The letter book on which this article is based was brought to my attention by postal history dealers Argyll Etkin; I am most grateful to them for giving me generous access to such interesting material. The letter book is for the year 1840, a critical year in the wider political sense and more specifically for one of the chief instigators of the mail route between Britain and India overland through Egypt, Thomas Waghorn. The letters are from Waghom's office in Alexandria, mostly by him to his London office at 39 Cornhill but some to Waghorn during a brief visit he made in mid-year, first to Malta, the halfway station to Alexandria, and subsequently to London. They reveal many aspects of the organisation: details of financing; handling of mail and passengers; means of transport and the preferred route; difficulties with timetables; competition within and without Egypt; as well as the character of Waghorn himself. And all this against a background of the evolving “Eastern Question” – the transfer of European rivalries to the Ottoman Empire that was to obsess the governments of the main European powers for much of the nineteenth century.

The 26 inscribed stones which are described here were found during a visit to the north-western part of the territory, close to the border with the Yemen. It was realized that they were important for palaeographic and historical reasons and that they belonged to the later period of Saba'.

A rigorous restriction of space in the Journal, which to the editor has all the virtues of necessity, and to the contributor most of the features of calamity, confines me to a few lines of preliminary matter. I should have wished to explain the use in these papers of the words “ ideogram ” and “ ideographic ”, but I cannot. I should also have liked to include entries on the important characters yin and yany of the dualistic system, which occur in my own collection of Honan relics, but are unknown to either Lo Chên-yü or Wang Hsiang, but this too is impossible. Let us therefore proceed to business.

Attempts to show that similarities between the religious cults of different places are due to a transmission of ideas often have little basis in fact: the similarities may be more apparent than real, and may be more convincingly explained by other factors. Nevertheless, there is strong, albeit not conclusive, evidence for the following suggestion of an example of cultural transmission from the Graeco-Roman world to India.

The inscriptions on four faces of the stone pillar outside the Jo-khang at Lhasa concerning the treaty of A.D. 821/823 between the Tibetan king, Khri gTsug-lde-brtsan Ral-pa-can, and the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung, have been edited in whole or in part several times during the past century. Particulars of those publications can be seen in the excellent edition by Professor Fang-kuei Li in T'oung Pao, XLIV, 1956, which is the only one in English to contain the four inscriptions in Tibetan and also the Chinese versions of three of them which give the document its unique linguistic importance.

Ādurbād, son of Māraspand, is a well known figure in the history of Zoroastrianism. The historical Ādurbād appears to have played an important rôle in the religious controversies during the reign of Šābūr II (309–379) and in the suppression of Manichaeism. The third book of the Dēnkard contains the ten precepts with which Ādurbād contradicted the teachings of Mānī and which are likely enough to be authentic. Besides these, we possess a good number of wise sayings attributed to him in various Middle Persian books and, more sparsely, in Arabic adab collections, and whose historicity seems more open to doubt. In particular we have two fairly extensive Middle Persian works attributed to him, the Handarz ī Ādurbād ī Māraspandān (HA) or “Admonitions of Ādurbād”, and the work entitled Wāzag ī ēwcand ī Ādurbād ī Māraspandān (WE) or “Some sayings of Ādurbād”, as well as an Arabic text, Mawā'iẓ Ādhurbādh, included in Miskawayh's anthology of wisdom literature of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, and other nations.

To students of Buddhism and Comparative Religion desirous of knowing Buddha's own views and teaching from his own words, it is extremely disconcerting to find that the Pāli Canon can no longer be regarded as the actual “Word” and Doctrine of Buddha himself. It has been conclusively established by the researches of Kern, Minayef, Senart, Feer, Poussin, Lefmann, Winternitz, R. O. Franke, and others (including the writer) that the Pāli Canon is a mosaic of material belonging to different ages and stages in the development of Buddhism; and that the words and theories put into the mouth of Buddha therein are largely the composition of monks who lived several centuries after Buddha's death, and considerably later than was estimated by Professor H. Oldenberg. Embedded thus in this mass of heterogeneous material, with no outstanding distinctive marks, it seems almost hopeless to confidently detect and dig out therefrom the pieces containing unequivocally the true Buddha-Word.

When you enter the chief hall of a Buddhist temple in China you cannot fail to notice two rows of large yellow figures—one along the east and the other along the west wall. These figures, which are usually numbered and labelled, are called the Eighteen Lohan, and if you ask your guide what they are he will probably reply “belong joss.” This answer may not be deemed satisfactory, but further inquiry will only elicit the information that these are images of Buddha's eighteen great disciples. The names, however, show that this information is not quite correct, some of them being unknown to the original Buddhist canon. If you go on to Korea and visit the curious old Buddhist temples in that country, you will find that Buddha's Hall has rows of similar figures, but sixteen in number. If you continue your journey and visit Japan, you will find there also Sixteen Rakan lining the side walls of the Buddhist temples. Lohan and Rakan are for A-Io-han, the Chinese way of expressing the Sanskrit word Arhan for Arhat. Suppose you could go back and travel to Lhassa, there also you would find Sixteen Arhats, or as they are called there, Sthaviras, in the Chief Hall of Buddha's temples. Tibet, however, seems to have also its Eighteen Lohan, imported from China apparently in modern times.

Much, of what I shall say to-day will be familiar to those members of the Society who have lived in Northern India. A good deal has been written about Tulasī Dāsa, but it has always been addressed to a comparatively small audience—those directly interested in the details of modern Indian folk-religion. I therefore gladly take this opportunity of repeating on a larger stage what has been said before. Tulasī Dāsa is surely deserving of more notice than is usually bestowed upon him in histories of the development of the religious idea in India. He was not merely a reformer who stirred the emotions of his contemporaries and then went his way. He wields greater influence at the present day than when he died two centuries ago. Modern Hinduism has many forms and many beliefs, and yet the character of every Hindu of Upper India has been moulded in part by his teaching.

By rejecting animism and ritualism and emphasizing a rational outlook which treats reality as a causally and functionally determined system of plural synergies (saṁskāras), the emergence of Buddhism marks an important event in the history of Indian thought. The most distinctive feature of Buddhist ethics is its freedom from theism, which leaves room for rationalism and rules out submission to some superhuman power controlling the world-process. Prior to the advent of Buddhism even the Upaniṣads were not completely free from theistic influence in their speculations. It is proposed here to point to the Buddhist contribution to the growth of scientific outlook and methodology in India.