I HAVE been asked by Āḷkoṇḍavilli Govindācārya Swāmī to offer the following pages to the Royal Asiatic Society. The Artha-pañcaka, written in Tamil in the thirteenth century a.d. by the celebrated Piḷḷai Lōkācārya, is quite the most important summary of the modern Bhāgavata doctrine of Southern India that we possess. A Sanskrit translation of this work by Nārāyana Yati was noticed, and its contents partly described, by Dr. Bhandarkar at the Vienna Oriental Congress of 1886 (Aryan Section, Proceedings, p. 101), and the information is repeated by him in his Report on the Search for Sanskrit MSS. in the Bombay Presidency during the year 1883–4, published in 1887 (pp. 68, 69). It is upon this work, and upon another (the Yatīndra-mata-dīpikā of Śrī-nivāsa) described at the same time, that Dr. Bhandarkar founded his well-known account of the origin of the Bhāgavata religion, which has formed the basis of all researches into the subject conducted since then in Europe.

IN addition to the more or less accredited ancient Sibylline oracles, others circulated, under the name of the one or the other of the Sibyls, which also claimed to be of equal authority. The name was a recommendation for a special kind of apocalyptic literature, and the example set of old of foretelling the future was thereby continued for many centuries. The character of this Sibylline Oracle was akin to some of the old Apocalypses, in which the future was revealed in a symbolical form, and the events to come foretold by allegories and signs, which were interpreted by the Sibyl as by one of the prophets of old. By connecting such apocalyptic revelations with some ancient name and ascribing to men or women of the past works composed at a much later time, these compositions entered into the domain of that apocryphal Christian literature which made use of old formulas for disseminating new teaching and thus prepared the mind of the people for untoward incidents. These oracles were soon drawn into the cycle of the Doomsday; the legends of Antichrist and of the Last Judgment were incorporated with the older oracle; and thus an oracle which originally may have been a mere forecast of purely political events became a religious manifesto, a prophetic pronouncement on the course of events, leading up to the final drama.

THE lofty chain of the Western Ghats bears much the same relation to the land of Bhārgava-kṣetra, a Sanskrit name of the coastal country of Kerala or Malabar, as the gigantic Himālayan range bears to the land of Bhārata-varṣa, or the Indian continent as a whole. This huge and impervious mountain-barrier, shutting off the low-lying seaboard region from the high table-land of the Deccan behind, has made it a separate world in every respect. The face of Nature, with its luxuriant growth of palms nurtured by the abundant tropical monsoons, differs from that of any other part of the Indian Peninsula. The language, Malayālam, though a branch of Dravidian speech, is confined to this region.

IX. A single additional word upon the Pahlavi, Sanskrit, and Persian Commentaries is needed here.

It has been sometimes carelessly supposed that all the commentaries upon the Avesta are those which appear in the secondary stage of the Avesta language, with their Sanskrit and Persian translation, but of this Ahnnaver we have at Yasna XIX an interesting discussion of a very representative character, and in the original Avesta language, though it is not impossibly, yet I think hardly probably, a retranslation from an extinct Pahlavi original. A translation of its Avesta text into English will be found in the thirty-first volume of the Sacred Books of the East at the place designated by the page number. This text itself is actually a commentary upon the Avesta Ahunaver, but it has also—as said above—in due course, its own separate and entire (?) Pahlavi translation-text in the body of the Pahlavi Yasna, which has been edited by the present writer with all the MSS. collated, and in its deciphered form, in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Band vi, a translation of it into English having followed in the JRAS.; and it—this Paldavi translation-text—has also its own Sanskrit translation in the course of Nēryōsangh's translation at the place, with its Persian translation, like those of the Gāθic Sections, which appear in my addition of the Gāthas. The treatment of their original, the Avesta-Ahuna, in both this Avesta Commentary upon the Avesta-Ahuna and in its—this Avesta Commentary's—translation into Pahlavi—always, of course, a necessary distinction—is somewhat artificial and erratic when regarded as a tentatively exact and exhaustive exposition; but it has, perhaps, all the more its own interest, in spite of that very necessary defect, if not in consequence of it, as being a fine specimen of the products of the later Sasanian schools; and, as may be seen above, it is unexpectedly important on account of some of its expressions, which have created much discussion in the matter of the history of the Christian Logos Doctrine.

KĂNAURĪ is one of the complex pronominalized languages of the Tibeto-Burman family. It is spoken in the Sătlăj Valley in the Pănjāb, from a point about 20 miles up the river from Rāmpūr to near the Tibetan border. Băshăhr State, of which Kănaur is the eastern part, begins 50 miles east of Simla; it has an area of 3800 square miles, and a population of 84,000.

IN my “Notes on the Śaiva Siddhāntam”, published last year in Le Muséon, I called attention to the fact that the living faith of the majority of modern Tamils is in almost every respect, and certainly in all essentials, the same doctrine that was taught in Kashmir about the beginning of the eleventh century by Abhinava-gupta; and I endeavoured to indicate what, in my opinion, the links are which join the modern theology of the South to the ancient teachings of the North, and ultimately to the school which is represented by the Śvetāśvatara Upanisad. In further illustration of this view I now present the Paramārthasāra of Abhinava-gupta.

MANY writers have enlarged upon the subject of our indebtedness to India in matters intellectual, and in particular have drawn attention to ancient Hindu mathematics, which they consider exhibit in a marked degree the intellectual superiority of the Hindus in early times. They not only inform us that a system of mathematics was developed in India in early times, but imply that in this direction the Hindus were the benefactors of the rest of mankind. The latest authoritative statement of this kind is as follows: “In the mathematical sciences the achievements of the Indians have been very considerable. As the inventors of the numerical figures with which the whole world reckons, and of the decimal system connected with the use of these figures, they naturally became the greatest calculators of antiquity, just as the Greeks were the greatest geometricians . . . The later mathematicians made more progress in trigonometry, especially by the invention of the sine table. The greatness of the Indian mathematical writers who belong to the fifth century and later lies in their arithmetical and algebraical investigations . . . The raising of numbers to various powers and the extraction of the square or cube root were but elementary operations to these mathematicians. They also calculated arithmetical progressions, perhaps first suggested by the chess-board of sixty-four squares, which was known in India before the beginning of our era. They attained the greatest eminence in algebra, which they developed to a degree beyond anything ever achieved by the Greeks.”

IN the following pages an attempt is made to present the substance of Māwardi's chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in his Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, Bonn, 1853, pp. 107–28, together with some illustrations of how the rules and requirements there laid down were conformed to in practice. The “crux” of the chapter, ‘Omar's instructions to the Kāḍi, pp. 119–20, has been removed by Professor D. S. Margoliouth (see ante, pp. 307–26), and his help has been forthcoming in the case of other difficulties. Māwardi's entire treatise on Moslem political law is in course of translation by Count Léon Ostrorog, and the merits of the earlier of the two published instalments of the work have been pointed out in the Journal, 1901, p. 906. The later instalment covers chapter v of the treatise, the one immediately preceding that on the office of Kāḍi. That chapter may be taken to represent the Moslem ideal, and it is of interest to consider to what extent the ideal was transmuted into fact. The task is not easy. Of Moslem legal procedure we know but little, the nearest approach to law reports being the notices of judicial proceedings in works dealing with the lives of judges. Such a work is the history of the Ḳāḍis of Egypt by Abu ‘Omar al-Kindi (ob. a.h. 350; B.M. Add. 23,226), now being edited in the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series by Mr. A. R. Guest, and the edition will include extracts from a ninth century work on the same subject—the Raf' al-Iṣr of Ibn Ḥajar Asḳalāni, Paris Ar. 2149, in which are preserved large portions of the work composed in continuation of that of al-Kindi by Ibn Zūlāḳ, ok a.h. 387, of which no copy is known to exist.

SINCE writing my article on the Talaing text of the Myazedi record, I have been furnished with a number of documents which enable me to supplement what I then wrote and correct a few errors of transcription and interpretation. M. L. Finot has lent me a photograph of the Pāli, Burmese, and undeciphered texts of the second pillar of the Myazedi record, as well as an estampage of the undeciphered text of the first pillar, and has made several suggestions for which I am much indebted to him. Mr. Taw Sein Ko has followed up his former valuable assistance by sending me a number of important estampages. They include one of the Talaing text of the second pillar of the Myazedi record (now on the platform of the Myingaba pagoda at Pagan), which I had despaired of ever seeing, as well as rubbings of the great Shwezigon inscription, also at Pagan (Nos. I (1)–(8) of Inscriptions of Pagan, Piny a, and Ava? of which no transcript is given there), and of two inscriptions recently discovered at the Shwesandaw pagoda, at Prome (which I shall call Shwesandaw I and II), all in Talaing of about the same period. Mr. Taw Sein Ko has also given me some valuable information bearing upon these records. I must express my sincere thanks for all this help.

In the Journal for 1909, pp. 869–70, I propounded a hypothesis regarding a certain passage in the Nāvanītaka, quoted from the Bheḍa Saṁhitā. I now wish to draw attention to the discovery of a “new fact” which supports that hypothesis.