The K. al-Mashyakha is a manual for Nuṣayrī shaykhs. Its significance as a window into the otherwise secret world of Nuṣayrī ritual was augmented by the role it played in the formation of Nuṣayrī studies: in 1860, it served as the basis for the first monograph on the Nuṣayrī religion, Samuel Lyde's posthumously published Asian Mystery. However, for over 150 years, the K. al-Mashyakha has been missing. This article announces its rediscovery in two identical manuscripts and identifies two additional works based on this text, the well-known Nuṣayrī catechism, K. Taʿlīm diyānat al-nuṣayriyya, and the recently published K. al-Mashyakha issued by the Lebanese press, Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa. In solving the mystery of its disappearance and rediscovery in two copies, this article provides new insight into the nineteenth-century Nuṣayrī world from which the K. al-Mashyakha emerged, as well as that of the European orientalists who pioneered this field.

Modern scholars approach Amīr Khusraw's Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as either a historical maavī that relates Delhi Sultanate conquests or as a romantic maavī that combines the love story between the crown prince and a Hindu princess with tragedy resulting from their fate. While the content of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān is well known, the form of the text and its implications for reading both history and romance remains unexplored. Reading the form inverts the historic and romantic division of the text. It reveals the historical elements as romantic panegyric created by Khusraw in praise of the Delhi Sultanate and the romance as a source-based historical biography.

The Mongol conquest of Tibet has been poorly understood. ‘Traditional’ Mongol and Tibetan accounts, in comparatively late sources, tell of a submission to Chinggis Khan by Tibetan chieftains. This version of history was rejected some time ago, and replaced with an account that begins with a Mongol invasion of Tibet in 1240. Problems with clarifying this issue include the often poor quality of Tibetan sources, the confusion of Tibet and Tangut (Xi Xia) in Persian sources, and misunderstanding by modern scholars of Chinese terms relating to Tibet. In fact, Chinese sources make clear that there was considerable contact between the Mongols and Tibet before 1240. Chinggis Khan may never have invaded Tibet, but undoubtedly had the intention of doing so. The picture that emerges is of a gradual conquest, with early incursions across the borders of Tibet followed by more penetrating invasions in the 1240s and 1250s.

The story of Vijaya, has long been central to the Sinhalese idea of themselves as a distinct ethnic group of Aryan origin with ancient roots in the island of Lanka. The ‘national’ chronicle of the Sinhalese, the Mahāvaṃsa (circa fifth century ce) presents Vijaya, an exiled prince from India descended from a lion, as the founder hero of Sinhala civilisation. In a companion article to this, I argued that the narrative of Vijaya and other founder-heroes in the Mahāvaṃsa revolves around the theme of transgression, and that this puzzling fact can only be explained by a consideration of the symbolic logic of the ‘stranger-king’ in origin stories and kingship rituals worldwide. In the present article, I look at other ways of explaining the narrative of Sīhabāhu, Vijaya, and Paṇḍukābhaya. First I break down the narrative into four different origin stories and consider their distribution in a range of texts from South Asia in order to reflect on possible textual inspirations for them (and even consider parallels with the Greek tale of Odysseus and Circe). Second, I consider the possibility that the narrative concerning relations with Pāṇḍu royalty reflects immediate political imperatives of the fifth century ce. Do such interpretations negate the assumption that an organic communal process of mythogenesis has been at work? In the final section this methodological dilemma is approached through comparisons with the way in which scholars have looked at the origin myths of ancient Greek and particularly Roman society. Lastly, these reflections add further weight to the global comparative model of the stranger king, for the stories of Romulus and Vijaya share an emphasis on alien and transgressive beginnings.

In 2009 the Sri Lankan government finally destroyed the conventional forces of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) as the civil war that had afflicted the island since 1983 was brought to a violent denouement in the north-east of the Vanni region. From some of the subsequent celebrations by the Sinhalese majority, it seemed that the President Mahinda Rajapaksa was hailed not only for having rid Sri Lanka of a violent menace, but for having, in one sense, re-created the island. The country could now attain the kind of genuine independence and wholeness that had been lacking for much of the period following decolonisation in 1948. After the victory, Rajapaksa was hailed as a ‘great king’ and his admirers were not slow to draw historical analogies with kings and founder-heroes of the past. Such heroes typically have to wade through blood to obtain political mastery; the Lankan chronicles imply that such is the price that must be paid for the re-establishment of society or civilisation itself.

The present paper examines the growth of corruption in Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s with particular emphasis on the factors that influenced changes in the behavioural norms of the officer cadres or higher bureaucracy of Pakistan. The main argument is that during the 1960s increases in development spending and the manipulation of local governments by civil servants to help the Ayub Khan military regime secure legitimacy led to a substantial increase in the level of corruption. However, while the increase was alarming, the higher bureaucracy was still fairly clean and, given leadership, training and resources, in a position to contain the spread of corruption. In the 1970s the first Pakistan People's Party government enacted a number of reforms aimed at asserting political control over the civilian bureaucracy while pursuing a socialistic development model that justified nationalisation of industrial and commercial assets. These substantially undermined the ability of the higher bureaucracy to fight back against corruption while dramatically increasing state penetration of society and the economy, thus making opportunities for corruption more abundant. After General Zia-ul Haq's military coup in July 1977, the new regime, though it received plenty of good advice, was not interested in enhancing the autonomy and prestige of the services as that would diminish Zia's personal power over the state apparatus.

In 1950 this journal published Charles Boxer's description of the Codex that bears his name and is now in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. In this article I shed light on a number of questions about the volume that he left unanswered. The plan of the essay is as follows. First, I recapitulate the nature, composition and contents of the Codex, and its associations with Chinese artists. Next, I turn to evidence that the explorer Quíros saw the manuscript in the court in Madrid no later than 1610; in particular I compare the text of his Summary relation with part of the Boxer Codex. Finally, an examination of the binding shows the Codex was only bound in Madrid, strongly suggesting how and when it got to Spain.

The process whereby existing rituals are taken up and re-envisaged is a well known phenomenon in ritual studies. The offering of a piece of white of cloth to the officiating monks during the Theravāda Buddhist funeral ceremony provides a particularly good example. This custom originates in pre-Buddhist funerary rituals, which included the symbolic covering of the dead body with a new, uncut piece of white cloth intended as a new garment for the deceased, but which was afterwards donated to the officiating priests. The present article examines how in the Buddhist funeral the donation of the cloth came to be associated with the monks’ ascetic practice of making their robes from discarded rags (paṃsukūla). A comparison of the lists of “rags” in the Theravāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas and in the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, alongside a historical exploration of the attitude of the Buddhist laity towards monks who adopted ascetic practices, sheds new light on the significance of the paṃsukūla offering. Further, the manner in which an old pre-existing ritual is accommodated within a different conceptual framework provides a clear instance of the primacy of ritual continuity over ritual meaning.

The First Sino-Japanese War during 1894 and 1895 was a dramatic moment in world events. Not only did it catch the attention of the West but, for as long as it lasted, it became a central focus of readers of newspapers in China in both English and Chinese. The Chinese public was extremely eager to read any news that could be gathered about the war, and newspaper proprietors grasped this opportunity to promote their businesses, competing to provide the latest information using wartime reporting practices already established in Britain and the United States. This paper explores the competition between two commercial Chinese language newspapers, Shenbao and Xinwenbao, in order to elucidate the relationships between patriotism, profit and readership during the First Sino-Japanese War. By comparing and contrasting how news of the war was reported in both publications, and how it was received by the public, we learn something of how these newspapers operated in gathering and publishing reports of tremendous national events, and gain insight into how commercial interests and readers' reactions to news events influenced editorial policy.

David Gordon White's wide-ranging scholarship on tantra, yoga and alchemy has inspired many students and scholars to undertake research in those fields. White worked as an assistant to Mircea Eliade and his doctorate from the University of Chicago was in History of Religions. His research methodology, true to this scholastic heritage, is not as deeply rooted in textual criticism as that of the current vanguard of scholars working on tantra and yoga, whose philological studies rarely reference his work. The accessibility of his books and articles, however, together with his engaging writing style and the excitement that imbues his scholarship, mean that indologists specialising in other fields, and authors addressing non-scholarly audiences, frequently draw on his publications. White's prominence in the study of yoga and tantra requires all scholars working on those subjects to address his work.