iii 



the Honourable the Court of Directors or some literary Association may undertake 

 their publication.' ' 



Government agreed to defray the cost of publishing the Grammar and Diction- 

 ary, and these duly appeared in 1834.' 



In 1835 Csoma again set out on his travels, reaching Maldah in January 1836. 

 Early in March he was in Jalpaiguri, and after a sojourn of nearly two years in Eastern 

 Bengal and in the neighbourhood of Sikkim, Csoma returned to Calcutta. During this 

 period he seems to have been chiefly engaged in learning Bengali and perfecting his 

 knowledge of Sanskrit. From the end of 1837 to the beginning of 1842 he again 

 resided in the Society's house, and in the capacity of Librarian, was partly occupied in 

 arranging the Tibetan works he had himself presented. He also at this time wrote and 

 published a number of articles in our Journal,^ and was furthermore employed by 

 Dr. Yates and other missionaries in the translation of the Liturgy, and Psalms, and 

 the Prayer Book into Tibetan. 



Two further allusions to the vocabulary remain to be quoted. In the 

 Preface to his Dictionary Csoma writes as follows: — -''Sanskrit terms seldom occur 

 in their books [i.e., the Buddhist Literature of the Tibetans] with the exception 

 of a few proper names of men, places, precious stones, flowers, plants, etc., where 

 the translators could not determine what their proper signification would be in 

 Tibetan. But the technical terms in arts and sciences found in Sanskrit have been 

 rendered (not as European nations have done with their translations out of Greek 

 and Latin) by their precise syllabic equivalents in Tibetan, according to a system 

 framed expressly for the purpose by the pandits who engaged in the translation of the 

 sacred works of the Buddhists into the latter language; as may be seen in the several 

 vocabularies extant of Sanskrit and Tibetan terms, of which a large one has been 

 translated into English by the author of this Dictionary and presented to the Asia- 

 tic Society; the same he afterwards found had been previously made known to the 

 learned of Europe by the late Mons. Abel Rerausat." Then again, in Csoma's i\.na- 

 lysis of the Kah-gynr (Asiatic Researches, vol. xx, p. 397) we read: ''All the 21 

 volumes of the Sjier-p'hyin [i.e., the Prajha-paramita] treat of speculative or theoreti- 

 cal philosophy, i.e., they contain the psychological, logical and metaphysical termi- 

 nology of the Buddhists, without entering into the discussion of any particular sub- 

 ject. There are collected one hundred and eight such subjects (dharmas) , terms or 

 phrases, with several subdivisions or distinctions ; of which if any predicate be added 

 to them, affirmative or negative judgments may be formed. These terms have 

 mostly been introduced into the Sanskrit and Tibetan Dictionary also, that was pre- 

 pared by ancient Indian pandits and Tibetan interpreters, and which may be found 

 in the Bsian-hgy^ir (Mdo Class, Go volume)." 



' The Dictionary appeared in January and the Grammar in December of that year. 



^ In honour of the 125th Anniversary of Csoma's birth, the vSociety are about to reprint all 

 these articles in a collected form. As an Introduction to this volume I propose to print the substance 

 of a lecture I delivered before the Society on January 5th, igro. 



This evidently refers to " Un vocabulaire philosophique en cinq langues imprime a Pekin," 

 Melanges Asiatiques. Paris 1825, vol. i, pp. 153 — 183. 



