By the Great Ming Emperor the Karma-pa GŽu'u la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ ta'i śiṅ rtsi tsa'i hu'o was invited and was made chief of all the ban-dhe (Buddhist monks) in the Empire. At Liṅ-gu svi-sde (temple) he performed a great service of prayers for the Great Imperial Father, Tha'i Ju, and the loving Queen-mother in order to deliver all creatures in the world from the round of transmigration and from hell. The service began on the fifth day of the second month of the fifth year of Yun Lo. On the first day there appeared an iridescent cloud of five colours, beautiful to see, expanding and contracting in various ways, in brilliance like the Wish-granting Gem. Also, above the mchod-rten (stupa) of Relics a ray of light, like the full moon, shone out unblemished and flickering a little. Also, two bands of golden rays rose above the dwelling place of the Precious Essence of all Bygone Buddhas, the Religious King, Powerful through Great Compassion, the Karma-pa gŽu'i la'i ta'i ba'u hva waṅ zi then ta'i śin tsi tsa'i hu'o, the place where he performed the ceremony after having made the dkyil-'khor (mandala).

The legend of Devāpi, which occurs in several early Indian sources, raises numerous issues relating to Devāpi's character, his right to the throne, his reasons for not exercising that prerogative, the unfortunate consequences of his brother Śantanu's accession, and the rectification of those consequences.

The cosmological aspect of religion, and the application of cosmic symbolism to religious architecture and social organization, were discovered relatively late, so that the attention rightly directed to the subject in recent years has engendered a tendency to overestimate its importance in Asian thought. Fortunately this has not escaped the notice of critics. The cosmological aspect of the ziggurat is now recognized to have been secondary. Further, with regard to Indian culture, Prof. A. L. Basham has uttered this timely warning: “It is hardly likely that the complex cosmic symbolism of the Vedic sacrifices was elaborated until long after the sacrifices themselves came into being. Similarly the cosmic symbolism of the Hindu temple seems to us to be a comparatively late and artificial growth, of far less significance than some authorities are inclined to attribute to it. The symbolism seems to have been somewhat esoteric, the preserve of schools of learned men who specialized in trying to explain every aspect of life by this means. We believe that for the early Indian man in the street it was of far less significance than might be believed from the emphasis which some modern students place upon it.” In the present article I shall try to redress the balance in the case of certain non-Islamized peoples of Indonesia, an undertaking which in view of some recent publications seems to be needed.

The Turkish Languages are unusually rich in numerical series, and there are pecularities in their numerical system which are, I believe, unparallelled elsewhere. The main facts are well known, and it might be thought that there was nothing more to be said about them; but several interesting points have never been properly discussed. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to them.

Al-Kindī's Treatise On the Definitions and Descriptions of Things (Fī Ḥudūd al-Ashyā' wa-Rusūmihā) has come down to us in the great Istanbul manuscript of his collected writings (Aya Sofiya 4832), and has been published on the basis of that unique manuscript by M. A. Abū Rīdā (Rasā'il al-Kindī al-Falsafiyya, vol. i, Cairo, 1950, pp. 163 ff.). In a manuscript of the British Museum which contains a great number of important philosophical texts, Add. 7473 (Cureton's Catalogue, no. 426), written about the year 640/1242, there are some extracts from it. They are preceded (fols. 175r–178r) by al-Kindī's well-known treatise on the astrological calculation of the Islamic empire, published from this very manuscript by O. Loth. The colophon of that text reads as follows: “The treatise is finished, with the praise of God and His help and assistance. I have transcribed it from a copy dated the middle of Rabī' I, 531 [Nov.–Dec., 1136]. This colophon is followed by the extracts, which are headed by a note reading as follows: “The following paragraphs were found in the copy which I used as my model, and so I transcribe them.” What follows are definitions from al-Kindī's treatise. As it is superfluous to reproduce that part of the extracts which exists also in the Istanbul manuscript, I propose to employ a simplified method of comparison: I give the headings of the British Museum extracts, without adding anything where the British Museum version corresponds exactly to the text of the Istanbul manuscript; but I note all divergences. Readers interested in the details will peruse these pages with the printed edition before them.

Accounts of the two notable translators into Arabic, al-Biṭrīq and his son Yaḥyā are, even in our best works of reference, inadequate and often confused. One gathers the general impression that their translations were displaced by the works of Ḥunain b. Isḥāq and his school, who flourished about sixty years later. It is to this loss of popularity, it would seem, that the paucity of information about the two earlier translators and the limited number of existing MSS. of their works are due. Enough survives, however, to make clear that the translations of Yaḥyā b. al-Biṭrīq and his father covered a wide field, and that at one time their numerous works were well known.

In an examination of word-phrases A. Meillet stated long ago: “Des mots comme oui, non représentent le plus haut degré d'abstraction que puisse atteindre ainsi une réponse consistant en un seul mot.” As has been repeatedly pointed out, the classical Indo-European languages did not have any exact equivalent of this abstract method of expression. The majority of the modern languages on the other hand have arrived at these convenient “special expletive interjections”. Hindi nahîn, like the cognate Marathi nâhĩ, Gujerati nahi(m), etc. typifies this development of most modern Indo-European languages both syntactically and formally: it is used as an equivalent of “no” (though it may serve also as negative adverb), and it represents an enlargement of the old Indo-European negative particle, Sanskrit na. This formal and syntactic transformation of Sanskrit na into modern nahîn has been variously explained. The standard theories involve the addition to the negative particle of some part of a substantive verb, a development by no means isolated in the Indo-European languages. They may be summarized as follows:—

I. Theories in which parts of the verb as- “to be” are added.

(a) Kellogg stated: “The common negative nahîn, Braj nâhi has arisen from the combination of the negative na with the 3rd singular âhi of the substantive verb.

(b) S. K. Chatterji thinks that *asati based on Sanskrit asti may have been added to na.

(c) Dwijendranath Basu believes that only a derivation from na + âsit can account for the Bengali forms. Similar explanations were given also by Sen and others.