no material evidence of them exists, nor in the often-repeated assertion that Asoka built 84,000 dagobas,[1] to receive relics. That he built several is quite certain. The fact of the relics of two of the favourite disciples of Buddha—Mogalana and Sariputra—and of ten of the principal dignitaries of the Buddhist Church in the time of Asoka having been found at Sanchi in topes certainly anterior to the Christian era,[2] is quite sufficient for our present purpose. As is well known, the Tooth relic, whose history can be traced back with certainty for more than fifteen centuries, is now worshipped under British protection in Ceylon.
No such form of worship existed in classical antiquity, nor is it quite clear how it came to be adopted by the Christian Church. Buddhism was a reform of a material, ancestral-worshipping, body-respecting form of religion. The sepulchral tumulus with them became in consequence a dagoba, or relic shrine, containing a bone, or a vessel, or rag, or something that belonged to Buddha or some of his followers; and all the grosser superstitions of the Turanian natives, whose faith he was trying to elevate and refine, were sublimated into something immaterial and more pure. But Christianity never could have wanted this, and its adoption of relic worship was either a piece of blind imitation adopted without thinking, among other things, for which there was more excuse, or it was one of the many instances of the toleration of foreign elements which characterized the Christian priesthood in the early age of the Church.
It is as little clear when this worship was introduced as why it was done, for Christian legends in regard to relics are not more to be depended upon than those of the Buddhists. It could not have been common in the days of Clemens of Alexandria, or he would not have mentioned as a wonder that the Indians worshipped a bone enclosed in a pyramid;[3] but shortly after Constantine's time the fashion became prevalent, and the miracles performed by the touch of relics became one of the favourite delusions of the middle ages. If this is correct, and we are justified in assuming
