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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
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tailed expansion of the doctrines ascribed to him to have been devised, as calculated to excite the admiration and win the belief of the natives of India, ever ready to give credit to the supernatural, and to pay superstitious homage to the assumption of divinity. Besides the inscriptions attributed to Asoka, he is said to have been a profuse constructor of Viháras, Buddhist monasteries, and of Sthúpas or monuments over Buddhist reliquia. Viháras were probably multiplied about this time or even earlier: we have not yet met with any Sthúpas to which so high an antiquity can be confidently assigned. It seems little likely that Sákya, or the first propagators of the system, would have enjoined the construction of monuments to preserve the frail relics of humanity, when their first dogma was the worthlessness of bodily existence, and it could not have been until Sákya was elevated by his followers to the rank of something more than a god that his relics, or those of his early disciples, should have been held entitled to such veneration; at any rate we have no evidence of the erection of any Sthúpa as early as the middle of the third century before Christ, whilst we have several proofs of their construction after the era of Christianity, down as late as the sixth century afterwards. These are afforded by the discovery, in the solid body of the monuments, of the coins of the consular families of Rome, and of the first Cæsars; of the coins of the emperors of Constantinople, Theodosius, Marcian, and Leo, who reigned from A.D. 407 to A. D. 474; and
