years before the commencement of our era, and with incessant labors and
long and repeated journeys to have lasted forty-five years, when at
about the age of eighty he died, or, as the Buddhists more truthfully
and more beautifully say, entered Nirvana.

HENRY T. NILES.
TOLEDO, January 1, 1894.

* * * * *

Since this work was in the hands of the printer I have read the recent
work of Bishop Copelston, of Columbo, Ceylon, and it was a source of no
small gratification to find him in all material points agreeing with
the result of my somewhat extensive investigations as given within, for
in Ceylon, if anywhere, we would expect accuracy. Here the great
Buddhist development first comes in contact with authentic history
during the third century B.C. in the reign of the great Asoka, the
discovery of whose rock inscriptions shed such a flood of light on
primitive Buddhism, while it still retained enough of its primitive
power, as we learn from those inscriptions themselves, to turn that
monarch from a course of cruel tyranny, and, as we learn from the
history of Ceylon, to induce his son and daughter to abandon royalty
and become the first missionaries to that beautiful island.

H.T.N.




INTRODUCTION.