Memoir On The History Of The Tooth-Relic Of Ceylon:- With A Preliminary Essay On The Life And System Of Gautama Buddha

The ideas and facts comprised in this volume are principally drawn from materials for a memoir which he had recently the honour of communicating to the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. But even though that remarkable period during which Gautama Buddha flourished had nothing extraordinary to interest us, the attractive beauty of his life, and the great influence exercised till the present day over an immense section of mankind by his system?an offshoot though it be of the Indian mind, not in the fresh days of its prime and vigour, but at a memorable epoch when the Aryan feudalism, so to speak, tracing back its origin to an economical law lying at the very root of Indian society. Its reproduction in a more accessible form here from the Journal of that learned Society is, however, fraught with one disadvantage?that the fortunes of Gautama Buddha?s tooth are in general too remote from the sympathies of those not professing his creed to find favour with them. This book is a short treatise on the history of the fabled Toothrelic of the Buddha in Ceylon. The book starts with 5 chapters on the life of the Buddha and Buddhist philosophy and then 9 further chapters on the fate of the Tooth from its removal from the funeral pyre of the Buddha to its journey to Ceylon where it was supposedly captured and destroyed by the Portuguese and it reappearance.