The following notes are intended to supplement an article written in 1912 and published in JRAS. for October, 1916, pp. 773–807. The theme then was the tradition of the group as generally accepted at the present day, and limitation of space confined the study to one hero-tale for each of the Eight. The tales were translated intact from an illustrated compilation of Taoist mythology which continues in popular favour and provides a fairly representative treatment of the subject. With a scope so restricted, the former article made but a small contribution towards a better understanding of an important national cult. It is essayed here to probe a little deeper and in more varied places in search of evidence about the origin and evolution of the conception. The writer feels that apologies are due for the scrappy nature of these notes rather than for reverting to the topic ; for surely there is call for much fuller inquiry, considering the ubiquity of the Eight in the folk-lore and folk-art of the Far East during many centuries, and the scant, attention paid them by Western students.

The palmleaf manuscript containing the text of the Prajñâpâramitâ-piṇḍลrtha by Dinnâga was found in the monastery of Žalu which I visited in autumn 1939. It consists of three leaflets without indication of any date. This small book is an epitome of the Aṣṭasâhasrikâ-prajñâ-pâramitã and it is intended to classify the arguments expounded in this treatise and to adapt its long repetitions to the logic of a rational and intelligible scheme.

The theory that Samudra Gupta inherited the kingdom of his maternal grandfather as well as that of his father is unsupported by the lawbooks, for if he were his maternal grandfather's heir he could also inherit his paternal estate only if his father had no other sons, which we know was not the case. Reference to the mother's patrilineage in this and other cases is made (1) to distinguish one's descent from that of half-brothers, (2) because of the political support a mother's family may provide, and (3) to emphasize the special purity or illustriousness of one's descent. The use of metronymics and other practices illustrates a built-in ambiguity in Indo-Aryan kinship: the wife assumes the clan and lineage of her husband upon marriage in theory, but in fact she never fully relinquishes her affiliation to her natal clan and lineage.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to present an account of the contents of a document, which needs some special acquaintance with the details of village history to understand it, but which possesses considerable interest since it is the earliest known account of a local group of Indian villages written by an European observer.

Research undertaken recently at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has resulted in the discovery of a number of fresh documents which throw light on the relations between Georgia and France in the early eighteenth century, and in particular on the journey to Versailles of Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani. The objects of this mission were to secure French intervention in favour of King Wakhtang VI of K'art'li, since 1712 detained by the Persian Shah at Isfahan, and to arrange for the dispatch of French missionaries to Western Georgia, whence the Theatines had been obliged to withdraw towards the end of the seventeenth century.

Before proceeding to the subject-matter of this paper, I would ask leave to revert for a moment to the preceding article on the Bhāgavata system of incarnations. Several kind Bhāgavata friends have sent me criticisms on points of detail in what I then wrote, which will be utilized when opportunity occurs. I would mention one now, as it affects the question of terminology. On p. 624 I used the name Vibhu or Vibhava Avatāra as the name of one of the forms under which the Supreme manifests Himself. I can give authority for both these names from North Indian literature; but, writing from Mysore in the south, Paṇḍit Gōvindâcārya, the translator of Rāmaňuja's commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, informs me that the use of Vibhu in this connexion is incorrect. As a technical term of Bhāgavata theology, vibhu means “infinite”, in contradistinction to aṇu, “finite.” For the incarnation, vibhava is the only correct term. In this sense vibhava is explained as vividhēna bhavati, and means literally “many-becomingness”.

British Museum MS. Or. 8193 was presented to the Museum on the 18th July, 1918, by one of our members, Mr. R. S. Greenshields (I.C.S., retd.). It had been purchased by him at a sale held on behalf of the British Red Cross Society in London on 22nd April, 1918. I understand that the MS. was presented to the British Red Cross Society by Sir Douglas Seton Steuart, in whose family it had been for many years. It was no doubt brought from India by one of the donors' ancestors, whose name, “The Honble. A. Seton, Esq.,” is written on the fly-leaf in a hand which recalls the late eighteenth century. A note in the same hand on the first folio of the MS. states that it is in the “ancient pehlawee character” (a statement apparently founded on a similar note in Persian on the margin of the recto of the second folio) and that “according to another information … a certain religious person, Mohummud Moostukeem of Nornawl, intimated that this book had been presented to him by one of his pupils in the reign of Mohummud Shah (i.e. between a.d. 1719 and 1748), but no one can read it. Also in the time of the Nawab Feiz Gullub Khan it had been presented to the inspection of a learned Molawee of Delhie, who could not read it, but judged the writing to be in the ancient Cuffic character.” The only other evidence of the history of the MS. which appears to survive is a note in Persian written in the field of the miniature on folio 87v, as follows:—

When revising my translation of the Mandæan scroll The Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa which has just been published by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Studi e Testi, No. 176, I was struck by certain resemblances in the narrative to the story of the journey of the Parthian prince in search of the Pearl as related in the Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas. This poem is sometimes called the Hymn of the Apostle Thomas and by Professor F. G. Burkitt (the Quest, vol. v, July, 1914) the Hymn of the Soul. In his Zwei Gnostische Hymnen (Giessen, 1904) which contains both the Syriac text and the translation into German, Erwin Preuschen calls it Das Lied von der Erlösung.

In all ages there have been puritans who have looked upon “wine, woman, and song” as things to be avoided. In the East especially, and it was in the East that the phrase was born, the proscription of this trinity of joys was a question of serious moment. It was the cry of the old Hebrew prophets, and it was echoed by the early Christian fathers, as well as by the purists of Islām. To some extent, one can appreciate why wine and woman came to be proscribed, but that song was included is not so easily understood. Yet, when one sees how music is capable of affecting the peoples of the East, coupled with the fact that music with them has invariably been found as a concomitant with wine and woman, it will be more readily appreciated how listening to music came to be looked upon, as Burton said, as being unworthy of, if not unlawful for, those who trod the path of righteousness.

Historians are agreed as to the importance of the fiscal institutions established in Upper India by Sher Shah (1540–1545), but their precise nature is not easy to discover. The difficulty lies mainly in the authorities available. All the published chronicles of the Afghan kingdom derive in effect from the Tārīkh-i Sher Shāhī of Abbās Sarwānī, and the text of this writer has not yet been worked out from the discordant manuscripts which have survived, so that it is not possible to be certain what the chronicler actually wrote in the few and tantalising passages which he devoted to the fiscal system. The only detailed study of the subject which I have seen is contained in Professor Kalikaranjan Qanungo's monograph entitled Sher Shah, which was published in Calcutta in 1921. In what follows I shall have to question some of the Professor's conclusions regarding the fiscal system established by his hero, and it is only fair to begin by saying that my criticisms do not apply to more than a very small proportion of his work. He has not, indeed, faced the problems presented by the text of the Tārīkh, and consequently his study cannot be regarded as definitive, but in the questions of chronology, topography, and psychology which occupy most of his pages he seems to me to have exercised a generally sound judgment along with great industry, and there are not many of his conclusions from which I would dissent.

Between 1922 and 1953, the German-Dutch Catholic Congregation Societas Verbi Divini, SVD, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries or Steyl Missionaries, sent approximately 90 missionaries to Northwest China. During these three decades, the Divine Word Missionaries established some 30 missionary stations (plus about 100 out-stations) in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.

1. The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform upon a clay tablet unearthed in 1933 at Ras esh-Shamrah (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablet dates approximately from the fifteenth-fourteenth century b.c. The text was first edited by M. Charles Virolleaud in the periodical Syria, xvii (1936), pp. 209–228, but the present interpretation differs toto cælo from that proposed in the editio princeps.

This article is an attempt, in the nature of things tentative only, to carry a stage further the identification and location of the principal Sino-European works printed in China during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as recorded by Henri Cordier in his L'Imprimerie Sino-Européene en Chine (Paris, 1901) and by Paul Pelliot in T'oung Pao (vol. xxiii, pp. 356–360) (Leiden, 1924). Considerations of space have obliged me to confine myself to a discussion of some ten of the most interesting of these, that is those which have the whole or the greatest part of the text printed in a European language. I therefore omit all those which have thetitle-page in Latin and the text in Chinese characters.

The Burmese king popularly known today as “Kyanzittha”, reigned at Pagán from a.d. 1084 to 1112 or 1113. But his active career started much earlier than that: say from about 1050. The career divides itself sharply into REIGN and PRE-REIGN. He has left a dozen original stone inscriptions in Old Mon, some of great length; and these (thanks to the labours of my teacher, the late Dr. C. O. Blagden) are excellently edited and available in Epigraphia Birmanica. They cover merely the Reign. In them he hardly ever alludes to the Pre-Reign; and never once to the great predecessor whom he served so long, King Aniruddha.—In the late Chronicles, however, e.g. the Glass Palace Chronicle translation, six pages suffice to cover the reign—mostly fables, with slight resemblance to the original inscriptions. As for the Pre-Reign, there are 40 pages, also fabulous, full of mistakes and contradictions, but still of value.

Every schoolboy and schoolgirl in India, figuratively speaking, is taught the Myth of Macaulay's Minute. According to this myth, attitudes of lofty condescension towards India's peoples and their inferior cultures, combined with practical needs for a cheap labour force to supply the manpower requirements of an enormous bureaucratic machine, prompted alien rulers to impose an English language educational system upon the subcontinent and, thereby, to neglect and stifle the natural growth of indigenous educational institutions. Moreover, in its more extreme forms, this myth assumes that these rulers were also either racially arrogant or wilfully ignorant, or both. Finally, this myth assumes that the disastrous consequences of this “colonialist” fiat were a major factor inhibiting the progress and well-being of a large proportion of India's peoples.

The question of the Arabian influence on the music of Western Europe has been considerably stressed of recent years. In the practical art, the minstrel class of the Middle Ages not only adopted the actual instruments of the Arabs, such as the lute ('ūd), rebec (rāb), guitar (kaithār), and others, but also the actual musical devices of the performers on them. In the theoretical art, clues in the Mediaeval Latin treatises on music enable us to follow a track which leads us to the conclusion that the teachings and writings of Arabian or/and Mozarabian theorists of music also had some influence on the theory of music of Western Europe.