At this date Seleucus Nicator sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to King Chandragupta at Patna. His account of the India of that day is, unfortunately, lost; but through Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Arrian, and Clement of Alexandria, some valuable fragments have come down to us. Patna, it must be remembered, was in the heart of the Buddhist Holy Land. Clement of Alexandria cites a passage from Megasthenes about the Indian "philosophers." "Of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanæ (Sramanas) and other Brahmins. And those of the Sarmanæ, who are called Hylobii, neither inhabit cities nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands. Like those called Encratites in the present day, they know not marriage, nor begetting of children. Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Strabo also describes the Brahmins and the Hylobii, or Germanes, with similar details. He draws a distinction between the Germanes and the Brahmins on the subject of continency, the Brahmins being polygamists. No doubt these Sarmanæ and Brahmins of Megasthenes were the Brahmins and Buddhist Sramanas, or ascetics. To the first were confided sacrifices and ceremonies. They were a caste apart, and none outside this caste could officiate. Their ideas of life and death, it is announced, were similar to those of Plato and the Greeks. The Brahmins ate flesh and had many wives. Every new year there was a great synod of them. They dwelt in groves near the great cities on "couches of leaves and skins." The Hylobii, on the other hand, insisted on absolute continence and strict vegetarianism, and water drinking. Clitarchus gives us an additional fact from Megasthenes. The Hylobii "derided the Brahmins." "By their means," says Strabo, "kings serve and worship God." (See for all that can be recovered from Megasthenes, Cory, "Ancient Fragments," pp. 225-227.) That the Buddhists at first were wandering beggars without any convents is the opinion of the Russian Orientalist, Wassiljew, who supports it from a valuable Chinese history by Daranatha. It asserts that the King Ajatasatru passed Varsha or Lent in a graveyard; and that until the date of Upagupta, a contemporary of Asoka, there were no temples. The first was built at Mathura. (Ch. iv., cited by Wassiljew, "Buddhism," p. 41.) Daranatha asserts that a disciple of Ananda reached Cashmir. M. Wassiljew remarks that this would mean a spread of the doctrines in intermediate lands. I must point out that the first ritual of Buddhism was the "Praise of the Seven Mortal Buddhas," who were worshipped, as Gen. Cunningham has shown from the Bharhut Stupa, in the form of trees. This seems to have been the sole form of worship even in the days of King Asoka, who enjoins his subjects to worship round Buddha's tree, the ficus indicus.