A modern student of Buddhism, unfamiliar with Buddhist art, and accustomed to think of the Buddha only as a human and historical figure, would naturally expect to find the Śākya sage represented in art like any other Buddhist friar, with a shaven (muṇḍa) head; and to suppose that such representations could only have existed as memorials, and not as objects of a cult. As a matter of fact, however, the Buddha is always represented, although not in royal garb, as a deity, with a nimbus, lotus or lion throne, and certain physical peculiarities proper to the conception of a MahāPuruṣa and Cakravartin or King of the World. But crowned and otherwise ornamented Buddhas are not unknown, and again, the earliest Indian type differs in several respects from the established formula of the Gupta and later periods. Thus the Buddha iconography presents a number of difficult problems; and amongst these are those referred to in the title of this paper.

This paper explores the varied reactions of the Turkish literati and intelligentsia to the adoption of the Roman script imposed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1928. Though alphabet reform had been on the agenda for almost 75 years, few intellectuals and bureaucrats had been supportive of romanisation in the years preceding the move. However after the implementation of the reform, opponents remained silent or were seemingly converted. This article discusses the reasons behind the silence and conversion of the elites and the strategies of opposition developed by more radical defenders of the Ottoman script. Finally it records the impact of the reform on the literary world and literary historiography.

This article analyses philological and literary aspects of a jātaka tale with a pygmalionesque motif involving a craftsman who falls in love with a non-human woman. This tale circulated along the Silk Road in at least six different versions: two original Sanskrit versions; one Tibetan translation from the Sanskrit source; one Tocharian adaptation; and two Chinese translations that also adapt the work to a smaller degree than the Tocharian version. By analysing the textual contexts and the content of the tale in all its alterations, this article shows that the two versions that differ most from the others, the Tocharian and the older Chinese version, are closely related to each other. Further analysis of the Tocharian version situates the tale among its literary kin. An analysis of the formulaic elements of the Tocharian tale indicates possible relations to Chinese chu-kung-tiao and pien-wen genres. The article also suggests the Tibetan lha mo as a link between Indian prosimetric campū style and the two Chinese genres. Finally, the analysis of the cluster of motifs in the tale is paralleled with canonical Western texts by Ovid and E. T. A. Hoffmann, opening fruitful venues for literary scholarship regarding human-like objects.

Of the six systems of philosophy received among learned Hindus, four have been noticed in the preceding parts of this essay, viz. the theistical and atheistical Sánc'hyas, the dialectic Nyáya, and the atomical Vaiśéshica. The prior or practical Mímánsá will be now considered; reserving the later or theological Mímánsá, usually named Védánta, for a future disquisition, should it appear requisite to pursue the subject, much concerning it being already before the public.

Midway through his account of the fortunes of the Barmakids in his Murūj aldhahab wa-ma'ādin al-jawhar, al-Masʽūdī (d. 956) introduces a debate on love said to have taken place in the majlis of Yaḥyā ibn Khālid al-Barmakī. Yaḥyā, described as a man of great learning devoted to philosophical discussion, invited the theologians who frequented his salon, and who had previously debated on a variety of philosophical and theological topics, “to speak of love ['ishq], without disputing, each presenting whatever occurs to him as it comes to his mind”. A number of definitions are offered, followed by additional comments by Mas'ūdī; the whole constitutes a substantial digression which intervenes between the depiction of the Barmakids at the height of their power and the account of their fall from favour.

The possibility of understanding certain parts of the Yh-King, such as the ethnological chapters and the legendary ballads, led early to the conclusion, that the whole of these documents could be currently read and interpreted. It is quite possible that the hexagrams were attached to them merely as a system of numerical classification to keep them in proper order; but it is more likely that the antiquity of these obscure documents, and the tradition that they contained a treasure of ancient wisdom, first led to their use as fateful and prophetic sentences, in which some glimmer of meaning was detected or surmised, and that the hexagrams were then applied to them for the purposes of divination.

At the beginning of this century shadow plays were sometimes performed in Egypt, but not very often. They had latterly become chiefly an entertainment for the lower classes, and because of the drastic comedy of these plays the Government took steps to suppress them. But we know that these shadow plays had a long history in Egypt, and have been performed also for the higher and highest classes. It is reported,1 for instance, that the well-known Sultan Saladin (died 1193) with his Wazir al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, was present at the performance of those plays; that the Turkish Sultan Selīm I, who in 1517 conquered Egypt, amused himself by seeing a performance of the shadow play. In recent times, the Khedive Taufīq Pasha (1879–1892) liked to see such representations. I myself possess some shadow play figures especially made for performances before him.

The text contained in the MS. described below begins with three syllables śa-li-ẖbur, which scholars will naturally (unless illuded for a moment by the thought of sāli “year”) find suggestive of Śāriputra. The recurrence of the syllables will confirm this impression, more especially when far on in the document appears 'an.nog.da.la.sam. yag.sam.bu.de, previously recognized as=Sanskrit anuttara samyak-sambodhi. But, since the conjunction of this expression with the name of Śāriputra is frequently exemplified in the mass of Sanskrit Buddhist writings, we are grateful for the occurrence early in the text of the combination 'a.myi.ẖda, i.e. obviously Amitābha or Amitāyus, pointing to the Amitābha literature. When we come to try the smaller Sukhāvatīvyūka (published by Max Müller and Bunyiu Nanjio in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan Series, vol. i, part ii, pp. 92–100), the distribution and character of the paragraphs soon enables us to fix upon sections ix(viii)–xx, of which several afford great assistance by furnishing names of numerals or of Buddhas in succession. As in the former case, some apparent divergencies from the Sanskrit original direct attention to the Chinese version translated into French by Messrs. Ymaizumi and Yamata in Annales du Musée Guimet, vol. ii, pp. 39–44. And this has enabled Captain Clauson to verify the whole text as a transcription, syllable for syllable, of Kumārajīva's rendering (Nanjio, No. 200). We give the Chinese characters from the India Office copy, and append a direct and inverse index of the syllables as represented in the Tibetan writing. From the interesting colophon it appears that the copy was a work of piety.

Travellers from the city of Peking to the town of Kalgan on the great wall of China, must make the journey by the rugged defile known as the Nankow Pass. Five miles north of the entrance, where the village of Nankow stands, is the smaller village of Keu-yung kwan. Fortifications there run up the steep slopes of the mountains on both sides of the valley; and besides arched gateways at the two ends of the village, the highway passes under a limestone archway of a much more striking appearance. This is covered with mythological and symbolic sculptures of obviously Indian origin. The tradition of the natives in the neighbourhood asserts it to have been the basement story of a pagoda which stood there; and the name by which it is still designated, Kwŏ keae t'à, “Pagoda crossing the street,” bears out the statement. We are told that this pagoda, though erected for the benefit of the locality, proved an object of such terror to the superstitious Mongols, coming south from their native wilds, that they could not be induced to pass under the ominous-looking structure; and thus it was found necessary in the early part of the Ming dynasty, to remove the upper stories of the erection; the policy of the government being to conciliate and attract these wild nomades.

For the right understanding of Alexander's Indian campaign it is essential to place correctly the nations called Malloi, Kathaioi, and Oxydrakai by Arrian, who were among the most formidable opponents of the invader. Mr. McCrindle, in his valuable work, “The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great” (new ed., 1896), seems to me to have gone wrong in this matter, and to have seriously misplaced all three nations. He has located the Malloi about one degree of latitude too far south, and, with respect to the Oxydrakai, his error, in my judgment, amounts to about three degrees. He has also failed to indicate correctly the position of the Kathaioi. I propose in this paper to examine all the evidence on the subject, and to try to establish the true approximate positions of the three nations on the map of ancient India.

When set against our knowledge of contemporary Greece and Rome, the whole of Parthian history may be termed a “Dark Age”. Even so, within the four centuries of Arsacid domination, the accidents of discovery and the efforts of scholarship have illuminated some periods more than others. Of the latter, one, running between the death of Mithradates II in about 88 B.C. and the accession of Orodes II some thirty years later, has proved peculiarly impenetrable.

The original version of the Assassin biography of al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ṣabbāḥ, called sar-gudhasht-i sayyidnā, is not extant. All we possess are two recensions of it, if such a term is apposite, in the notes taken on the work by the two seventh/thirteenth century historians, ‘Aṭā-Malik al-Juwaynī (work completed 658/1260) and the Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍdl Allāh (work completed 710/1310–11). For unless we may suppose that al-Juwaynī, who discovered the book in the library of the Assassin headquarters at Alamūt, afterwards condensed the notes that he first took, and that the Rashīd later incorporated these first longer notes in his history, we can only conclude that the Rashīd consulted the original work afresh, since his version is in fact very much fuller than al-Juwaynī's. Which the Rashīd did it is impossible to say. There is one fact, however, that points to the first course as the likelier, namely that in introducing their, extracts both use almost the same words (which cannot have appeared in the original work). Moreover, the copy used by al-Juwaynī was burnt after perusal with the other pernicious writings of the heretics. So the second course would involve the (improbable) existence of another copy.

Continuing our theme of looking at foreign relations between Iran and Britain from the point of view of the popular level through the role of the karguzar (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Agent), this article will consider cases concerning foreign trade and disputes over property. It will examine the popular response to the growth of the foreign presence through expansion of foreign trade and the way Iranians handled their situation in a system that was dominated by Europeans. As trade grew in the late nineteenth century, so did the number and workload of karguzars.

Seldom has a work had such world-wide success and been translated into so many languages as the Indian stories and animal fables known as the Panchatantra. In the sixth century of our era they were translated from Sanskrit into Pehlevi. Thence they passed into Arabic; and from the Arabic text, called by Muhammadans the Fables of Bidpai or the Book of Kalila wa Diṁna, were made all those different versions through which these stories were transmitted to the countries of Europe.

We must admit that very little is known about the first development of Indian logic and particularly about Buddhist logic before Diṅnāga. If we take the best manuals of Indian logic now available, such as those by Suali, Vidyābhūṣāṇa, Keith, or the most comprehensive Histories of Indian philosophy like those of Dāsgupta and Rādhākrishna we shall easily recognize that the data contained therein are far from being satisfactory; more than that, they are also very often wrong. In fact, almost the only source from which their statements are derived is the book by Sugiura, who certainly had the merit of giving the first account of Indian logic as preserved in Chinese sources, but, being himself absolutely without knowledge of orthodox nyāya and of Sanscrit, is in his statements and in his translations very often misleading.

In the thirteenth century A.D. the Muhammadan religion spread from India to the Malay Archipelago. Many centuries before, the commerce which was carried on between India and the Eastern Islands had been the means of familiarizing the inhabitants of the latter with the tenets of Brahmanism. These had taken root among them, at all events, wherever monarchies were established on the Hindu pattern, and had, to some extent, modified the nature or demon-worship which had previously been the sole religion of the Malay tribes. When the religion of Muhammad was established in the western regions, from which commercial intercourse was carried on with the Eastern Archipelago, it made its way gradually eastward. The Hindu rulers of petty Malay States in Sumatra and in the Peninsula of Malacca became converts, and the movement spread thenceforward uninterruptedly. At the present day all the Malay communities in reasonably accessible localities have embraced the Muhammadan religion. Some have been Muslims for centuries; among others, the adoption of this faith has been a comparatively recent event. Some Malay races, like the Dayaks of Borneo and the Battaks of Sumatra, still cling to their primitive beliefs and customs.

Since the publication of the third part of my Memoir on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Van in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (xx. 1.) for 1882, the number of new Vannic inscriptions which have come to my knowledge has been but small. During the winter of 1888–1889 Prof. H. Hyvernat and M. Müller-Simonis travelled in Armenia, and Prof. Hyvernat made every effort to discover fresh cuneiform inscriptions and re-copy those which were previously known. But unfortunately political intrigue and religious antipathies, aided by the severity of the winter, so seriously impeded his efforts as to oblige him to leave the country with few additions to our knowledge of its early epigraphy. That many more inscriptions, however, exist above ground besides those with which we are already acquainted has recently been ascertained by a German engineer, Dr. Belck, who has been settled in Armenia for some time past.

The last few decades have seen the publication of several hitherto unedited Arab sources relative to the history of the 'Abbāsid empire in the tenth century—such as Kitāb ta'rīkh al-wuzarā' by Hilāl aṣ-Ṣābi, the volumes of Miskawaihi's Kitāb tajārib al-umam, and at-Tanūkhī's Nishwār al-muḥāḍarā—that are a veritable storehouse of information on the social, economic, and political situation of that period. These works have revealed a completely new world to us: they show us, so to speak, the back stage of tenth century 'Abbāsid administration and we see the governmental machinery with all its ramifications in action.

It is so long since Indo-Muslim numismatics first attracted scholarly attention and there have been so many devoted labourers in this field that it is gratifying to note a new coinage struck by yet another Indo-Muslim dynasty. To the best of the knowledge of the present writer no coinage of the Samma Jāms of Sind (14th–16th century a.d.) has yet been published. This paper records two varieties of their copper coinage, dating from the latest period of their rule.

This paper traces the history and usage of the theory of Sinicisation in western and Chinese scholarship, and discusses the intellectual trends underlying the different discourses in which the theory has been adopted. Since early 20th Century, the theory of “Sinicisation” has evolved and was adopted into three distinct historiographical discourses to construct different arguments. The first discourse is about the historical acculturation of border peoples and assimilation of domestic peoples to Chinese language, culture and economic life; the second one argues an inherent superiority in Chinese culture specifically produced cultural change across eastern Eurasia to promote nationalism; the third discourse emphasizes the diversity and mixture of the people living inside historical and contemporary China to construct and stabilise the polity. Every discourse rooted in its own intellectual trend, and also faces different criticism. Followed with examining criticisms of Sinicisation since the 1950s, this paper concludes by discussing the relationships of the three discourses of Sinicisation.