LANMAN. — PALI BOOK-TITLES. 667 



and the six brief texts Vimana- and Peta-vatthu, Thera- and Therl- 

 gatha, Buddha-varjsa and Cariya-pitaka. Moreover, a new Bangkok 

 edition in Kambodian letters is reported to be under way, although I 

 have thus far failed to elicit answers to my inquiries about it. # But this 

 is not all. There stand actually on my shelves not less than forty- 

 seven volumes of the new Rangoon editions of Tipitaka books and com- 

 mentaries in Burmese letters. Twenty of them are from the Hantha- 

 waddy Press and cover all the Vinaya and Abhidhamma, while of the 

 Sutta-pitaka they contain most unfortunately only the Dlgha-nikaya. 

 In short, they give largely the texts of which we already have good edi- 

 tions and leave out much of that of which we are most in need. 

 Twenty-six are from the P. G. Mundyne Pitaka Press and contain 

 Buddhaghosa's commentaries and various Tikas. 3 Childers's dic- 

 tionary is hardly to be had for love or money ; and, if it were, it is 

 wholly inadequate for reading the vast amount of texts since pub- 

 lished. A new one must be made. 



Result of lack of organization as concerns the dictionary. — 

 Reverting to the matter with which we began, it is safe to say that 

 within the last twenty-five years good and efficient labor has been 

 expended by competent scholars upon the work of gathering materials 

 for a Pali dictionary, of an amount which would have been amply suffi- 

 cient to produce a good dictionary if only it had been properly orga- 

 nized. As it is, B has unwittingly duplicated part of A's labor ; C, 

 part of B's ; and so on ; and we are about where we were when we 

 started, and all for lack of some central organization. This is a pitiful 

 result, and is due to a state of things of which we Indianists ought to 

 be thoroughly ashamed. 



Some forty odd years ago a beautiful melody from Weber's Frei- 

 schiitz came to be used in the church-choirs of some rather remote 

 New England villages. The ultra-conservatives were scandalized and 

 remonstrated : " Shall the sons of Belial possess themselves of our holy 

 altars?" "Not so," answered the innovators; "say rather, 'Shall 

 the devil have a monopoly of all the good tunes 1 ' " 4 In like manner 

 (without suggesting any likeness between business and deviltry), why 

 should mercantile undertakings have the monopoly of good organization 1 

 or again, why should, for instance, that excellent periodical, Collier's 

 Weekly, with its very wide circulation, avail itself of the advantages 



3 The other volume contains the Buddhist Acta Sanctorum, Buddha- 

 ghosa's commentary on the Dhammapada. Here is a splendid chance for a 

 young man to win his spurs in exploiting this rich mine of Buddhist legend. 



4 Substantially the same remark is attributed to Whitfield in R. Southey's 

 Life of Wesley, 2, 374 (London, 1858). * See Postscript, p. 707. 



