440 ORISSA. faith that penetrated these remote jungles of the seaboard. For centuries before and after the birth of Christ, the rock caves of Orissa resounded with the chants of Buddhist monks. But about the fourth century of our era, Buddhism in Orissa began to lose its sharply marked identity, and gradually gave way to other developments of spiritual life, which took the form of Siva-worship. The great city temples, Bhuvaneswar, dedicated to Siva, dates from the seventh century. This worship in corporated the doctrines of the Aryan conquerors with the rites of the aboriginal races. The doctrines were spiritual, and it kept them in the inner sanctuary for its Aryan priests; the rites were gross and bloody, and it paraded them in the outer courts as an attraction to the mixed populace. It fixed its seat in the west of Puri District, where the mountains and forest tracts of Central India slope down on the alluvial plain. There it struck its roots deep in the ignorance and the fears of a people who knew God only by the more terrible manifestations of His power; as a God nighty indeed, but to be dreaded rather than loved. But side by side with Siva-worship, there can be dimly traced another spiritual form struggling into life. The worship of Vishnu likewise took its doctrines and all its inner mysteries from the ancient Aryan faith, and engrafted upon them rites which appealed to the imaginations and the passions of a tropical race. Both Sivaism and Vishnuism were attempts to bring the gods down to men. The former plunged boldly into the abyss of superstition, and erected its empire without shame or scruple upon the ignorance and terrors of the people. The worship of Vishnu shrank from such lengths, and tried to create a system wide enough and strong enough for a national religion, by mixing a somewhat less base alloy with the fine gold of Aryan spirituality. It was a religion in all things graceful. Its gols are bright, friendly beings, who walk and converse with men. Its legends breathe an almost Grecian beauty. But pastoral simplicities and an exquisite ritual had no chance against a system like Sivaism, that pandered to the grossest superstitions of the masses. The spiritual element in Vishnu-worship has no doubt always existed among the Aryani settlements throughout India. But its popular conquests have generally been subsequent to those of Sivaism; and this is the case in a very marked manner in Orissa. In the eleventh century, the Vishnuite doctrines were gathered into a great religious treatise. The Vishnu Purána, which dates from about 1045 A.])., probably represents, as indeed its name implies, 'ancient fornis of belief that had co-existed with Sivaism and Buddhism for centuries. It derives its system from the Vedas; not, however, in a direct channel, but filtered through the two great epic poems of the Rámáyana and the Mahabharata. It forms one of cighteen religious
