THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.

26

ancient historical and religious records, Mr. Davids

[JANUARY 5, 1872.

publications embody, as usual, a goodly amount of

deserves the encouragement and approbation of all

useful information in the various branches of Orien

who take an interest in these studies; and the Council have no doubt but that the Ceylon Government, which

tal knowledge.

has recently shown its liberality by granting a suinº of money for the searching for, and procuring of MSS., will lend its full support and countenance

to so promising and well-timed an undertaking. As regards our sister societies on the Continent, the Asiatic Society of Paris and the German Oriental Society, their scientific researches have lost nothing of their wanted vigour and efficiency, and their

The number of the American Oriental Society's Journal, issued during the last year, contains the greater part of an important publication, viz., of Professor W. D. Whitney's Taittiriya Prätishākhya, the Sanskrit Text and Commentary, with a transla tion of the former, and copious annotations.

A

new number of the same Journal, which will con tain the concluding part of this work, will be issued in the course of the summer.

REVIEWS. A CATENA of Buddhist Scriptures.

FROM tire Citi

NESE. By Samuel Beal, Chaplain R.N., Author of “Budd hist Pilgrims,” &c., (pp. 436, 8vo.) London, Trübner & Co., 1871.

ries copies of these invaluable works. Buddhist books, we learn, began to be translated into Chinese so early as the middle of our first century A.D. “It is one of the singular coincidences which oc

Of this extensive store-house of

Buddhist lore,

it is our duty at present merely to give a brief

cur in such abundance, between the history of Budd hism and the Christian religion, that whilst the

outline. Some of the translations here published

influence of the latter was leavening the Western

have already appeared in the Journal of the Royal

world, the knowledge of the former was being car ried by missionaries—as zealous, though not so well

Asiatic Society. Having revised these, and added others to complete what he considers to be the cycle of the Buddhist development, the author now publishes the entire series as a contribution towards a more general acquaintance with Buddhist litera ture in China.

It seems that the Buddhist Canon

in that country, as was arranged between the years. 67 and 1285, A.D., includes 1440 distinct works comprising 5586 books. These however form only an insignificant portion of the whole Buddhist liter ature which is spread throughout the empire, of which, hitherto the majority, or nearly all of English people, have been content to remain ignorant. In these circumstances, the author may well think that it is difficult to understand how we can claim to have

any precise idea of the religious condition of the Chinese people, or even to appreciate the phraseo logy met with in their ordinary books. The book, we are told, and we can well believe it, represents the results of some years of patient labour; and that whatever be its fate, the author, or rather edi tor, has found his reward in the delight which the study has afforded him, and in the insight which he has thereby gained into the character of one of “the most wonderful movements of the

instructed, as the followers of St. Paul—into the

vast empire beyond the Eastern deserts ; where it took root, long before Germany or England had be come Christian, and has flourished ever since.” The

first complete edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon dates merely from the seventh century. It was prepared under the direction of Tae Tsung, the se cond emperor of the Tang dynasty, who reigned from 627 to 650 A.D. and it was published by his successor Kaon-Tsung. Yung-loh, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, in the year 1410, prepared a second and much enlarged edition of the Canon, writing a royal preface to it. This is called the Southern Edition—man-t'sang. Wan-leih the thir teenth emperor of the same dynasty, caused the publication of a third edition about 1590 A.D.,

which goes by the name of the Northern Collection, or peh-tsang, and which was renewed and enlarged in 1723, during the reign of Keen-lung, under the auspices of a former governor of Cheh-kiang, who wrote a preface to the catalogue of works contain ed in it, and added a reprint of the royal preface to the first complete edition written by Tae-Tsung.

human

“It is calculated that the whole work of the Indian

mind in the direction of Spiritual Truth, which is traced in the history of Buddhism.” Much has

translators in China, together with that of Hiuen Thisang, amounts to about seven hundred times the

been done within the last thirty years to elucidate Buddhist history and philosophy, and it is certainly

size of the New Testament.

extraordinary, that little or no use has been made

of the Buddhist Canon as it is accepted in China. In many of the large monasteries, there are to be found not only complete editions of the Buddhist Scriptures in the vernacular, but also the Sanskrit originals from which the Chinese version was made. Yet no effort has hitherto been made, either in this country or elsewhere, to secure for our great libra

The section known as

the Mahāprajná Pāramita alone, is eighty times as large as the New Testament, and was prepared by Hiuen-Thsang, without abbreviation, from the Sanskrit, embracing two hundred thousand shlókas.”

It is certainly singular, that with a knowledge of this large and complete collection of the Buddhist

Scriptures, so little use has been made of it by mis sionaries and scholars, with the exception of M. Wassiliev. “It would be wrong to state,” says Mr.