The evidence on which Orientalists have to rely in fixing the date of the Buddhist scriptures is confessedly such “that we must not be surprised if those who are accustomed to test historical and chronological evidence in reference to Greece and Rome declined to be convinced by it.”[71] For centuries after the death of Buddha his followers assure us that they had no written books constituting their rules of faith and manners. The earliest written collection of which in their own records we have any historical trace is that of Ceylon, and all that can be said of it is “that there is nothing improbable” that part of it may have been reduced to writing about the first century B.C., but the whole was only fixed about 420 A.D. The Nepaulese collection is said to date only from the first Christian century; but it is not alleged that the whole of the works now in it were even then in existence. According to their own tradition, they had no written biography of Buddha till about the first century of our era, and no one who has examined that narrative or read the opinions expressed by Orientalists as to the date when it was produced—opinions so divergent as to indicate a difference of several centuries—would ever dream of employing it as evidence of what is alleged in it to have happened. It is simply impossible, therefore, to regard the Buddhist’s Pitakas as if they were of similar authoritative value with the New Testament, for, in fact, in respect of canonical worth they do not deserve to be ranked with much of our later patristic literature.