Some three years ago, I published a note on the above mentioned subject. Since then, I have been able to collect such additional material as to afford conclusive proof of what at first could only be advanced as a hypothesis. In laying my conclusions before the readers of this Journal, I may be excused for first summarizing the contents of my previous paper, which appeared in a publication and in a language accessible only to a limited number of students.

Do the Chinese pilgrims know two cities named Kapilavastu?

Certain discords and bearings in the itineraries of the pilgrims are discussed in the Prefatory Note to Antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal, and from them it is inferred there were two cities named Kapilavastu; one the city visited by Fa-hsien, now represented by the ruins at Piprāhavā; the other that described by Yuan Chwang, of which the “royal precincts” are found in Tilaurā Koṭ, some ten miles to the north-west of Piprāhavā. Paltā Devī is held to mark the site of the town either of the Buddha Krakucandra or of the Buddha Koṇāgamana; or Sisaniā Pānḍe may represent the town of Koṇāgamana. Guṭihavā is believed to represent the site of the famous Nyagrodha grove.

The Karma doctrine in its Brahmanistic form teaches that every individual in successive existences reaps the fruit of ignorance and desire as these were expressed in action performed in antecedent existences. As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps; no man inherits the good or evil act of another man: nā ’yam parasya sukṛtaṁ duṣkṛtaṁ.cā ’pisevate (Mbh. xii, 291, 22). The fruit is of the same quality with the action, and good or bad there is no destruction of the action:. na tu nāśoya vidyate. The result is exactly as when just retribution follows a wrong; there can be no cessation till the account is squared: ubhayaṁ tat samībhūtam. Whether “with eye or thought or voice or deed, whatever kind of act one performs, one receives that kind of act in return”: kurute (v.l. karoti) yādṛsaṁ karma tādṛśam pratipadyate (ib. 16, 22; cf. 139, 24).

In the Journal for October, 1899, there was published a hand-list of the Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac manuscripts in Dr. Hunter's collection. The following pages contain a list of the Persian and Turkish manuscripts. The late Mr. E. J. W. Gibb visited the library and examined the Turkish manuscripts, leaving in each of them, with the exception of one or two which escaped notice at the time, a slip, with his initials, describing its contents. These slips have been copied down here verbatim, and one or two remarks have been added. A detailed catalogue of the whole of the European manuscripts by the Rev. Patrick H. Aitken, B.D., is now in the press, and will be published by the Messrs. MacLehose in due course. I have to thank Professor Browne for kindly reading the proof of this paper.

In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October, 1894, I showed that the Kelishin inscription (No. lvi) was a bilingual, the Assyrian transcript of it having been discovered by M. de Morgan, and I was thereby enabled to confirm some of my interpretations of Vannic words and grammatical forms and to correct others. My conclusion was disputed by Drs. Belck, Lehmann, and Scheil, but the question has now been decided in my favour. Dr. Leopold Messerschmidt, together with Dr. Belck, has made a careful examination of a cast of M. de Morgan's squeeze in the light of the fresh materials obtained by Drs. Belck and Lehmann in their scientific mission to Armenia, and the result is to prove that the Vannic and Assyrian texts are close representatives one of the other. The revised texts have been published by Drs. Belck and Messerschmidt in Anatole I (1904), and Dr. Lehmann has written upon them in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, lvi, 4 (1904), pp. 825–829.

By way of a preliminary to some further remarks on the inscription on the Piprāhavā relic-vase, which I shall present when a facsimile of the record can be given with them, I offer a study of an interesting side-issue, the tradition regarding the corporeal relics of Buddha.