SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. 275 



country of Benjamin, or cream of tartar with Crim Tar- 

 tary.' 



Somewhat in hke manner we have come to call various 

 chains of mountains in India the Western Ghats, Eastern 

 Ghats, and so forth ; and I have seen it stated in a geo- 

 graphy-book that Ghat means mountain. But Ghat really 

 means a Pass. The plateau above and the plain below 

 those passes луеге respectively known to the Mahommedan 

 rulers as Bald-ghat and PAyiii-ghdt, ' Above the passes ' 

 and ' Below the passes.' Hence the Portuguese, and after 

 them the English, attached the idea of moiintain range to 

 the word Ghat. — [Y.] 



GIGEN. 

 P. 12. 



This is the word used by our author for those ordinary 

 ' incarnate ' Lamas whom Hue calls CJiaberons. The word 

 is Mongol, and we find it thus explained in Kovalefsky's 

 Dictionary : ' GhegJicn . . . eclat, splendeur ; . . . brillant 

 . . . personne venerable ; titrc honorairc dim grave per- 

 sonnage' Gegen KJiutnktu is one of the formal titles of the 

 Great Lama at Urga spoken of in the text.^ — [Y.] 



^ Buddhala is however older than Hue, for I see it is alluded to 

 by I. J. Schmidt in his Forschungen, &c., 1824, p. 209. 



The origin of the application of the name Potala, or Potaraka, 

 to the palace of the Grand Lama seems a little obscure. The name 

 is the same as that of the city in Sindh (Haidarabad), which the 

 Greeks called Pattala. Koeppen says that, according to legend, the 

 Sakya family, i.e. the family of Buddha, originally sprang thence. 

 According to Buddhist stories there were two other sacred hills of this 

 name. The first rose out of the Western Sea, and bore on its summit 

 a celestial palace which served as a rest-house to the Bodhisatvas on 

 their errands to earth. This is the true and heavenly Potala. Another 

 lay in the China Sea opposite Chekiang, and is in fact the famous 

 ecclesiastical island of Puto near Chusan. 



'^ See Koeppen, Lamaismus, yjb. 



