118 INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGES 



to be translated. All the material which is contained in the whole 

 range of this literature and bears on the history of Buddhist India 

 will have to be extracted and worked up. And after all this has been 

 done a critical history of Pali literature will have to be written. 

 Among the most urgent needs in the field of Pali scholarship at the 

 present day, however, is the compilation both of a comprehensive 

 and thoroughly scientific grammar and of a dictionary resembling 

 the Sanskrit work of Bohtlingk and Roth, which will include all 

 the lexicographical material that has become available during the 

 last thirty years since the publication of Childers' lexicon. A Pali 

 grammar of the kind I have indicated will no doubt be supplied 

 by the work which Professor Otto Franke, of Konigsberg, is about 

 to contribute to Bvihler and Kielhorn's Encyclopaedia of Indo-Aryan 

 Research. As to the Pali Dictionary, Professor Rhys Davids is at 

 present planning one on a large scale in cooperation with some other 

 scholars. It is sincerely to be hoped that this undertaking, which 

 would do more than anything else to promote Pali studies, will not 

 be retarded or frustrated by want of funds. 



If research in the field of Pali is to be advanced in the manner which 

 the extent and importance of the subject demand, the establishment 

 of a few chairs of Pali is essential. At present there is, I believe, not 

 a single salaried professorship of Pali in Europe or America. Pali 

 studies are meanwhile being carried on either by a few professors 

 of Sanskrit, chiefly in Germany, or by scholars who, being obliged to 

 make their livelihood in some other way, are able to devote only 

 a scanty leisure to their favorite pursuit. I have, for some time past, 

 been urging the advisability of founding a chair of Pali in the Uni- 

 versity of Oxford, where Oriental subjects are otherwise very fully 

 represented. I do not, however, feel confident of success unless 

 some generous benefactor should step in. Perhaps the King of Siam, 

 the only Buddhist monarch in the world, who is well known to be 

 a munificent patron of Pali learning, having himself published on 

 a magnificent scale a complete set of the Pali canon in Siam, may 

 come forward as the founder of the first chair of Pali in the West. 



As to the old Prakrits, they are known to have had a continuous 

 recorded existence in the form of inscriptions for several centuries, 

 beginning with the rock and pillar edicts of Asoka, the Buddhist 

 Emperor of the third century B.C., which are scattered all over India. 

 These early Prakrit inscriptions, as well as the Sanskrit ones which 

 begin to appear in the second century A.D., have been to a large 

 extent published; but many of them, owing to defective reproduc- 

 tion, will have to be re-edited. Epigraphical research would be 

 greatly advanced by collecting all these inscriptions within the 

 compass of a single work in a critical edition. The reconstruction 

 of the political history of the period from this material, together 



