, the horoscopes, the fortunes, the chances, the hours, the convulsions, the auguries, the divinations, and all the deception of the Chaldæans, sons of deception” is not to be relied upon, and is contradictory to the facts that daily observation affords us.

At the present moment scholars seem to be agreed about the date of Nahapāna, and some are of opinion that lie was the founder of the Śaka era. This theory was propounded by M. l'abbé Boyer in his paper entitled “Nahapāna et l'ère Śaka”. Though the theory has not met with general acceptance, eminent scholars are still to be found who maintain this opinion even at the present date. In 1913, during the great debate on the date of Kanishka, Dr. J. F. Fleet said, “I hold that the era [Śaka era] was founded by the Kshaharāta king Nahapāna, who reigned in Kāṭhiāwār and over some of the neighbouring territory as far as Ujjain from a.d. 78 to about a.d. 125, and held for a time Nāsik and other parts in the north of Bombay, and who seems to have been a Pahlava or Palhava, i.e. of Parthian extraction.” There are others who, though they do not assert that Nahapāna was the founder of the Śaka era, maintain that the dates in the inscriptions of his son-in-law Ushavadāta at Nasik and Karle, and of his minister Ayama at Junnar, are Śaka dates. Mr. V. A. Smith says, “Almost all students are agreed that the inscriptions and coins of the Chashṭana line of Satraps are dated in the Śaka era, and I see no reason for doubting that the Kshaharāta records are dated in the same way.”

In the autumn of 1915 I found at Buârâ a few leaves of a Persian MS. forming part of an unknown work devoted to the biography of the famous saint Shay Aḥmad-i-Jâm, surnamed Zindah-Fîl. There were only thirteen leaves, 23 by 18 and 16 by 13·5 cm., written on old Oriental paper, eighteen or nineteen lines in a page, in a comparatively elegant old character (like that of MSS. copied at Herât). This MS. was copied apparently in the tenth or eleventh century a.h. (The first page is written perhaps with a different qalam, but the hand seems to be the same as in the other parts.)

The frontispiece plate of Mr. H. G. Rawlinson's recent work, Intercourse between India and the Western-World (Cambridge, 1916), gives a very fine reproduction of two bas-reliefs, placed one above the other, from the famous Javanese stūpa of Boro-budur. The most conspicuous object shown in the lower panel is a sailing vessel, which the unknown artist has rendered with remarkable skill and vigour, whilst the remaining portion of it exhibits some six men (apparently belonging to the vessel in question) being hospitably received by another party of people whose quaint-shaped dwelling is visible in the background. The author, evidently with reference to this scene, has felt at liberty to label the illustration “A Hindu Ship arriving at Java”.