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of the district. At Varkkallai is the celebrated temple of Janardan, an avatar of Vishnu, visited by pilgrims from all parts of India; while numerous mineral springs in the vicinity make it a favorite health resort. {Imp. Gaz., XXIV, 300.)
58. Goman. — This is Cape Comorin, the southern extremity of the Indian peninsula (8° S' N., 77° 33’ E. ). The name is the Tamil form of the Sanscrit Kumari, virgin, which was applied to the goddess Durga, or Parvati, the consort of Siva.
Yule observes (Marco Polo, II, 882-3) that the monthly bathing in her honor is still continued; and according to the Imperial Gazetteer (X, 376), it is “one of the most important places of pilgrimage in Southern India.
In'-’the first century of the Christian era Rome, Parthia, India, and China were the four great powers of the world, of which the first and last were advancing, the others passing through political transformation. Of the world’s religions, the Buddhist, as Edmunds has well said ( Buddhist and Christian Gospels, 3d ed., Tokyo, 1905, p. 23), “was the most powerful on the planet. But it was no longer the Buddhism of the Emperor Asoka. The disintegration of the Maurya Empire had been followed by the rise of the Indo-Scythian power in the northwest, and of the Andhra in the Deccan. Both these were Buddhist, the Scythian Kanishka in the following century being the second great exponent of that faith; but the ways of the barbarian were not those of the Hindu, the two chief Buddhist powers were at war, and in 126 A. D. , when the Andhra king Vilivayakura II, or Gautamlputra Satakarni conquered, the queen-mother Balasrl set up a memorial at Karll telling how he “destroyed the Sakas, Yavanas, and Pahlavas . . . properly expended the taxes which he levied in accordance with the sacred law . . . and prevented the mixing of the four castes.” (Vincent Smith, Early History, 188.) To the north the great missionary movement through Turkestan and China had only just begun, while the race-migrations from the Hima- layas into Burma and Indo-China, which made of those kingdoms a bulwark of Buddhism in the middle ages, had not taken place. In Ceylon the native race, the Sinhalese, were heartily for the Law of Piety, as in Asoka’s day; but opposed to them racially and in matters religious, were their neighbors and ancient enemies, the Southern Dravidians, with their Aryan dynasties and caste-systems, who had never embraced the Buddhist doctrine, and whose primitive nature- worship was included bodily within the cult of the Hindu gods. Siva especially, “the auspicious,’’ Rudra of the Vedas-, the god of the storm, the destroyer and reproducer, was the deity venerated by the
