The dialect here under consideration was first given attention by Hodgson, and was later briefly described from Hodgson's materials by Professor Sten Konow in the Linguistic Survey of India. No connected specimen in the language has so far been made available.

The following story and notes, therefore, gathered in the Darjeeling District in 1931 will perhaps serve as a supplement to our knowledge of this imperfectly known form of speech.

The latter part of the tenth century of the Christian era gradually ushered in a new epoch in the history of India. In northern India the old kingdoms, which had dominated the political arena so long, made their exit, and new powers rose to take their place. The struggle between the Gurjaras and the Rāshṭrakuṭas ended fatally for both the contending parties. The great empire of Bhoja and Mahendrapāla had shrunk into the little principality of Kanauj. Its place was taken by the Chāndellas, the Haihayas, and the Chāhamānas, etc. The Pāla empire, too, in eastern India, had fallen on evil days. The land south of the Vindhyas was no exception from this. The Cholas of Tanjore who were to reach the height of their glory in the succeeding century, were gradually consolidating their position in the extreme south. While a new Chālukya dynasty claiming relationship with the older one eclipsed the supremacy of the Rāshṭrakuṭas in the Deccan. The history of the tenth and eleventh century a.d. is full of internecine warfare, which paved the way for Muslim conquest of India.

The language of the Kharosthi documents recovered from Chinese Turkestan by Sir Aurel Stein is in the main Prakrit, but contains a considerable amount of non-Indian material. Of this there are a number of Iranian words (under a score). The rest consists of about 1,000 proper names and about 150 words. The latter consist of titles, names of agricultural products, articles of dress, etc., for which no doubt there was no Indian term that exactly corresponded. We may take this as representing the native language of the Shan-Shan kingdom, as opposed to the Indian Prakrit which was used as the official language. Most of the documents come from the Niya site, which was an outpost of the kingdom bordering on Khotan. For the rest there are a few from Endere (= Sāca) and about forty from the Lou Lan area (666–707). Since the names in these latter are of the same type and often the same names, we may conclude that the population and their language was uniform throughout the whole kingdom.

Nāropā, with Padmasambhava, Mi, la ras pa, and Tsoṅ k'a pa, is one of the most famous Buddhist teachers in Tibet. He may certainly be considered as one of the most conspicuous factors of Tibetan Buddhism, since he was the spiritual father of Marpa, who is acknowledged as the guru of Milaraspa and the founder of the bKa’ rgyud pa sect. This school later split up into several sub-sects, widely spread even now in Tibet, and through Karma Bakshi allied itself with the rÑiṅ ma pas; but its first teacher or ādiguru is said to have been rDo rje ạc'aṅ, or Vajradhara, whose doctrines were secreṭly transmitted to Tilopā, and by this siddha to Nāropā, who was to exercise through his pupil a great spiritual influence all over Tibet.

PRAVARTATE svargaloke grāmo 'sau na mahītale. That scale exists in heaven, not on earth.

It was this sentence in the Sañgītadarpaṇa (i, 72) that determined me thirty years ago to visit India. Not that I hoped exactly to solve the problem, but the music must be interesting, I thought, which had learnt so much that it had quite forgotten.

It is a fact that hardly requires repetition that one of the edicts on the pillar of Aśoka standing inside Akbar's fort at Allahabad is addressed to the Mahāmātras of Kauśāmbī (modern Kosam on the bank of the Jamna, about thirty miles from Allahabad) whence it was removed to Allahabad by some king. Cunningham suggested that Firūz Shāh, who is known to have removed two other Aśokan columns to Delhi from Meerut (Mīrath) and Topra, was the author also of this removal from Kosam to Allahabad. On this Hultzsch makes the following remarks: “But while Delhi was the capital of Firōz Shāh, Allahabad was founded, or rather re-founded two centuries after him by Akbar. This ruler may have removed from Kōsam the Allahabad pillar, on which the inscriptions of his favourite Bīrbal and of his son Jahāngīr are engraved. In this case the pillar would have been still standing at Kōsam when the inscription of Samudragupta was incised on it.” The divergence between the views of these two scholars makes the subject worthy of a fresh study.

The four unfamiliar syllables in the title of this paper seemed as originally written so like the heading of some important appeal from one of the less known Colonies to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, that a more informative sub-title appeared advisable.

The verses that give the date of composition of the poem are the 34th and 35th dohās of the Bālakāṇḍa in Rāmadāsa Gaur's edition, and may be translated as follows:—

“Having so removed all doubts,

And having placed on my head the pollen-dust of my master's lotus-feet,

I again pray to all with joined palms

That I may not be blamed as I make this Tale.

In this Journal, ante, pp. 307 f., in an article with the above title, Dr. C. L. Fábri draws attention to the affinity that seemingly exists between symbols found on the Mohenjo-daro and Harappā seals and those on certain punch-marked coins. As the impression might be conveyed by this paper that Dr. Fábri was the first to be struck by this correspondence, it is only fair to note that two Indian scholars had previously called public attention to this similarity, citing several of the identical examples now given by Dr. Fábri. Dr. Pran Nath noticed the resemblance between the signs five years ago, and made a special study of the punch-marked coins in the British Museum in this connection; he referred to the question on more than one occasion, and published specific examples in the Indian Historical Quarterly, vol. vii (1931), Supplement, pp. 11 f. Mr. Durga Prasad also, in pamphlets and lectures and in the thesis submitted to the Numismatic Society of India, which won the gold medal of the Society in 1933 (at Baroda), had dealt with the question.

Indologists have at this time of day come to know how prominent is the part played by numbered categories in the Pali Canon. The whole of the Fourth Nikāya, the Anguttara, is composed of such. The two last Suttantas of the First Nikāya: the “Sangīti” and the “Das-uttara”, are composed of such. Five Suttas of the Second Collection: “Bahuvedaniya, Chabbisodhana, Bahudhātuka, Mahācattarīsaka, Pañcattaya,” have numerical title and treatment. The Third Nikāya alone, the Saṃyutta, has not conformed to this method. In the case of the Anguttara- and Dĩgha-Nikayas the subjects are not only grouped under numbers, they are taken in arithmetical progression: the Ones, Twos, Threes, etc. (That the Anguttara progression should cease at the Elevens, as though it were a cricketing chronicle, has not yet been inquired into, if I may except myself (in my re-written Home University Library Buddhism, 1934).) The lists are apparently out to exclude nothing which will have been of doctrinal importance to the compilers, whenever and wherever that compilation took place.