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the date as follows:—Bhagavati Parinirvrittee Samvat 1819 Karttike badi 1 Budhi—that is 'in the year 1819 of the Emancipation of Bhagavata on Wednesday, the first day of the waning moon of Kartik.' If the era here used is the same as that of the Buddists of Ceylon and Burmah, which began in 543 b. c., the date of this inscription will be 1819—543=a. d. 1276. The style of the letters is in keeping with this date, but is quite incompatible with that derivable from the Chinese date of the era. The Chinese place the death of Buddha upwards of 1000 years before Christ, so that according to them, the date of this inscription would be about a. d. 800, a period much too early for the style of character used in the inscription. But as the day of the week is here fortunately added, the date can be verified by calculation. According to my calculation the date of the inscription corresponds with Wednesday, the 17th September a. d. 1342. This would place the Nirvana of Buddha in 477 b. c., which is the very year that was first proposed by myself as the most probable date of that event. This corrected date has since been adopted by Professor Max Müller."
The reasons assigned by some Orientalists for considering this so-called "corrected date" as the real date of Buddha's death have already been noticed and criticized in the preceding article;*[1] and now we have only to consider whether the inscription in question disproves the old date.
Major General Cunningham evidently seems to take it for granted, as far as his present calculation is concerned, that the number of days in a year is counted in the Magadha country by Buddhist writers in general on the same basis on which the number of days in a current English year is counted; and this wrong assumption has vitiated his calculation and led him to a wrong conclusion. Three different methods of calculation were in use in India at the time when
- ↑ * See "Replies to Inquiries suggested by Esoteric Buddhism," Theosophist, vol. v., pp. 35—43.
