“ ‘Where are you going, M. Körösi?’ asked the Count.
“ ‘I am going to Asia in search of our relatives,’ was the answer. [[xxiii]]
“And thus he really went … undergoing, as may easily be conceived, all the hardships and privations of a traveller destitute of means, living upon alms, and exposed, besides, to the bitter deception of not having found the looked-for relatives. And still he went on in his unflagging zeal, until, assisted by your noble countrymen, he was able to raise himself a memorial by his Tibetan studies.
“I suppose that, when dying in Ladak … he always had his eyes directed to the steppes north of Tibet, to the Tangus country, where, of course, he would have again been disillusioned.
“Körösi was therefore a victim to unripe philological speculation, like many other Hungarian scholars unknown to the world. But his name will be always a glory to our nation, and I am really glad to hear that [some one] … has devoted time to refresh the memory of that great man.—Yours very sincerely,
“A. Vámbéry.
“Budapest, February 20, 1882.”
About the time when Csoma Körösi was starting from Bucharest on his adventurous pilgrimage, another equally genuine and disinterested scholar, Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, was commencing his long residence in Nepal. Living continuously in that country for three-and-twenty years, and occupying from 1831 to 1843 the important post of British Resident at Kathmandu, he was able to succeed in making the immense collections of Buddhistic works which he afterwards, with a generosity as great as his industry, made gratuitously accessible to European scholars. “The real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha,” says Professor Max Müller (“Chips,” i. 190), “dates from the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal.” But there is no need to dwell here on the well-known fact that an immense amount of [[xxiv]]such Sanskrit literature was discovered by Mr. Hodgson in Nepal, and presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Société Asiatique of Paris. We have at present to deal only with the stores of information which he extracted from Tibet. Mr. Hodgson not only established the fact, Professor Max Müller goes on to say, “that some of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered had existed in the monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of our era,” but he also showed that “the whole of that collection had, five or six hundred years later, when Buddhism became definitely established in Tibet, been translated into the language of that country.” Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans, translated into their language from Sanskrit, Mr. Hodgson received a copy as a present from the Dalai Lama, and this he presented to the East India Company. As early as 1828 he printed in the “Asiatic Researches” (vol. xvi.) an article on Nepal and Tibet, in which he stated that “the body of Bhotiya [i.e., Tibetan] literature now is, and long has been, a mass of translations from Sanskrit; its language native; its letters (like its ideas) Indian.”[21] To that statement he in 1837 appended this note: “It is needless now to say how fully these views have been confirmed by the researches of De Körös. It is but justice to myself to add that the real nature of the Kahgyur and Stangyur was expressly stated and proved by me to the secretary of the Asiatic Society some time before M. De Körös’s ample revelations were made. Complete copies of both collections have been presented by me to the Honourable East India Company, and others procured for the Asiatic Society, Calcutta: upon the latter M. De Körös worked.” It was a fortunate combination which brought the special knowledge and the patient industry of Csoma Körösi into contact with the immense mass of materials obtained by Mr. Hodgson from Tibet. [[xxv]]
Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans the following description is given by Professor Max Müller, who refers to Köppen’s “Religion des Buddha” as his authority:[22]—“It consists of two collections, commonly called the Kanjur and Tanjur. The proper spelling of their names is Bkah-hgyur, pronounced Kah-gyur,[23] and Bstan-hgyur, pronounced Tan-gyur. The Kanjur consists, in its different editions, of 100, 102, or 108 volumes folio. It comprises 1083 distinct works. The Tanjur consists of 225 volumes folio, each weighing from four to five pounds in the edition of Peking. Editions of this colossal code were printed at Peking, Lhassa, and other places. The edition of the Kanjur published at Peking, by command of the Emperor Khian-Lung, sold for £600. A copy of the Kanjur was bartered for 7000 oxen by the Buriates, and the same tribe paid 1200 silver roubles for a complete copy of the Kanjur and Tanjur together. Such a jungle of religious literature—the most excellent hiding-place, we should think, for Lamas and Dalai-Lamas—was too much even for a man who could travel on foot from Hungary to Tibet. The Hungarian enthusiast, however, though he did not translate the whole, gave a most valuable analysis of this immense Bible in the seventeenth volume of the ‘Asiatic Researches,’ sufficient to establish the fact that the principal portion of it was a translation from the same Sanskrit originals which had been discovered in Nepal by Mr. Hodgson.”
The Sanskrit works which Mr. Hodgson so generously presented to the Asiatic Society of Paris were soon turned to good account. From them M. Eugène Burnouf drew the materials for his celebrated “Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien.” But of the Tibetan sacred writings, [[xxvi]]which were also rendered available to European students, no great use has ever been made except by two scholars. Csoma Körösi, as has been already stated, published an “Analysis of the Tibetan Work entitled the Kah-gyur,” and an “Abstract of the Contents of the Bstan-hgyur;” and M. P. E. Foucaux brought out at Paris in 1847 his “Rgya Tch’er Rol Pa, ou Développement des Jeux, contenant l’Histoire du Bouddha Çakya-Mouni, traduit sur la Version Tibétaine du Bhahhgyour, et Revu sur l’Original Sanskrit (Lalitavistâra).” M. Foucaux’s excellent work is too well known to require more than a passing notice here. But as Csoma Körösi’s Analyses are probably less familiar, it may be well to extract from them a short account of the different sections of the colossal Tibetan collection.