196 Retnarks on an Inscription [April, 



II. — Remarks on an Inscription in the Ranjd and Tibetan (V'chhdn) 

 Characters, taken from a Temple on the Confines of the Valley of 

 Nepal. By B. H. Hodgson, Esq. Resident. 



On the main road from the valley of Nepal to Tibet, by the Eastern 

 or Kiiti Pass of the Hemachal, and about two miles beyond the ridge 

 of hills environing the valley, there stands a diminutive stone chaitya, 

 supported, as usual, by a wide, graduated, basement. 



Upon the outer surface of the retaining walls of this basement are 

 inscribed a variety of texts from the Bauddha Scriptures, and amongst 

 others, the celebrated Shad-Akshari Mantra, Om Mani Padme Horn. 

 This is an invocation of Padma Pani, the 4th Dhyani Bodhisatwa, and 

 prassens Divus of the Theistic school of Buddhists-r— with an accessary 

 mention of their triad, under that symbolic, literal form which is com- 

 mon to them and to the Brahmanists*. It is not, however, my present 

 purpose to dwell upon the real and full import of these words ; but to 

 exhibit the insmption itself, as an interesting specimen of the practi- 

 cal conjunction of those two varieties of the Devanagari letters which 

 may be said to belong respectively and appropriately to the Saugatas 

 of Nepal and of Tibet. Not that both forms have not been long 

 familiar to the Tibetans, but that they still consider, and call, that 

 one foreign and Indian which the Nipalese Bauddha Scriptures exhi- 

 bit as the ordinary ecriture ; and which, though allowed by the 

 Nipalese to be Indian, and though most certainly deduceable from the 

 Devanagari standard, is not now, nor has been for ages, extant in 

 any part of India. 



cold-blooded executions which he caused to be done upon many innocent persons 

 erected a temple to Maheswar (Siva), and first established Hinduism as the 

 religion of the realm. According to one author, Chu Cheng Pha' ascended the 

 throne in the year of Sakaditya 1524 (A. D. 1602), while another author places 

 the occurrence fourteen years later. He died A. S. 1563, (A. D. 1641.) 



I think Dr. Buchanan must have been wrongly informed, when he asserts the 

 conversion of the royal family to the new faith was effected in the rei°-n of 

 Gadadhar Singh, who he calls the fourteenth prince of the family ; while I make 

 him out to be the twenty-ninth in succession to Chu Ka Pha' ; he was however 

 the first Ahom sovereign who took the Hindu title, which may have led the Dr. 

 to credit the information communicated to him. 



The proper name of the king Gada'dhar Singh was Chu Pat Pha', and he 

 reigned from A. S. 1603 to 1617, (4. D. 1681 to 1695.) In A. D. 1692-3, he 

 dispossessed all the Bhukuts of their possessions, and compelled them to reside 

 together in Kamrup, in Upper Assam ; and in the year following, he cast all the 

 images of the votaries of Vishnu into the Bruhmaputra. 



* Viz. the triliteral syllable Om, composed of the letters A, U, and M, typifi- 

 ing, with the Brahmanists, Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa— but with the Buddhists, 

 Buddha, Dbarma, and Sanga. 



