Whatever momentary success may have attended the preaching of Buddha, no
traces of his pious labours long survived him in Ceylon. The mass of its
inhabitants were still aliens to his religion, when, on the day of his
decease, B.C. 543, Wijayo[1], the discarded son of one of the petty
sovereigns in the valley of the Ganges[2] effected a landing with a
handful of followers in the vicinity of the modern Putlam.[3] Here he
married the daughter of one of the native chiefs, and having speedily
made himself master of the island by her influence, he established his
capital at Tamana Neuera[4], and founded a dynasty, which, for nearly
eight centuries, retained supreme authority in Ceylon.

[Footnote 1: Sometimes spelled _Wejaya_. TURNOUR has demonstrated that
the alleged concurrence of the death of Buddha and the landing of Wijayo
is a device of the sacred annalists, in order to give a pious interest
to the latter event, which took place about sixty years later.--Introd
_Mahawanso_, p. liii.]

[Footnote 2: To facilitate reference to the ancient divisions of India,
a small map is subjoined, chiefly taken from Lassen's _Indische
Alterthumskunde_.

[Illustration: MAP OF ANCIENT INDIA.]]

[Footnote 3: BURNOUF conjectures that the point from which Wijayo set
sail for Ceylon was the Godavery, where the name of Bandar-maha-lanka
(the Port of the Great Lanka), still commemorates the event.--_Journ.
Asiat._ vol. xviii. p. 134. DE COUTO, recording the Singhalese tradition
as collected by the Portuguese, he landed at Preature (Pereatorre),
between Trincomalie and Jaffna-patam, and that the first city founded by
him was Mantotte.--_Decade_ v. l. 1. c. 5.]

[Footnote 4: See a note at the end of this chapter, on the landing of
Wijayo in Ceylon, as described in the _Mahawanso_.]

[Sidenote: B.C. 543.]

The people whom he mastered with so much facility are described in the
sacred books as _Yakkhos_ or "demons,"[1] and _Nagas_[2], or "snakes;"
designations which the Buddhist historians are supposed to have employed
in order to mark their contempt for the uncivilised aborigines[3], in
the same manner that the aborigines in the Dekkan were denominated
goblins and demons by the Hindus[4], from the fact that, like the
Yakkhos of Ceylon, they too were demon worshippers. The Nagas, another
section of the same superstition, worshipped the cobra de capello as an
emblem of the destroying power. These appear to have chiefly inhabited
the norther