42 S. C. Das —The Sacred and Ornamental Characters of Tibet. [No. 2, 
During the reign of king Thisron Deu-tsan, Buddhism was made 
the state religion of Tibet, and the Pon religion was suppressed by 
royal edicts, and the country of snows attracted the attention of the 
Indian Buddhists. S'anta Rakshita, one of the professors of S'ri 
Nalendra, visited Tibet where he was appointed the spiritual adviser to 
the king. Thisron embraced Buddhism with that earnest devotion 
to religion which marked the character of Asoka. He was determined 
to follow that monarch’s footsteps in the propagation of his adopted creed. 
At the advice of S'anta Rakshita he founded many religious institutions 
in central Tibet. Not satisfied with the religious works of minor im¬ 
portance which he had already done, the king desired the Indian pandit 
to introduce Buddhist monachism in his kingdom. In order to help 
S'anta Rakshita in this important work, the king invited Acharya 
Padma Sambhava, a native of Udyana, who was at this time travelling 
in Magadha. With the help of these two Indian pandits the king 
founded the famed monastery of Sam-yea after the model of the monas¬ 
tery of Uddandapuri of Magadha. He richly endowed this monastery, and 
provided it with spacious accommodation in buildings designed in the 
Indian fashion for the residence of one hundred and eight Indian pandits. 
The two Indian pandits commenced the introduction of Buddhist 
monachism by initiating seven Tibetan young men into the order of Bhik- 
shu. After the completion of Sam-yea the king invited many Buddhist 
scholars from Magadha to conduct the work of translating Buddhist 
sacred scriptures into Tibetan. During the reign of this king and his 
successors, down to the accession of the apostate Lang Darma to the 
throne of Tibet, the work of translation was carried on with vigour. 
With a view to make Sanskrit accessible to the Tibetans, and also to 
save the Tibetan students, desirous of learning Sanskrit, the trouble of 
an Indian journey and residence, the Tibetan Lochavas (Sanskrit 
scholars and interpreters) wrote commentaries on Sanskrit grammars and 
translated Sanskrit dictionaries into Tibetan. The works of the best 
authors of ancient India, including those of Kapila, Yalmiki, Vyasa, 
Panini, Kalidasa, &c., were also translated. The thirty-four Tibetan 
letters of the alphabet, that were introduced by Sambhota to form the 
basis of the Tibetan language, were now found insufficient for this kind 
of work. To facilitate the transliteration of Sanskrit words into Tibetan, 
additional letters were required. These they supplied by the simple 
method of inversion and duplication of some of the existing Tibetan, 
letters. 
It is worthy of remark that a tongue which in its nature was 
monosyllabic, when written in the characters of a polysyllabic language 
like the Sanskrit, had necessarily to undergo some modification. The 
