J 834.] European Speculations on Buddhism. 387 



hand, our personal inquirers have time and opportunity at command, 

 and can question and cross-question intelligent witnesses, the result of 

 an appeal to the living oracles will oft times prove as valuable as that 

 of one to the dead. 



Let the closet student, then, give reasonable faith to the traveller, 

 even upon this subject ; and, whatever may be the general intellectual 

 inferiority of the orientals of our day, or the plastic facility of change 

 peculiar to every form of polytheism, let him not suppose that the living 

 followers of Buddha cannot be profitably interrogated touching the creed 

 they live and die in ; and, above all, let him not presume that a religion 

 fixed, at its earliest period, by means of a noble written language, has 

 no identity of character in the several countries where it is now pro- 

 fessed, notwithstanding that that identity has been guarded, up to this 

 day, by the possession and use of original scriptures, or of faithful trans- 

 lations from them, which were made in the best age of this church. 



For myself, and with reference to the latter point, I can safely say 

 that my comparisons of the existing Buddhism of Nipal, with that of 

 Tibet, the Indo-Chinese nations, and Ceylon, as reported by our local 

 inquirers, as well as with that of ancient India itself, as evidenced by 

 the sculptures of Gya*, and of the cave temples of Aurungabad, have 

 satisfied me that this faith possesses as much identity of character in 

 all times and places as any other we know, of equal antiquity and 

 diffusionf. 



* See the explanation of these sculptures by a Nipalese Buddhist in the Quar- 

 terly Oriental Magazine, No. XIV. pp. 218, 222. 



t Asa proof of the close agreement of the Bauddha systems of different coun- 

 tries, we may take this opportunity of quoting a private letter from Colonel Bur- 

 ney, relative to the ' Burmese Philosopher Prince,' Mekkhara Men, the king 

 of Ava's uncle. 



" The prince has been reading with the greatest interest M. Csoma de Koros's 

 different translations from the Tibet scriptures in your Journal, and he is most 

 anxious to obtain the loan of some of the many Tibetan works, which the Society 

 is said to possess. He considers many of the Tibetan letters to be the same as 

 the Burmese, particularly the b, m, n, and y. He is particularly anxious to know 

 if the monastery called Zedawuna still exists in Tibet, where according to the Bur- 

 mese books, Godama dwelt a long time, and with his attendant Ananda planted 

 a bough which he had brought from the great plpal tree, at Buddha-Gaya. The 

 prince is also anxious to know whether the people of Tibet wear their hair as the 

 Burmese do ? how they dress, and how their priests dress and live ? The city in 

 which the monastery of Zedawuua stood, is called in the Burmese scriptures 

 Thawotthi, and the prince ingeniously fancies, that Tibet must be derived from 

 that word. The Burmese have no s, and always use their soft th, when they meet 

 with that letter in Pali or foreign words — hence probably Thawotthi is from some 

 Sanscrit name Sawot. I enclose a list of countries and cities mentioned in the 

 2 d 2 



