'It was', they say, 'as easy for
the deity to write or dictate a battle, an amour, or any other
important event ten thousand years before as the day after it took
place'; and I believe nine-tenths, perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred,
of the Hindoo population believe implicitly that these accounts were
also written. It is now pretty clear that all these works are of
comparatively recent date, that the great poem of the Mahabharata
could not have been written before the year 786 of the Christian era,
and was probably written so late as A.D. 1157; that Krishna, _if born
at all_, must have been born on the 7th of August, A.D. 600, but was
most likely a mere creation of the imagination to serve the purpose
of the Brahmans of Ujain, in whom the fiction originated; that the
other incarnations were invented about the same time, and for the
same object, though the other persons described as incarnations were
real princes, Parasu Rama, before Christ 1176, and Rama, born before
Christ 961. In the Mahabharata Krishna is described as fighting in
the same army with Yudhishthira and his four brothers. Yudhishthira
was a real person, who ascended the throne at Delhi 575 B.
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