Legend of the Diamond Valley 19 



Valley was known in ancient India is furnished by the same work, Liang 

 se kung tse ki, as supplied to us with the Fu-lin version of the legend. 

 Here we read this story: "A large junk of Fu-nan (Cambodja) which 

 had come from western India arrived (in China) and offered for sale a 

 mirror of a peculiar variety of rock-crystal, 1 one foot and four inches 

 across its surface, and forty catties in weight. On the surface and in 

 the interior it was pure white and transparent, and displayed many- 

 colored objects on its obverse. When held against the light and ex- 

 amined, its substance was not discernible. On inquiry for the price, it 

 was given at a million strings of copper coins. The Emperor ordered 

 the officials to raise this sum, but the treasury did not hold enough. 

 Those traders said, ' This mirror is due to the action of the Devaraja 

 of the Rupadhatu. 2 On felicitous and joyful occasions he causes the 

 trees of the gods 8 to pour down a shower of precious stones, and the 

 mountains receive them. The mountains conceal and seize the stones, 

 so that they are difficult to obtain. The flesh of big animals is cast 

 into the mountains; and when the flesh in these hiding-places becomes 

 so putrefied that it phosphoresces, it resembles a precious stone. Birds 

 carry it off in their beaks, and this is the jewel from which this mirror 

 is made.' Nobody in the empire understood this and dared pay that 

 price." 4 This account gives us a clew as to how it happened that the 

 Devaraja of the Rupadhatu was linked with the aforesaid legend hail- 

 ing from Fu-lin. Both legends are on record in the same book, and 

 the author combined the one report with the other. There is no reason 

 to wonder that the story of the Fu-nan traders was not comprehended 

 in China. We ourselves should be completely at sea, did not the West- 

 ern legends enlighten the mystery. The story-teller from Fu-nan either 

 did not express himself very clearly or was not perfectly understood by 

 his interpreter, or the text of the Liang se kung tse ki has come down 

 to us in corrupt shape. It is indubitable, however, that the story here 

 on record is an echo of the legend of the Diamond Valley. All its essen- 

 tial features clearly stand out, — the inaccessible mountains hoarding 

 the stones, the casting of flesh on them, and birds securing the stones. 

 The narrative is only obscure in omitting to state that the jewels ad- 



1 Compare the writer's note on this subject in Toting Pao, 1915, p. 200. 



' See above, p. 7. 



• This term corresponds to Sanskrit devataru ("tree of the gods"), a designation 

 for the five miraculous trees to be found in Indra's Heaven, — kalpavr.iksha, parijata, 

 mandara, samtana, and haricandana (compare Hopkins, Journal Am. Or. Soc, 

 Vol. XXX, 1910, pp. 352, 353). 



4 "Tai p'ing yu Ian, Ch. 808, p. 6 (the Chinese text will be found in T'oung Pao 

 1915, p. 202). 



