Art. V.—A Trilingual List of Nāga Rājās, from the Tibetan

Extract

The Lāmas, as is well known, have preserved in very full form much archaic Indian lore, now otherwise imperfectly known or altogether lost. And a valuable feature of such Lāmaist literature is the frequent use of bilingual names, where the Sanskrit name is supplemented by a most careful etymological translation into Tibetan, thus enabling us to fix the etymology of many of the Hindū and Buddhist mythological and historical names, regarding which vague guesses are often hazarded. These Tibetan etymologies, though not necessarily the true ones, are certainly those which over a thousand years ago were the current traditional etymologies in India. And as, even apart from etymological features, categorical lists of little known personages, mythological or prehistoric, are helpful to students of both Buddhism and Hinduism, I here give a list of Nāga Rājās from the Mahācyutpatti, in the bsTan-hgyur (Tén-gyur) section of the Lāmaist Scriptures. This list, which may be compared with that in the Vāyu Purāna, seems to include many of the Vedic terrestrial Nāga Kings, the aboriginal enemies of the primitive Aryans, whose more direct descendants are now confined chiefly to the remote hills of Nāgpur, Chhoṭa Nāgpur, etc., etc. Tibetan literature contains much information about these Nāgas, one of Buddha's titles being ‘King of the powerful Nāgas.’