Monier-Williams suggests that it is possible that human sacrifice was at one time part of the Brahmanical system and adduces the story of Hariskandra and Sunahsepa as an evidence of that practice.[173] In this legend, Hariskandra, being childless, prays to Varuna to grant him a son, vowing to sacrifice him to the god. A son is born but the father does not keep his word, and when the son reaches the age of discretion he refuses to become a victim. From a starving Brahman he purchases a son for one hundred cows, but this victim escapes by being adopted by the priest Visvamitra who is a royal sage.[174] In the Purushamedha, or the section of the Satapatha-Brahmana dealing with the human sacrifice, a large number of men and women are bound to eleven sacrificial posts, and after the necessary rites have been performed on them, they are set free and eleven animals are killed instead. That in times previous to this adoption human beings had been sacrificed, there is no doubt. Despite all that can be said in favour of the Buddhistic religion and the reforms that it wrought, it is not possible to find that it made any change in the attitude of the Hindus toward their children or the practices of the day as did the religion of Christ and later the religion of Mohammed, one of which sanctified the child, while the other expressly forbade infanticide. Laying down the law that life was a period of suffering and humility, the Buddhistic religion still declared that Nirwana was not obtainable by those under seven, so that the life of the child did not take on any increased value under the new religion of Gautama. It was natural that with no forceful check on infanticide contained in the new religion, the primitive idea so well planted should spread and become stronger rather than diminish. It is therefore not surprising that in the Manava-dharma-castra ascribed by Burnell[175] to the period between the year 1 A.D. to the year 500, the daughter is placed very low in the scale of things human: “184—Children, old people, the poor and sick, are to be known [to be] lords of the sky; an elder brother is equal to a father; a wife and son are one’s own body. “185—And one’s own servants are one’s own shadow; a daughter is the chief miserable object. Therefore offended by these, one should always bear it without heat.”[176] That infanticide was so common in the time of Alexander that it attracted the attention even of that Greek in his march of conquest through the country, is evident in the records that he brought back. Q. Curtius Rufus relates,[177] that on entering the kingdom of Sophytes, Alexander was astonished at the wisdom of the laws of this barbarian. According to Curtius and Diodorus, Sophytes was governor of a territory west of the Hyphasis while according to Arrian it lay along the banks of the Hydaspes.