Until well within the second quarter of this century, academic sinology in Britain remained the province of a few isolated, if brilliant, amateurs, men who had retired to scholarly pursuits after a lifetime of activity in some other field. They occupied university chairs with distinction, but never attracted many pupils and consequently never established a tradition of exact, professional scholarship. That such a tradition, sound and solid, though still young, exists today, is above all the merit of two scholars who, having left Germany in the years before the second World War, devoted their lives to the service of learning in their adopted country. The late Gustav Haloun enjoyed a short but memorable tenure of the Chair at Cambridge. At London, Walter Simon, whom his friends, colleagues, and former pupils greet with respect and affection on his eightieth birthday with this volume of essays, inspired a new academic professionalism, which was Germanic in the rigour of its philological exactitude, but at the same time humane in its appreciation of the civilization to which the study of language is the key. His immediate monument is the present Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Far East at this School, and it is appropriate that we should take this opportunity of honouring his life's work among us. But the ‘school’ to which he gave life is by no means confined to London. Scholars whom Simon taught or influenced occupy chairs of sinology and other teaching and library posts in this country, in Australia, Canada, and the United States.

To do honour to my old friend Walter Simon I have put together here five documents from Central Asia. These are: (1) the photograph of the Turkish text in Khotan Saka script; (2) a Tibetan letter in Khotan Saka script; (3) pieces of document from Kuci (Kucha) inscribed with Kharoṣṭhī and Brahml script; (4) a fragment of Khotan Saka containing the word bisīvrai; and (5) three Tibetan documents with Khotan Saka words.

This paper is intended first as a tribute to my teacher, and second as a small contribution to the perennial discussion of the place or extent of the tragic in Chinese literature. I shall plead limited space as excuse for refraining from philosophical discussion, definition, or comparison with Classical Greek or Shakespearean manifestations of the tragic. My suggestion will be simply that P'i-p'a chi ‘Lute song’ (hereafter ‘Lute’) may be added to Kuan Han-ch'ing's Ton O yuan and the ‘Red chamber dream ‘on that select list of Chinese works which in the conflicts they present and the resolutions they propose tend towards the tragic.

Since 1896, when I-ching's famous book on Buddhism in India and South East Asia was made available in an English translation by J. Takakusu, Western Sanskritists have looked with special interest at chapter xxxiv, on the Sanskrit grammarians. The general reaction has been one of disappointment; and for many years most Indologists would have agreed with many of A. Barth's criticisms: ‘Il demeure done bien acquis que, parmi des renseignements du plus grand prix, comme les dates de la Kāçikā Vṛitti et du grammairien Bhartṛihari, I-tsing nous a servi quelques bourdes énormes; par exemple, quand il fait du Mahābhāshya un commentaire sur la Kāçikā Vṛitti; quand il distingue entre le Vākyapadīya de Bhartṛihari et son commentaire sur le Mahābhāshya’; and more besides. Ironically, it is now known that the date given for Bhartṛhari is wrong, and that the latter did write both the Vākyapadīya and a commentary on the Mahābhāṣya. Nevertheless, other errors continue to be quoted.

The question primarily at issue is whether da and desu in modern, chiefly conversational, Japanese, together with other forms commonly held to belong to paradigms of da+ and desu+ viewed as inflected items, should be called copulative forms; whether, that is to say, they perform the grammatical function of linking a subject with a predicate. The question also concerns combinations consisting of de followed by one of the forms of aru+, arimasu+, or gozaimasu+. In general, these combinations have when positive the same uses and senses as forms of da+ and desu+ and are when negative the only available negative counterparts of those forms. Some attention will be given to what has been said about the verb nari+ (< ni ari+) and the combination nite ari+ of the now obsolete Classical Literary style, though no attempt will be made to reach conclusions about them.

La famille était la cellule sur laquelle reposait la sociéte chinoise ancienne, a telles enseignes que la piéte filiale se vit extrapoler en loyalisme á l'égard de l'empereur, pére du peuple. Aussi le bouddhisme, qui invitait son clergé a ‘sortir de la famille’ pour s'agreger á une communauté religieuse, indépendante de l'État, ne laissa-t-il pas de poser aux Chinois qui s'y ralliérent bien des problémes douloureux. C'est ce dont témoigne l'insistance qu'ont mise les traducteurs, les commentateurs, les auteurs de textes apocryphes ou populaires, á illustrer les détours auxquels les moines bouddhistes pouvaient recourir pour ‘retribuer’ les bontes qu'ils avaient reçues de leurs parents. La plupart des apocryphes et des élucubrations populaires de ce genre ne nous sont connus que par des manuscrits retrouvés a Tun-huang. Ceux-ci nous ont rendu notamment un certain nombre de tsanqui sont particuliérement touchants par leur ton ingenu et leur langue sans apprets. L'age m'incline a préférer la muse populaire á celle des lettrés, et j'ai choisi l'une de ces pieces pour en offrir une recension et une traduction á mon vieil ami Walter Simon, en y joignant trois autres qui s'en rapprochent étroitement.

As a small token of my gratitude to Professor Walter Simon for the help that he has ungrudgingly given me over many years, I present to him, with some trepidation, some etymological notes on words which I have encountered during work on the Japanese puppet drama. Even so restricted an investigation has obliged me to consult many long-suffering colleagues at SOAS, and I take this opportunity of thanking them and apologizing for not mentioning them individually.

Since Chinese is the crucial example of a purely isolating language, linguists have long been interested in any phenomena which suggest that some classes of Chinese words may once have been infected. A point which has attracted especial attention is the existence of a pair of 1st person pronouns, wu/*ngo- and wo/*ngấ , of which the latter has free distribution but the former is generally subject or possessive down to the second century B.C. Half a century ago Karlgren pointed out the same terminations in a pair of 2nd person pronouns, ju/*ńo' and erh/* , and suggested that proto-Chinese had pronoun declension, with -o marking the nominative and genitive and -a the accusative (but his evidence of restricted distribution was inconclusive except in the case of wu). Later Kennedy preferred to explain the distribution of wu by classing it with various other pronouns and particles in which the level tone is associated with uncompleted utterance (so that either, like wu, they are never phrase-final, or they are phrase-final but interrogative, as with hu/*g'o- and the other interrogative particles). A further important contribution is Chou Fa-kao's discovery of a possessive termination -ǝg, which he ascribes to fusion with the possessive particle chih/*ǝg- . In 1969 I myself proposed a classification of the pronouns into two systems, the pre-Classical and the Classical.

The Yün-men chuanis an obscure work which does not deserve obscurity. It is actually a Ming chantefable, a fact which already gives it great value, since only a handful of works survive from the flourishing oral literature of that dynasty. But it has, in addition, a striking incidental importance: it proves to be the immediate source of a well-known Ming vernacular short story. It thus neatly demonstrates a point on which there has been a good deal of speculation—that Ming writers on occasion created their stories by taking their scissors to existing chantefables—and provides a unique opportunity to study the process.

The word blags-pa occurs in line 48 of the Li-yul chos-kyi lo-rgyus. A manu-script of this work, brought back from Tun-huang by Paul Pelliot, has been described by F. W. Thomas in his Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, London, 1935, p. 303, n. 1, and by Marcelle Lalou in Inventaire des manuscrits tibetains de Touen-houang, n, Paris, 1950, p. 25, No. 960. The text has been translated by F. W. Thomas, op. cit., 305–23. R. E. Emmerick has edited the text in his Tibetan texts concerning Khotan, London, 1967, 78–91. Emmerick's glossary (op. cit., 108–60) has to be consulted for his interpretation of the text. The passage which contains the word blags-pa is the following: thos-pa'i bsod-nams kyaṅ bskal-pa gcig-gi sdig 'byah // blags-pa'i bsod-nams ni / bskal-pa grans myed-pa'i sdig 'byan //. Thomas reads slags-pa'i instead of blags-pa'i and explains in a note that slags = Klags (p. 313, n. 2). His translation is as follows: ‘The merit of even hearing it cleanses the sin of one æon; the merit of reading it cleans the sin of countless æeons’. Emmerick states in his glossary: ‘blags (pf. <blag-pa “to hear”) 48. F. W. Thomas has “reading”, with the note slags = klags (TLT i.313 n. 2). But the reading is blags on my photograph, blag-pa is “to hear“ by itself or with rna-ba. So Das, Russ. D. against Jä’.

Trois Sūtra du Samyuktāgama (Taishō Issaikyō (T), 99) traitant à des titres divers de la vacuité ont spécialement retenu l'attention de l'auteur du Mahāpraj˜āpāramitopadeśa (en abrégé Upadeśa, T, 1509), interpréte autorisé du Madhyamaka ou de la Philosophic du Milieu. II s'agit du Paramārthaśūnyatāsūtra ‘Sūtra de la vacuité au sens vrai du mot’, du Mahāśūnyatāsūtra ‘Sūtra de la grande vacuité’ et du Samrddhisūtra ‘ Sūtra de Samrddhi’ ainsi appelé du nom d'un disciple du Buddha. En voici des citations, accompagnées des explications que l'Upadeśa leur a consacrées.

The ‘Analects of Confucius’ 1/13 records a saying of Yu Tzu which begins as follows:

The meaning of yen k'efu yeh has never, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily explained. Any acceptable explanation, it seems to me, must furnish satis-factory answers to three questions. (1) What does the wordfu mean in this context ? (2) What is the construction of the sentence ? (3) What is the point of the saying ?

In 1954 I published an article on consonant clusters in Tai, in which a number of clusters such as etc., were reconstructed for Proto-Tai. Some of them are preserved in some modern dialects, and some others have since been found to exist in the Saek language. However, not all clusters can be attested in the modern languages, and this is particularly true for the dental clusters. In the case of labial or velar clusters, namely a labial or velar consonant followed by a liquid, a small number of the languages preserve at least some of the clusters, such as Siamese, Ahom, Wuming, etc., but in the case of dental clusters hardly any modern language preserves such clusters. Saek is the only language which shows dental clusters, tl- and tr- according to Haudricourt (1963, 158) but tl-, tr-, thl-, and thr- according to Gedney (1970, 74). However, most of these clusters do not seem to go back to Proto-Tai dental clusters, but rather to velar clusters. Siamese has tr-, but it occurs mainly in Sanskrit and Cambodian loans. Thus the reconstruction of dental clusters is far more difficult than that of other clusters.

It has long been recognized that the establishment of the Office of Music (Yüeh fu) as one of the agencies of state in Han imperial government played an important role in the development of Chinese poetry and nurtured the growth of particular genres of literature; and the precedent that was set at this time was followed at later stages of China's literary development with highly important results. Less attention, however, has been paid to the work of the office in arranging musical performances; or to the circumstances in which the office was established and in which its activities were several times curtailed, prior to its eventual abolition. In addition historians have not always appreciated the connexion that may be traced between the rise and fall of this office and other changes which occurred in the intellectual history of Han China.

The Cherng shianqtext is included as section 25 of the present editions of the Shyun Tzyywhich are all based on the edition established by the Tarng commentator Yang Lianq. In his preface, which is dated A.D. 819, Yang Lianq notes that the editions at his disposal included the Cherng shianq as section eight.

Early forms of michiyuki‘travel sequences’ in works of Japanese literature are to be found in a few of the songs and poems in the eighth-century Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Man'yōshū. They continued to be used in general literature and, through sung entertainments such as imayō, enkyoku, and kusemai, appeared also in various forms of drama. The best examples are to be found in the medieval military tales and in the puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), where the treatment of the travel sequence reaches its peak by a combination of text, music, and movement. One of the most famous michiyuki texts, however, is this passage from the Taiheiki, a fourteenth-century war tale, which describes the journey from Kyōto , the imperial capital, to Kamakura , the seat of the military government in the eastern part of the country, made by a court noble in 1331 after he was arrested for being implicated in the emperor Go-Daigo's second plot to overthrow the Hōjō military rulers.

In 1962 I published some evidence based on Han and early post-Han transcriptions to show that Chinese still had a sibilant final in certain departing tone rhymes at that period. I can now add some still later examples which bring the date down to the beginning of the sixth century, at least in the south. As will be shown below, the transcription evidence is also supported by contemporaneous rhyming practice, which still allowed contacts between Middle Chinese -j' < -s and -t.

If one examines the vocabulary of almost any Mon-Khmer language, and turns to words with an initial labial semivowel—or those derived from roots with such an initial—one is immediately struck by the number of words with meanings of the order of ‘round, circular’, ‘to go round’, ‘to put round, coil, wrap round’, ‘enclosure’, ‘to turn round, return’, and the like. Thus, consulting three relatively modest lexica, we can cite from (modern) Mon in the Western branch of the family wèn, wèn wòk ‘ to be crooked, deformed’; ω⋯αη ‘compound, enclosure’; ω⋯αη ‘to shun, avoid’; ω⋯η ‘loop, bend; to be bent round, to go round’; wòt ‘to wring out’; wòa ‘whirlpool’; with tsh ‘all around’. The Eastern Mon-Khmer language Sre, spoken around Jiring (Di-linh) 100 miles north-east of Sàigòn, has wac ‘eddy’; wal bong ‘halo round sun or moon’; wang (waang) ‘pound for animals’; war ‘to coil round, wrap round’; waar ‘to bend back’; weet ‘to turn round’; wil ‘circle’; wöl ‘again; to turn’; wör ‘to stir’. In Northern Mon-Khmer, Palaung has υαη ‘compound’; υƏr ‘to stir’; υεh ‘to avoid, shun’; νeη to come back, go back’; υi? ‘to bend’; υir ‘again, to recur’; (υrƏr) ‘to avoid, shun’; υiƏt ‘to give back, return’. (The Palaung voiced fricative υ corresponds functionally in syllable-initial position to the semivowel in the other languages.)

This article is an attempt to establish a relationship between certain syntactical structures in standard Chinese and a context category. The structures are defined in formal terms without any commitment to a general theory of deep and surface structures; nor is the context category used in any way as a criterion to establish the form of the structures as such. It is put forward rather as a way of accounting for the function of the structures in a context of situation.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.