success of the new building. At almost
as early a period the _Mahava[=n]sa_, composed in the fifth century
A.D., fixes the appearance of the Nirgrantha in the island of Ceylon. It
is said that the king Pa[n.][d.]ukabhaya, who ruled in the beginning of
the second century after Buddha, from 367-307 B.C. built a temple and a
monastery for two Nirgranthas. The monastery is again mentioned in the
same work in the account of the reign of a later king Va[t.][t.]agamini,
cir. 38-10 B.C. It is related that Va[t.][t.]agamini being offended by the
inhabitants, caused it to be destroyed after it had existed during the
reigns of twenty one kings, and erected a Buddhist Sa[.n]gharama in its
place. The latter piece of information is found also in the
_Dipava[=n]sa_ of more than a century earlier. [Footnote: Turnour,
_Mahava[.n]sa_, pp. 66-67 and p. 203, 206: _Dipava[=n]sa_ XIX
14; comp. also Kern, _Buddhismus_, Bd. I, S. 422. In the first
passage in the _Mahava[.n] sa_, three Nigha[n.][t.]as are introduced
by name, Jotiya, Giri, and Kumbha[n.][d.]a. The translation incorrectly
makes the first a Brahma[n.] and chief engineer.]

None of these works can indeed be looked upon as a truly historical
source. There are, even in those paragraphs which treat of the oldest
history after Buddha's death, proofs enough that they simply hand down a
faulty historical tradition. In spite of this, their statements on the
Nirgrantha, cannot be denied a certain weight, because they are closely
connected on the one side with the Buddhist canon, and on the other they
agree with the indisputable sources of history, which relate to a slightly
later period.

The first authentic information on Vardhamana's sect is given by our
oldest inscriptions, the religious edicts of the Maurya king A['s]oka,
who, according to tradition was anointed in the year 219 after Buddha's
death, and--as the reference to his Grecian contemporaries, Antiochos,
Magas, Alexander, Ptolemaeus and Antigonas confirms,--ruled, during the
second half of the third century B.C. over the whole of India with the
exception of the Dekhan. This prince interested himself not only in
Buddhism, which he professed in his later years, but he took care, in a
fatherly way, as he repeatedly relates, of all other religious sects in
his vast kingdom. In the fourteenth year of his reign, he appointed
officials, called law-superintendents, whose duty it was to watch over the
life of the different communities,