17S Dr. Mitra— On Ekotibhdva. [July, 



of condition. There can be no unification of substance in the act of string- 

 ing on a thread, and therefore the affix appears to me to be of 

 doubtful propriety. In fact the learned Professor has resorted to it 

 solely to account for the supposed long i in the Tibetan texts, and as I 

 cannot see my way at present to admit the accuracy of the reading, I 

 deny the necessity of the inappropriate affix. 



1 Babu Saratchandra Das says that my derivation of the word from 

 ve and kti does not seem to him to be correct, because it does not strictly 

 give the meaning of the term in accordance with the rules of Sanskrit 

 grammar.' He has not cited the rule, but certain it is that whatever 

 the rule, it did not stand in the way of S'ridhara S'vami, the commenta- 

 tor on the Bhagavata nor of the authors of the Rig Veda : they all use 

 the word with a short i, and I am content to err with them. 



' The word sutra has been used apparently with a view to make the 

 meaning consonant with the interpretation of the compound term given 

 by a Lama, but it is not permissible. It is not suggested by the text. 

 The same remark applies to the epithet ananta-dhdrd-vdhihatayd ' the 

 endless flow of the stream.' There is no justification for it in the text. 

 It may be that in Tibet the meaning of the term is different from what 

 Sanskrit and Pali scholars have assigned to it ; but that does not necessi- 

 tate a different derivation. The learned Professor is thoroughly familiar 

 with the Lalita Vistara, which is the oldest work in which the term 

 was first met with, for he is the author of a Sanskrit abridgment of 

 that work, and he must have noticed in the 22nd chapter of it, that the 

 term cannot there be explained to mean ' the endless flow of the 

 stream.' The term there qualifies the first of a set of four meditations, 

 each of which lasts for a few minutes. Of course during the continu- 

 ance of any one of these meditations there is a continuous, or unbroken, or 

 undisturbed flow of attention as shown in Aphorism 2 of the 3rd Book 

 of Patanjali's Yoga, but there is no endlessness in it. When the se- 

 cond meditation begins, the first is lost, and with it ' the flow of the 

 stream ' terminates, and does not return again in its original form in 

 the course of the subsequent meditations. In such a case the most ap- 

 propriate meaning is that which the Pali authorities ascribe to the word, 

 and which Professor Max Miiller has accepted, i. e., it means concen- 

 tration of the mind or eJcdgratd, or as I put it on the authority of S'ri- 

 dhara S'vami, making one subject the object of our thought, and there 

 need be no doubt that that is the right meaning. Just now I have not 

 access to Csoma's MS. glossary of Tibetan technical terms, it being 

 with Babu Saratchandra Das at Darjiling, but from the quotation 

 given in his paper, it is evident that Csoma had no idea about the ' end- 

 less stream.' He uses the word ' union ' which for a popular rendering 



