[137]Published by Messrs. Macmillan & Co. Shway Yoe is an assumed name. The author’s real name is Scott.
[138]I was told when in Ceylon, that many monasteries in the Kandyan provinces had misappropriated their endowments and dropped the schools, which they were bound to keep up.
[139]Notes illustrative of Buddhism as the daily religion of the Buddhists of Ceylon, by J. F. Dickson, M. A. Oxon.
[140]This is the derivation given by Childers; one might otherwise have been inclined to suspect some connexion with Preta, a ghost (pp. [121], [219] of this volume).
[141]The texts and commentaries of some of these were collected by M. Grimblot, and translated with notes by M. Leon Feer, in the Journal Asiatique. The Tibetan Pirit is said to consist of only thirteen Suttas.
[142]A cold climate necessitates the addition of trousers, and boots and occasionally shoes are worn.
[143]This is probably permitted with a view to prevent the study of Mongolian from entirely dying out. It is certain that, although the Buddhist sacred books have long been translated into Mongolian, Chinese, and Tungusic, only the Tibetan texts are esteemed as canonical.
[144]The indomitable persevering Hungarian traveller, Alexander Csoma de Körös, already mentioned (at [p. 70]), was the first European to throw light on the Tibetan language. He had been impelled to acquire it by the task he had imposed on himself of searching out the progenitors of his race. More than eighty years ago he set out on his travels, and his search ultimately brought him to Tibet. There he devoted himself to the study of the Tibetan language and its sacred literature, taking up his abode in the monastery of Pugdal, in defiance of intense cold and other hardships. But his heroic energy did not end there. In 1831 he travelled from Tibet to Calcutta, and in that city, about the year 1834, published his Grammar and Dictionary of the Tibetan language, besides his table of contents of the Kanjur and the extra-canonical treatises. At length fancying himself qualified for the accomplishment of his self-inflicted task, he started off again, and died in Sikkim in April 1842. He is buried at Dārjīling. We Englishmen, who ought to have taken the greatest share in these linguistic conquests—so important in their bearing on the interests of our Indian frontier—have hitherto, to our great discredit, almost entirely neglected them. Meanwhile, St. Petersburg and Paris have founded chairs of the Tibetan language, and nearly all that has been effected for promoting the study of Tibetan has been due to Russian and French scholars, and to German and Moravian missionaries, especially to Jäschke and Hyde.
I am glad, however, to see from the annual address delivered by the President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and published in the Report for February, 1888, that this reproach is now being wiped out by our fellow-subjects in India. Babu Pratāpa Chandra Ghosha is bringing out in the Bibliotheca Indica the Tibetan translation of the Buddhistic work Prajñā-pāramitā, forming the second division of the Kanjur, while Mr. Sarat Chandra Dās, C.I.E., is editing the Tibetan version of the Avadāna-Kalpalatā (a store-house of legends of Buddha’s life and acts), and compiling a Tibetan-Sanskṛit-English Dictionary. Great credit is due to our Indian Government for the publication of Jäschke’s Tibetan-English Dictionary.
[145]As corpses are exposed to be devoured by animals in Tibet human bones are easily obtained for this purpose.