n6 Chinese Clay Figures 



forced to admit that the counterpart to the illustration of the Cheng 

 lei pen ts'ao has already pre-existed in India, and was transmitted from 

 there to China; for neither the author of that work, nor any other 

 Chinese source, as far as I know, furnishes any explanation for this 

 picture. An unexpected confirmation of this opinion comes to us from 

 another quarter, — Tibet. 



In the Tibetan language we meet the word bse-ru which at present 

 denotes two animals, — first, the rhinoceros, and second, a kind of 

 antelope. The former is the original and older significance, the latter is 

 secondary. The second element of the compound, ru, means "horn," 

 and may be dropped; the proper word is bse (pronounced se). The 

 stem is se, the prefixed labial b- not being part of the word-stem, and 

 like most prefixes in Tibetan nouns, representing the survival of an 

 ancient numerative. This is corroborated by the corresponding Lepcha 

 word sa. and the Chinese word se, all three referring to the rhinoceros. 

 This linguistic coincidence leads to the conclusion that the Chinese and 

 Tibetans as stocks of the large Indo-Chinese family of peoples were 

 acquainted with the rhinoceros in prehistoric times, for otherwise they 

 could not have the word for it in common; and this conclusion will be 

 fully upheld by our historical inquiry into the subject. This fact of 

 comparative philology is also apt to refute the supposition of Mr. 

 Giles that "a term which originally meant a bovine animal was later on 

 wrongly applied to the rhinoceros." As proved by comparison with the 

 Tibetan and Lepcha words, the Chinese term originally must have 

 designated the rhinoceros. 1 Above all it is incumbent upon me to 

 demonstrate that the Tibetan word bse really designates the rhinoceros, 

 and that the Tibetans were familiar with this animal. The ancient 



translation "lion-unicorn" adopted by Muller is not to the point, as far as the time 

 of Chinese antiquity is concerned. The hiai chai is not explained as a lion (nor could 

 this be expected, as the lion was unknown in ancient China), but as a divine wild 

 goat (shSn yang). The fact that the conception of the animal existed among the 

 Chinese in times prior to the contact with India is clearly proved by the occurrence of 

 the word in Huai-nan-tse, in Tso chuan (Suan Wang 17th year: Legge, Chinese 

 Classics, Vol. V, p. 332), Se-ma Ts'ien's Shi ki (Ch. 117), Lun hSng, Hou Han shu, 

 Erh ya, and Shuo wen. Only in such late compilations as the Japanese version of the 

 San ts'ai Vu hui do we meet the statement that the animal resembles a lion, merely 

 because it is sketched like a lion crowned with a single horn (see L. Seerurier, 

 Encycl. japonaise, le chapitre des quadrupedes, Plate III; or E. Kaempfer, The 

 History of Japan, Vol. I, p. 195, Glasgow, 1906). The connection of this creature 

 with the rhinoceros, and its transformation into a goat, will be discussed below (p. I7 1 )- 



1 The hypothesis of such "confusions, " which are usually assumed to suit one's 

 own convenience, is untenable also for other reasons obvious to every ethnologist: 

 people in the primitive stages of culture, being nearer to nature than we, are surely 

 the keenest observers of animal life and habits, and will most assuredly never con- 

 found a bovine animal with a rhinoceros; they may, by way of explanation, compare 

 the one with the other, but from comparison to confusion is a wide step. 



