1888.] Address. 43 



first fasciculus is in the pi'ess, and I place on tlie table the proofs of 

 the first few pages. The manuscript is in verse, and was translated 

 into Tibetan by Lochava Sbonton Dorje and the Indian pandit Laksh- 

 mikara at the vihdra of Gedun Shide in Maiiyul under the orders 

 of Ponchhen Shakya Ssanpo, ruler of Tibet in 1279 A. D. The blocks 

 from which the print used was taken were engraved by the direction 

 of the Dalai Lama Nagwan Lossan in 1645 A. D. The work consists 

 of 1U8 ^allavas, of which 107 were written by Kshemendra and one 

 by his son Somendra. The copies hitherto procured and now deposited 

 in our library and that of the Cambridge University are imperfect, 

 containing only the second part of the work, and a fragment of the first, 

 so that the publication of this Sanskrit and Tibetan version of the 

 entire poem will restore to India a portion of a valuable Buddhistic work 

 that has been lost to it for over five hundred years. Kshemendra 

 is said to have been the court poet of Ananta, Raja of Kashmir, and 

 undertook the work at the instance of his Buddhist friend Nakka. It is 

 a veritable store-house of the legends as to Buddha's life and acts 

 according to the Mahay ana school of Northern Buddhism, and is written 

 in a simple, elegant style, quite free from the turgid verbosity and 

 tedious repetition usually characteristic of Buddhist Sanskrit works. 

 The arrangement of the original and Tibetan version in juxtaposition 

 should give an impetus to the study of classical Tibetan and afford an 

 accurate basis for further research. 



In my address last year, it was brought to your notice that Babii 

 Sarat Chandra Das was also engaged upon a vocabulary of Tibetan 

 Buddhistic terms. Since then he has procured several manuscript 

 dictionaries in Sanskrit- Tibetan and Tibetan- Sanskrit, and it is now 

 proposed, if it can be arranged, to compile a comprehensive Tibetan- 

 Sanskrit-English dictionary, with an appendix containing the Sanskrit- 

 English portion with a reference to the Tibetan equivalent. This work 

 when completed should serve as a key to the great collections of manu- 

 scripts in St. Petersburgh, Paris, and London which written, as they are, 

 in classical Tibetan require more aid to understand them than is afforded 

 by the dictionaries of Csoma de Koros and Jaschke. It is not unreason- 

 able to expect from the works, now in progress under your auspices, a 

 flood of light on the history of northern Buddhism, regarding which our 

 knowledge at present is so mixed with conjecture. Learned Indian 

 Buddhist pandits travelled to Tibet and communicated to the Lochavas 

 there the received interpretation of the phrases and terms used which 

 were subsequently embodied in the dictionaries prepared in Tibet, and 

 found in the Bstmi-hgyur (Mdo class. Go volume), so that we, perhaps, 

 could not reasonably expect a more authoritative interpretation than 



