Occult records show differently.  They say—­challenging proof to the contrary—­that Alexander never penetrated into India farther than Taxila; which is not even quite the modern Attock.  The murmuring of the Macedonian’s troops began at the same place, and not as given out, on the banks of the Hyphasis.  For having never gone to the Hydaspes or Jhelum, he could not have been on the Sutlej.  Nor did Alexander ever found satrapies or plant any Greek colonies in the Punjab.  The only colonies he left behind him that the Brahmans ever knew of, amounted to a few dozens of disabled soldiers, scattered hither and thither on the frontiers; who with their native raped wives settled around the deserts of Karmania and Drangaria—­the then natural boundaries of India.  And unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians.  The boasted “invasion of India” was confined to the regions between Karmania and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south and north:  countries which were all India for the Greek of those days.  His building a fleet on the Hydaspes is a fiction; and his “victorious march through the fighting armies of India,” another.  However, it is not with the “world conqueror” that we have now to deal, but rather with the supposed accuracy and even casual veracity of his captains and countrymen, whose hazy reminiscences on the testimony of the classical writers have now been raised to unimpeachable evidence in everything that may affect the chronology of early Buddhism and India.

Foremost among the evidence of classical writers, that of Flavius Arrianus is brought forward against the Buddhist and Chinese chronologies.  No one should impeach the personal testimony of this conscientious author had he been himself an eye-witness instead of Megasthenes.  But when a man comes to know that he wrote his accounts upon the now lost works of Aristobulus and Ptolemy; and that the latter described their data from texts prepared by authors who had never set their eyes upon one line written by either Megasthenes or Nearchus himself; and that knowing so much one is informed by Western historians that among the works of Arrian, Book vii. of the “Anabasis of Alexander,” is “the chief authority on the subject of the Indian invasion—­a book unfortunately with a gap in its twelfth chapter”—­one may well conceive upon what a broken reed Western authority leans for its Indian chronology.  Arrian lived over 600 years after Buddha’s death; Strabo, 500 (55 “B.C."); Diodorus Siculus—­quite a trustworthy compiler!—­about the first century; Plutarch over 700 anno Buddhae, and Quintus Curtius over 1,000 years!  And when, to crown this army of witnesses against the Buddhist annals, the reader is informed by our Olympian critics that the works of the last-named author—­than