1895. 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



353 



VOLUMINOUS BIBLES,. 



fome Sacred Writiogs Tbat Are Perfectly 

 Appalline In Their Bulk. 



The sacred books of the Bud- 

 dhists are perfectly appalling in their 

 bulk. They are called the Tripitaka, 

 the Three Baskets, and were origi- 

 Bally written in Pali, a vernacular 

 form of Sanskrit. They have been 

 translated into many languages, 

 Buoh as Chinese, Tibetan and Mant- 

 choo. They have also been written 

 and published in various alphabets, 

 not only in Devanagari, but in Cin- 

 galese, Burmese and Siamese letters. 

 TTie copy in 19 volumes lately pre- 

 sented to the University of Oxford 

 "by the king of Siam contains the 

 Pali te^t written in Siamese letters, 

 but the lane;uage is always the same. 

 It is the Pali, or the vulgar tongue, 

 as it was supposed to have been 

 spoken by Buddha himself about 500 

 B. C. After having been preserved 

 for centuries by oral tradition it 

 was reduced for the first time to 

 writing under King Vattagamani in 

 88-76 B. C, the time when the truly 

 literary period of India may be said 

 to begin. But besides this Pali canon 

 there is another in Sanskrit, and 

 there are books in the Sanskrit 

 canon which are not to be found in 

 the Pali canon, and vice versa. 



According to a tradition current 

 among the southern as well as the 

 northern Buddhists, the original 

 oanon consisted of 84,000 books, 82,- 

 000 being ascribed to Buddha him- 

 self and 2,000 to his disciples. Book, 

 however, seems to have meant here 

 no more than treatise or topic. 



But as a matter of fact the Pali 

 oanon consists, according to the 

 Kev. E. Spence Hardy, of 275,250 

 stanzas and its commentary of 361,- 

 550 stanzas, each stanza reckoned at 

 82 syllables. This would give us 

 8,808^000 syllables for the text and 

 11,569,000 syllables for the com- 

 mentary. This is of course an enor- 

 mous amount. The question is only 

 whether the Rev. Spence Hardv and 



bis assistants, who are responsible 

 for these statements, counted right- 

 ly. Professor Rhys Davis, by tak- 

 ing the average of words in ten 

 leaves, arrives at much smaller 

 sums— namely, at 1,752,800 words 

 for the Pali canon, which in an Eng- 

 lish translation, as he says, would 

 amount to about twice that number, 

 or 3,505,600 words. Even this would 

 be ample for a Bible. It would make 

 the Buddhist Bible nearly five times 

 as large as our own, but it seems to 

 me that Spence Hardy's account is 

 more likely to be correct. Professor 

 Rhys Davis, by adopting the same 

 plan of reckoning, brings the num. 

 ber of words in the Bible to about 

 900,000. "We found it given as 773,- 

 692. But who shall decide? 



What the bulk of such a work 

 would be we may gather from what 

 we know of the bulk of the transla- 

 tions. There is a complete copy of 

 the Chinese translation at the India 

 oflBce in London ; also in the Bod- 

 leian, and a catalogue of it made by a 

 Japanese pupil of mine, the Rev. 

 Bunylu Nanjio, brings the number 

 of separate works in it to 1,662. 

 The Tibetan translation, which dates 

 from the eighth century, consists of 

 two collections, commonly called the 

 Kanjur and Tanjur. 



The Kanjur consists of 100 vol- 

 umes in folio, the Tanjur of 225 

 volumes, each volume weighing be- 

 tween four and five pounds. This 

 collection, published by command 

 of the emperor of China, sells for 

 £630. A copy of it is found at the 

 India office. The Buriates, a Mongo- 

 lian tribe converted to Buddhism, 

 bartered 7,000 oxen for one copy of 

 the Kanjur, and the same tribe paid 

 12,000 silver rubles for a complete 

 copy of both Kanjur and Tanjur. 

 "What must it be to believe in 325 

 volumes, each weighing five pounds 

 — nay, even to read through such a 

 bible !— -Professor Max Mullor in 

 Nineteenth Century. 



