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II. Extracts from the Mualiját-i-Dárá-Shekohí;*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2009
Extract
Treatise the Fortieth, comprehending twenty-four discourses on the subject of speech and writing, and the senses external and internal; with, under God's assistance, the preliminary chapter of the Zád-ul-Musafarín, composed by Hakím Nasar Khosru, surnamed Hujat, the Guide.
This work, which comprises seven-and-twenty parts or dissertations (in the original), I have been contented to bring under four discourses, or lectures, as a sufficient conclusion to the key of my dissertation on the repository of meanings. It is a composition of not less than eight hundred years standing, by that genuine philosopher and guide to the true principles of science whose name is above recorded, and whom we acknowledge to have been a lineal and no remote descendant of our venerated Prophet, and who continues to the present day to be the master and instructor of the wisest of the moderns in the sphere of the understanding. To his descent we have the testimony of his own words in the following couplet:—“I, who am the Prophet's truest heir—I, Nasar, the son of Khosru, son of Háreth.” Now Háreth was one among the children of Khorasan's royal Imám: accordingly, all such as have treated on the knowledge of things appertaining to the faculties of the human understanding, have diligently directed their studies to this excellent work, and thus acquired for themselves, distinguished renown.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , July 1831 , pp. 32 - 56
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1838
Footnotes
*
The Mualiját-i-Dárá Shekohí, a work of no common magnitude or importance, is a compilation, in three folio volumes, extending through not less than 3338 pages; and contains treatises, or discourses, not only on all the diseases to which the human frame is liable, with their corresponding remedies, but also on almost every subject within the compass of human understanding. The compiler, Hakim Nur-ud-dín Shirási, who appears to have been either grandson or sister's son of the enlightened Abul Fazel, asserts, in his preface, that he commenced his work A. H. 1052, in the fourteenth year of the reign of Shah Jehán (corresponding with A.D. 1642, the sixteenth of Charles the First of England); and that he brought it to a conclusion A.H. 1056, having thus been only four years on his laborious undertaking. Both these dates are respectively comprised (the Persian characters being numerically applied) in the two following sentences:— 
Ilájat-i-Dárá Shekohí. “The Medical Remedies of Dara Shekoh, and 
in tib ajib be az jám gítí numá-shudeh. “This physical wonder is to be preferred to the mirror which reflects the world.”—The work may be regarded as an Indian encyclopædia; and the articles here given from it are the more curious, as the copy in Major Price's possession, from which they are taken, is supposed to be the only one in Europe, unless it be that which was made from it, about thirty years ago by M. Bruys, formerly a French resident at Surat, for the library of the King of France.
References
page 32 note † Hakím Násar-ibn Khosru, the author of the Zád-ul-Musafarín, or Traveller's Viaticum, from which the compiler of the Mualíját-i-Dárá Shekohí has so largely borrowed, was a genuine Khoresh, and must have Written under the short reign of Ul-Wathek, the ninth khalif of the house of Abbas, who ruled over the Musalman world between the years 840 and 847 of the Christian era, when Ethelwolf, the son of Egbert, sat on the throne of England. He is said to have been particularly distinguished by his protection and patronage of the unfortunate but still venerated race of Fatima. Ali Rezza, the eighth imám, and great-grandfather of Nasir-ibu Khusru, died under the reign of Ul-Mamun, A.D. 818. The tract here given is evidently formed on the system of Aristotle, and the other Greek philosophers, some of whose works are known to have been translated into Arabic under the reign of UI-Mamun. It exhibits a curious specimen of the manner in which abstract speculations were treated in the East at 80 remote a period, about the middle of the ninth century, and the opinions then entertained of the operations of the human mind. The illustrious author of the “Essay on the Human Understanding” is generally considered to have commenced his work in the year 1670, more than 600 years subsequent to the date of the Zád-ul-Musáfarìn, and not to have completed it till sixteen years afterwards.
page 38 note * The oonstruction of this passage is so perplexing, that I am compelled to give the lines in the original: 
which, in other words, may be rendered to the following effect; “Do you not perceive that, as by the written medium the searcher after meaning, for whose use the thing has been written, is rendered independent of speech, so is the same, through the perusal of what is written, rendered equally independent of oral information.” How we are to understand this as an illustration of the fact, “that speech is to writing as the soul to the body,” it would be difficult to explain.—D. P.
page 43 note * This passage is so ambiguously expressed in the original, that it has been difficult to give it any sort of literal translation, the reader must judge, 
page 48 note * Probably meaning the figures on either side of it.
page 48 note † I have been quite puzzled with this passage, and therefore must give it in the original 
The proficient in mathematics will be able to state this with the proper precision: it is probably designed to indicate that a square is equal to all its sections, however subdivided.
page 50 note * 
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page 53 note ‡ 
whether this should signifiy seven-fold, or seven times fused, must be left to the oriental scholar. There can be little doubt, though thus imperfectly described, that this refers to the ordinary gong on which, in India, under the native governments, the paraghari or sentinel strikes the hour.
page 54 note * 
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page 54 note ** This latter article can be no other than the clepsydra, or simple water-clock, anciently employed for the measurement of time; and with these explanations it will be easy to comprehend what is indicated by the strokes alternately slow and rapid, given to his gong by the sentinel at an Indian darbár. Thus two or three strokes given slowly indicate the second or third pahar; one to six or nine strokes, given more rapidly, mark the gharies; and from one to sixty strokes, still more rapidly, indicate the number of pals which have expired of the ghari. It may be necessary to add that a ghari appears to be exactly twenty-four minutes.
page 55 note * 
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page 55 note †† The result of both is precisely the same as to the length of the korûh, viz., ninety-six thousand fingers.
page 56 note * It is obvious to remark, that the first statement, which gives eight thousand farsangs to the circumference of the globe, reckoning three fingers' breadth at eight-tenths of an inch, thirtytwo fingers' breadth to the gaz, and four thousand gaz to the korûh or kos, would furnish a total of twenty-nine thousand and ninety English miles, or an excess of four thousand two hundred and fifty beyond the reality. But the second statement, of six thousand eight hundred farsangs of three kos, gives a total of twenty-four thousand seven hundred and twenty-six miles and four furlongs, being not more than one hundred and fourteen miles below the reality—that is, estimating the circumference of the globe at three hundred and sixty degrees of sixty-nine miles to a degree.
On experiment it will be found that six barleycorns are not more than equal to eighttenths of an inch, and a gaz will then be nineteen inches and two-tenths, about the common cubit. We shall therefore be very near the truth in estimating the korûh or kos of Akbar at one mile one furlong one hundred and fifty yards and one foot, and the jarsang of three korfth at three miles, five furlongs, and twenty yards.
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page 56 note §§ According to this statement the kos would be equal to one mile four furlongs twentysix yards and two feet; and a jojan to six miles one hundred and six yards and two feet— estimating the finger's breadth at eight barleycorns.