The Pomegranate 283 



China. How this would have been possible, is not explained by him. 

 The Sanskrit term for the pomegranate (and this is evidently what 

 Hirth hinted at) is dddima or ddlima, also dddimva, which has passed 

 into Malayan as delima. 1 It is obvious that the Chinese transcription 

 bears some relation to this word; but it is equally obvious that the 

 Chinese form cannot be fully explained from it, as it leads only to 

 *du-lim, not, however, to dalim. There are two possibilities: the Chinese 

 transcription might be based either on an Indian vernacular or 

 Apabhramca form of a type like *dulim, *ducjim, 2 or on a word of the 

 same form belonging to some Iranian dialect. The difficulty of the 

 problem is enhanced by the fact that no ancient Iranian word for the 

 fruit is known to us. 3 It appears certain, however, that no Sanskrit 

 word is intended in the Chinese transcription, otherwise we should 

 meet the latter in the Sanskrit-Chinese glossaries. The fact remains 

 that these, above all the Fan yi mih yi tsi, do not contain the word 

 Vu-lin; and, as far as I know, Chinese Buddhist literature offers no 

 allusion to the pomegranate. Nor do the Chinese say, as is usually 

 stated by them in such cases, that the word is of Sanskrit origin; the 

 only positive information given is that it came along with General 

 Can K'ien, which is to say that the Chinese were under the im- 

 pression that it hailed from some of the Iranian regions visited by him. 

 *Dulim, dulima, or *durim, durima, accordingly, must have been a 

 designation of the pomegranate in some Iranian language. 



(2) :$" ?* tan-So, *dan-zak, dan-yak, dan-n'iak. This word appears 

 in the Ku kin lu K and in the Yu yah tsa tsu. 6 Apparently it represents a 

 transcription, but it is not stated from which language it is derived. In 

 my estimation, the foundation is an Iranian word still unknown to us, 

 but congeners of which we glean from Persian ddnak ("small grain"), 



1 J. Crawfurd (History of the Indian Archipelago, Vol. I, p. 433) derives this 

 word from the Malayan numeral five, with reference to the five cells into which the 

 fruit is divided. This, of course, is a mere popular etymology. There is no doubt 

 that the fruit was introduced into the Archipelago from India; it occurs there only 

 cultivated, and is of inferior quality. On the Philippines it was only introduced 

 by the Spaniards (A. de Morga, Philippine Islands, p. 275, ed. of Hakluyt Society). 



2 The vernacular forms known to me have the vowel a; for instance, Hindustani 

 darim, Bengali dalim, dalim or darim; Newari, dhdde. The modern Indo-Aryan 

 languages have also adopted the Persian word anar. 



* In my opinion, the Sanskrit word is an Iranian loan-word, as is also Sanskrit 

 karaka, given as a synonyme for the pomegranate in the Amarakosa. The earliest 

 mention of dddima occurs in the Bower Manuscript; the word is absent in Vedic 

 literature. 



4 At least it is thus stated in cyclopaedias; but the editions of the work, as 

 reprinted in the Han Wei ts'un Su and Kifu ts'un Su, do not contain this term. 



» Ch. 18, p. 3 b (ed. of Pai hai). 



