The New History of the T'ang dynasty relates that in a.d. 648 the Chinese envoy Wang Hsüan-ts'ê, having raised an army in Tibet and Nep¯al, advanced into Central India as far as the town Ch'a-po-ho-lo, which he stormed after three days’ siege. The Na-fu-ti(or Ti-na-fu-ti) A-lo-na-shun, an usurper who had just seized the throne after the death of King Śīlāditya (i.e. Harṣavardhana Śīlāditya of Kanauj), thereupon fled, but was shortly afterwards taken prisoner. A band of his dispersed followers, however, took position, barring the way across the Kan-t'o-wei River, but were in their turn routed by Hsüan-ts'ê's second in command.

There is much to support the opinion of Rāmānuja, Dr. Thibaut, and many others, that Śaṃkara's doctrine of “illusion” is a biassed rendering of the old Vedānta, Bādarāyaṇik as well as Aupanishadic. If that be granted, it is by no means self-evident that Buddhism has been without influence on Śamkara's speculation; and the last writer on the subject, Vasudev Anant Sukhtankar, a very able pupil of Professor Jacobi, does not conceal his opinion, or his surmise, that Śaṃkara is indebted to Nāgārjuna. That may be true, but I would object that we really know little or nothing about the history of Vedānta, and that conclusions based on philosophical parallels are by no means definitive. Autonomous developments— autonomous if not absolutely independent—are admissible. Nāgārjuna (or his predecessors, the anonymous authors of the oldest Mahāyānasūtras), by the very fact that he proclaims “voidness” to be the real nature of things, was prepared to distinguish the relative truth (saṃvṛtisatya) and the absolute one (pāramārthika); and his nihilism coupled with “idealism” might lead to the Vijñānavāda: “existence of pure non-intelligent (?) intellect.” On the other hand the Aupanishadas, from their main thesis (tat tvam asi, etc.), could derive the distinction of the two brahmans, of the two vidyās. Both developments are natural enough; the conception of the universal void (o) and the intuition of the infinite (∞) are convergent, in the end; but parallel and convergent as they are, these developments do not lose their primitive tinge.

IN my “Notes on the Śaiva Siddhāntam”, published last year in Le Muséon, I called attention to the fact that the living faith of the majority of modern Tamils is in almost every respect, and certainly in all essentials, the same doctrine that was taught in Kashmir about the beginning of the eleventh century by Abhinava-gupta; and I endeavoured to indicate what, in my opinion, the links are which join the modern theology of the South to the ancient teachings of the North, and ultimately to the school which is represented by the Śvetāśvatara Upanisad. In further illustration of this view I now present the Paramārthasāra of Abhinava-gupta.

THE Dipavaṁsa tells us (8. 1, 2) that:—“The far-seeing Moggaliputta, having by supernatural vision beheld the establishment of the [Buddhist] doctrine in the future in the border-land, sent out the Thēras Majjhantika and others, each with four (companions), to establish the doctrine in the border-land for the enlightenment of sentient beings.” And it tells us in verse 5 that the Thēra Mahādēva was thus sent to the Mahisa country, Mahisaraṭṭha, = Mahisharāshṭra. The Mahāvaṁsa, in its account of the same matter, calls this territory (12. 3, 29) Mahisamaṇḍala, = Mahishamaṇḍala. Buddhaghōsha, dealing with the missions in his Samanta-Pāsādikā, quotes a verse, very similar to that of the Dīpavaṁsa, which mentions it as raṭṭhaṁ Mahisaṁ, but uses in his own prose the forms Mahisakamaṇḍala and Mahiṁsaka°; in the latter case, with the insertion of a nasal in a manner which is not uncommon in Pāli. And this last form is also found in the Jātaka and its commentary. We adopt the form Mahishamaṇḍala, because it is the one which, in its Pāli shape, has been habitually used by other writers.

MANY writers have enlarged upon the subject of our indebtedness to India in matters intellectual, and in particular have drawn attention to ancient Hindu mathematics, which they consider exhibit in a marked degree the intellectual superiority of the Hindus in early times. They not only inform us that a system of mathematics was developed in India in early times, but imply that in this direction the Hindus were the benefactors of the rest of mankind. The latest authoritative statement of this kind is as follows: “In the mathematical sciences the achievements of the Indians have been very considerable. As the inventors of the numerical figures with which the whole world reckons, and of the decimal system connected with the use of these figures, they naturally became the greatest calculators of antiquity, just as the Greeks were the greatest geometricians . . . The later mathematicians made more progress in trigonometry, especially by the invention of the sine table. The greatness of the Indian mathematical writers who belong to the fifth century and later lies in their arithmetical and algebraical investigations . . . The raising of numbers to various powers and the extraction of the square or cube root were but elementary operations to these mathematicians. They also calculated arithmetical progressions, perhaps first suggested by the chess-board of sixty-four squares, which was known in India before the beginning of our era. They attained the greatest eminence in algebra, which they developed to a degree beyond anything ever achieved by the Greeks.”

REPRODUCTIONS of the Dalai Lama's seal are found in Waddell's Lhasa and its Mysteries, p. 448, and in Walsh's Coinage of Tibet, MASB, vol. ii, p. 16. No attempt to read it has as yet been made, and neither of the reproductions is absolutely correct, though Waddell's is by far the better of the two. In the accompanying plate I give copies of both these versions, together with my own corrected version.

In the present article I give a translation and description of the anatomical chart kept in the Temple Medicine on the lChags-po-ri (“Iron Hill”) at Lhasa which, together with its connected monastery, forms the medical college of Tibet. The chart demonstrates the Tibetan science of anatomy, and every Tibetan doctor taught his anatomy from it.

IN the following pages an attempt is made to present the substance of Māwardi's chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in his Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, Bonn, 1853, pp. 107–28, together with some illustrations of how the rules and requirements there laid down were conformed to in practice. The “crux” of the chapter, ‘Omar's instructions to the Kāḍi, pp. 119–20, has been removed by Professor D. S. Margoliouth (see ante, pp. 307–26), and his help has been forthcoming in the case of other difficulties. Māwardi's entire treatise on Moslem political law is in course of translation by Count Léon Ostrorog, and the merits of the earlier of the two published instalments of the work have been pointed out in the Journal, 1901, p. 906. The later instalment covers chapter v of the treatise, the one immediately preceding that on the office of Kāḍi. That chapter may be taken to represent the Moslem ideal, and it is of interest to consider to what extent the ideal was transmuted into fact. The task is not easy. Of Moslem legal procedure we know but little, the nearest approach to law reports being the notices of judicial proceedings in works dealing with the lives of judges. Such a work is the history of the Ḳāḍis of Egypt by Abu ‘Omar al-Kindi (ob. a.h. 350; B.M. Add. 23,226), now being edited in the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series by Mr. A. R. Guest, and the edition will include extracts from a ninth century work on the same subject—the Raf' al-Iṣr of Ibn Ḥajar Asḳalāni, Paris Ar. 2149, in which are preserved large portions of the work composed in continuation of that of al-Kindi by Ibn Zūlāḳ, ok a.h. 387, of which no copy is known to exist.

The other and most ancient historical edicts discovered by me at Lhasa are inscribed upon a lofty pillar of victory which stands at the foot of Potala Hill, under the castle of the ancient kings, now incorporated in the palace of the Talai Lamas.

SINCE writing my article on the Talaing text of the Myazedi record, I have been furnished with a number of documents which enable me to supplement what I then wrote and correct a few errors of transcription and interpretation. M. L. Finot has lent me a photograph of the Pāli, Burmese, and undeciphered texts of the second pillar of the Myazedi record, as well as an estampage of the undeciphered text of the first pillar, and has made several suggestions for which I am much indebted to him. Mr. Taw Sein Ko has followed up his former valuable assistance by sending me a number of important estampages. They include one of the Talaing text of the second pillar of the Myazedi record (now on the platform of the Myingaba pagoda at Pagan), which I had despaired of ever seeing, as well as rubbings of the great Shwezigon inscription, also at Pagan (Nos. I (1)–(8) of Inscriptions of Pagan, Piny a, and Ava? of which no transcript is given there), and of two inscriptions recently discovered at the Shwesandaw pagoda, at Prome (which I shall call Shwesandaw I and II), all in Talaing of about the same period. Mr. Taw Sein Ko has also given me some valuable information bearing upon these records. I must express my sincere thanks for all this help.

IN the July number of this Journal, p. 836, I promised to publish the text of the Aparimitāyuḥ Sūtra. As I have not yet received the Cambridge manuscripts of that Sūtra, I must defer the fulfilment of my promise to a later issue of the Journal. In the meantime I have compared the Sanskrit text of the Vajracchedikā, in Max Müller's edition, with the “unknown language” text in Dr. Stein's manuscript; and I may now present two extended “bilingual” extracts from the two texts. So far as I am able to judge at present, the East-Turkestani text does not appear to be a translation, throughout, of the Sanskrit text, as published by Max Müller. It is so, however, quite clearly in certain portions; and it is some of these portions that I am now presenting as a preliminary contribution.