What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact that although Buddhism “became the state religion of India under Asōka, the Constantine of India, in the middle of the third century B.C.” (Max Müller), and was only declining in the seventh century A.D., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But that was not the case—on the contrary, it has become more and more involved, for there are now not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the subdivisions to which professions and occupations have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, looking down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion with some craftsman whose superior he deems himself to be. No wonder caste has been described as “a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of all employers of labour.” Life is, indeed, complicated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth falling upon a boiling pot defiles the food which it contains by an impurity which is almost worse than poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even in a European household, it has been said that no matter how low a menial may be, there is always someone a step lower to whom by payment he may assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning of the approaching contamination of his shadow. Max Müller, in his “Chips from a German Workshop,” quotes a table by Berghaus showing the relative numbers of the people professing the chief religions into which the world is divided. Nothing can better show the extent of the influence which Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind. Buddhists 31.2 Christians 30.7 Mohammedans 15.7 Brahmanists 13.4 Various heathens 8.7 Jews 0.3 In a note, Max Müller adds that: “As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssŭ Temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel.” [Illustration: PROFESSOR F. MAX-MÜLLER. _After a copyright photograph by Elliott & Fry, London._ [_To face p. 52._] _Ex Oriente lux._ We see from this table that all the chief religions of the world have their rise, like the sun, in the East.