Notes on the Religious, Moral, and Political State of India before the Mahomedan Invasion, chiefly founded on the Travels of the Chinese Buddhist Priest Fa Hian in India, A.D.399, and on the Commentaries of Messrs. Rémusat, Klaproth, Burnouf, and Landresse
Our Sanskrit scholars have sought, in the depths of Brahmanical literature, for the means of illustrating the political, the religious, the moral, and social condition of that ancient people, over whose minds it has hitherto been believed, that Brahmans exercised from the earliest times unbounded sway. The inquirers sought for facts and they found fables; they looked for historic lights, and they found poetic coruscations, which served only to render the darkness in which truth was enveloped more impenetrable. An Orientalist, Mr. Wathen, has said, that on the Mussulman conquest of India the Brahmans destroyed all previous historical documents; they seem, nevertheless, to have carefully preserved, or invented, or adapted, such compositions in Sanskrit, as attested their own religious supremacy or establisbed their cosmogony; and which have fettered the minds of Indians, as well as foreigners, to an unreserved admission of such pretensions as in their arrogance, caprice, or selfishness, they chose to advance.
