166 



TRANSLATION OF A BURMESE 



milk, and the spot where he ate (») it was called Payatha-hhaf afterwards. That spot was 

 close to the right bank of the Nareenjana (°), now called Nilajan stream, into which Gau- 

 DAMA cast the gold plate containing the food, after having eaten forty-nine niouthfuls of it. 

 The plate floated up the stream and gave aproof that Gaud am A would become a Buddha. 

 On this same spot a king oi Magadha named Theeri Dhamma Thauka, built one of 

 the 84,000 temples, which he raised to the memory of Gaudama 218 years after that 

 Buddha's death. The monuments usually called, as in this inscription, Tsedi or Zedi {'^), are 

 now generally built in Burmah, of a round and solid form, like that of the Dagope in 

 Western India, but in former times, as may be seen particularly at Pag4n, they were 

 much handsomer structures, being arched, and containing highly ornamental apartments 

 within them. At Pagan there still exists one pagoda called Them-hau-zedi{^), or ship- 

 temple, probably from the circumstance of the form having been taken from that in use in 

 countries beyond sea, which is something like the large Buddhist temj^le at Buddha Gaya, 

 described in Hamilton's East India Gazetteer as " a lofty brick edifice resembling at 

 a distance a huge glass house." The Burmese envoys had a picture taken in order to be 

 presented to the king of Ava of this edifice, and of most of the surrounding objects at 

 Buddha Gaya. Theeri Dhamma Thauka {') built a monastery as well as a temple in 

 84,000 different parts of his empire, and as the temple now standing at Buddha Gaya 

 called by the Burmese Maha Baudhi Paribauga Zedi (f) (temple in which all offerings to 

 Buddha's sacred tree are deposited), is considered by the Burmese vakeels to have been 

 originally built by the king of Magadha, they suppose that the inscription refers to the 

 monastery which was built at the same time, and which might have been styled Pdyatha- 

 hhat, but of which there are no remains now. The words of the inscription do not 

 however quite warrant such a supposition. 



2. — Theeri Dhamma Thauka was the grandson of Tsanda-goutta, (s) who 

 must be the same as Chandra-gupta, king of Magadha of Sanscrit authors, and San- 

 DRACOPTOS, or Sandracottos of the historians of Alexander the Great, According 

 to the Burmese history, Tsanda-goutta reigned for 24 years, between the Burmese 



C) The term used for Gaudama or any priest's eating is, " giving it glory." 



• C) .S". Nairanjana (') S. Chciitya ? Semhojeti. 



(') Sri Dharmaasoka. (') Parihboga jeti. 



(*) The Burnacse letter O is often pronounced as cA, and is used always for the ch in Pali or 



foreign words, but the usual sound given to it is more like a hard * pronounced with the tongue 

 pressed against the roof of the mouth. 



