1892.] Address. 39 



Tibetan literature accessible to us is enormous, and of very unequal 

 value ; and it will be necessary to exercise great care in selecting works 

 for publication in this series. 



Reference may also be made to a paper on the life of the Indian 

 Pandit, Atisa, otherwise known as Dipamkara S'rijiiana, by Babu Sarat 

 Chandra Das, C. 1. E., published in Part I of the Journal. Dipamkara 

 was a learned Pandit of Magadha, to whom Lha Lama, the king of 

 Tibet, sent messengers in the first half of the 11th century, in- 

 viting him to visit Tibet in order to restore the pure doctrines of 

 Buddhism, which had become debased in that country by an admixture 

 of Tantric and Pon mysticism, After many refusals he was prevailed 

 on to visit Tibet in the year 1038 A. D., when the king received him 

 with the utmost respect and veneration, and conferred on him the title 

 of Jovo Atisa, (the Supreme Lord who has surpassed all). He revived 

 the practice of the pure Mahayana doctrine, and died near Lhasa in 

 1053 A. D. at the age of 73. 



I may also notice the papers of the late Dr. Karl Marx, published 

 in numbers 2 and 3 of Part I of the Journal, one being a translation of 

 a dialogue from the Tibetan between a wicked king and his minister, 

 and the other a notice of documents relating to the history of Ladakh, 

 at which place Dr. Marx was a missionary. Death has been very busy 

 in the last few years with Tibetan scholars. We have lost Schiefner, 

 Minayeff, and Jaschke, and now the successor of Jaschke at Ladakh has 

 followed him. 



Tibetan- Sanskrit Dictionary. — An account may here be given of the 

 Tibetan-Sanskrit Dictionary, in the preparation of which Babu Sarat 

 Chandra Das, as the Tibetan Translator to Government, has been en- 

 gaged for the last two or three years under the orders of the Govern- 

 ment of Bengal. At the close of the Preface to his Tibetan Dictionary, 

 published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1834, Csoma de Koros 

 wrote : — " When there shall be more interest taken in Buddhism and in 

 the diffusion of Christian and European knowledge throughout the most 

 Eastern parts of Asia, the Tibetan Dictionary may be much improved, 

 enlarged and illustrated by the addition of Sanskrit terms." The 

 projected dictionary is intended to satisfy this requirement, only much 

 more fully than de Koros contemplated. Since his time another Tibetan 

 Dictionary has appeared, the production of Jaschke, the Moravian 

 Missionary at Ladakh. This work, though a great improvement on 

 Csoma's, does not meet the critical requirements of the pi'esent day. 

 Jaschke had not at his command the resources necessary for such an 

 undertaking. He was thoroughly familiar with Tibetan as a spoken 

 language ; but as regards its literary form, he had access to only a 



