When we turn from the Vedas, and try to investigate the origin of those religions that first opposed and finally absorbed the Vedas in their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans; all that was built was built by the Turanians, who wrote practically nothing. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books are ten centuries earlier, or possibly even more than that, while, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India. Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming every day more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native or at least of Turanian religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Yaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sakya Muni before his death in 543 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of faith, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas--according to the more usual accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and when he died, the father and mother’s name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but there seems no reason for doubting that they may have been real personages, and their dates extend back to a very remote antiquity.[37] The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death are equally recorded, all are in northern India, and though little else is known of them, they too may have existed. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary--some say the preceptor--of Sakya Muni.