220 
Sarat Chandra Das —Contributions on Tibet. 
[No. 3, 
By inculcating these sixteen moral virtues, he greatly promoted the 
present and future well-being and happiness of his subjects. From the 
seashore of southern India he procured for himself a self-created image 
of Chenressig with eleven faces made of Naga-sara sandal wood. He 
married a Nepali Princess, the daughter of Jyoti-Varma king of Nepal, 
who brought him seven precious dowers, the images of Akshobhya and 
Maitreya and a sandal-image of Tara, the gem named Ratnadeva, a 
mendicant’s platter made of lapis-lazuli or Vaidurya. Then, hearing tfie 
report of the extraordinary beauty of the Princess Hun-shin Kun-ju the 
daughter of Senge-tsanpo or the Lion King (Chinese Thai-Tsung 31 ) of 
China, he sent his celebrated Prime Minister Gar with a hundred officers 
to China. After repeated negotiations the proposal was agreed to. 
Many stories are recorded in connection with this marriage of which 
I here give one. As the number of candidates for the princess’s hand 
was very great, the king, unable to decide whom to choose or whom to 
reject, at last declared that he should bestow the princess on that prince 
whose minister by dint of sharpness of sense and quickness of understand¬ 
ing would stand first in merit and intelligence. In the first ordeal, 
the king laid before the assembled ministers a buckler constructed of a 
coil of turquoise, with one end terminating in the centre and the other 
at the edge. He required them to pass a string through the aperture of 
the coil from one end to the other. It was a great puzzle to all except 
to the shrewd Tibetan minister Gar, who tying one end of a thread to 
the narrow waist of a queen ant, gently blew it forward through the 
coil. The ant, dragging the thread easily, came out *at the other end 
to the great wonder of all. The king, not liking to send his favourite 
daughter to such a distant and barbarous country as Tibet, devised repeat¬ 
ed trials in all of which the cunning minister acquitted himself well. The 
reluctance of the king was at last overcome by various contrivances, and he 
at last determined to decide the fate of his daughter finally. He ordered 
500 handsome girls of the princess’s age to be dressed in the same kind of 
apparel as his daughter, and exhibited them before the assembled ambassadors 
along with the princess herself. The shrewd Tibetan, never wanting 
in resources, had studied the countenance of the princess; moreover being 
secretly informed of the king’s design, he had taken some hints about the 
identification of the princess from an old nurse in the royal household. 
By these means, the Minister Gar at once recognized the real princess, and 
gently pulling the edge of her robe, he claimed her for his liege lord. The 
81 King Thai-Tsung one of the most illustrious sovereigns of China, was the son 
of Lyyean the founder of the Tang dynasty of China A. D. 622. Thai-Tsung ascended 
the throne abdicated by his father in his favour in the year 625, when iSron-tsan was 
reigning on the throne of (Yum-bu Lagan) Tibet. 
