Whether we possess among the numerous Buddhist books preserved in China any text translated from a Pāli original, is a question which has not as yet been quite settled. Several scholars have answered it positively or negatively, but no one until now has brought forward an undeniable fact in support of his opinion. The object of my present note is to decide this point, and to introduce to the Society a text of Pāli origin in Chinese.

One day, when the disciples were discussing the various forms of wisdom peculiar to the Buddha, the Lord came into the hall and inquired what they were discussing. On being informed, he said: “Rahans, there will be no difficulty in understanding how I can now so easily overcome the opinions of Brahmans, princes, and others, bringing them to a right frame of mind, when you hear how, in a former existence as the high-born Vidhūra, on the summit of Mount Kāḷāgiri, I overcame and subdued the virulence of the Rakshasa Puṇṇaka.”

Chao Ju-kua's ethnographical work, the Chu-fan-chih, consists of two parts (books, chüan). In the first part the author describes the various countries concerned in the Oriental sea-trade of his time; while the second part treats upon the foreign products brought as merchandise to China, and is followed, by way of supplement, by a detailed description of the island of Hainan, which in those days had among all the possessions of the empire risen to a high state of civilization, owing to a large number of statesmen, poets, and philosophers having spent years of their lives there in banishment during the Sung dynasty.

In 1894 I began the preparatory studies for an account of the later Indian Moghul system of government and administration in all its branches, being impelled by the belief that some information of the kind was a necessary introduction to a History of that period, which I had previously planned and commenced. Before I had done more than sketch out my first part, which deals with the Sovereign, the Court Ceremonial, and the elaborate system of Entitlature, I noticed the issue of a book on a part of my subject by Dr. Paul Horn. The perusal of this excellent work diverted my attention to a later section of my proposed Introduction, the subject of the Army and Army Organization; and in this way I have been led to write this portion before any of the others. Except incidentally, my paper is neither a translation nor a review of Dr. Horn's essay; and though indebted to him, as acknowledged from time to time, my study covers, in the main, quite different ground, forming a complement to what he has done, and, as I think, carrying the subject a good deal farther in several directions. Dr. Horn seems to have read chiefly the authorities for the period before Aurangzeb ‘Ālamgīr; while my reading has been confined in great measure to the reigns of Aurangzeb's successors in the period 1707–1803.