CORRESPONDENCE.

1. INDIAN BUDDHIST MANUSCRIPTS IN TIBET.

DEAR PROFESSOR RHYS DAVIDS,-It may be worth recording that, in the course of some conversations which I had with His Excellency Shad-sgra Shab-pe, one of the Tibetan Governors ('Kah-blon ') of Lhasa, while he was at Darjiling about a year ago on political business, he informed me that many ancient Buddhist manuscripts, written on Birch-bark and Palm-leaf, which had been brought from India by medieval Indian and Tibetan monks, are still preserved in Tibet, especially at the old monasteries of Samyé (where many were destroyed during the great fire there about eighty years ago), Sakya, Narthāng, and Taranatha's old monastery of Phuntsho-ling. These manuscripts, being considered materially sacred as relics, and written in a character more or less unknown to the Lamas, are kept sealed up and rarely seen even by the Lamas themselves. They may possibly, however, become available to the Western world by-and-bye.

13th January, 1894.

L. A. WADDELL.

2. POLYCEPHALIC IMAGES OF AVALOKITA IN INDIA.

With reference to the Indian origin of the Eleven-headed form of Avalokita's image (see page 59 of the January number of the Journal), I find that Dr. Burgess has recorded and figured (Cave Temples of India, p. 357) a large

sculptured image of this form in the Kanheri Caves on the West Coast of India, near Bombay harbour; and these caves are ascribed to a period about 850 A.D. (loc. cit. p. 186). This form is also found in the ruins of Nakou Thom in Cambodia (GARNIER, Atlas, p. viii.).

Avalokita, as The Defender from the Eight Dreads (see Journal, p. 76, No. IV.), is found in sculptured form in Ajanţa Cave IV. and outside Cave XXVI., also in the Dherwära Cave at Elura, Aurangabad Cave VII., and in several caves at Kanheri, from one of which a fine group is figured by Burgess (loc. cit. pl. lv. fig. 1).

L. A. WADDell.

3.

The Homestead, Barnes,
1st February, 1894.

DEAR SIR,-In connection with the biography of the Buddha, and with the evolution of the Buddhist Canon, it will be of interest to some members of the Royal Asiatic Society to know that there is an unedited Pāli Sutta in the Majjhima Nikāya which destroys certain views generally entertained by scholars. The accepted view is that it is only in the later commentaries, and not in the very earliest canonical texts, that the miraculous incidents attending the conception and birth of Gotama the Buddha are narrated in the imaginative detail familiar to readers (e.g.) of the Sanskrit Lalita Vistara and of the introductory portion of the Pāli Jātakas, as translated in your Buddhist Birth Stories. In conflict with this view is the Acchariyabbhuta-Sutta (No. 123 of the Majjhima Nikāya). This Sutta, which— as its name implies-deals with marvels and mysteries, makes the Buddha himself declare:

(1) That he passed from the Tusita Heaven to his human mother's womb;

(2) That the universe was thereon illumined with brilliant

light;

(3) That four devas mounted guard over the future Buddha and his mother;

(4) That during her pregnancy his mother maintained a life of spotless purity and goodness, and enjoyed perfect health and happiness of heart;

(5) That her womb was transparent, showing the future Buddha within;

(6) That she was fated to die within seven days of his birth, passing to the Tusita Heaven;

(7) That she carried her child exactly ten months, neither more nor less;

(8) That she stood during parturition;

(9) That the new-born Buddha was received into the hands first of devas and then of human beings;

(10) That he was free from all defilements attending birth; (11) That two showers of water fell, one hot and one cold, wherein to bathe the future Buddha;

(12) That then the child, standing equally balanced on both feet, took seven paces towards the North beneath a white canopy of Kingship, surveyed every direction, and exclaimed 'In all the world, I am first, foremost, and peerless; this is my last birth; I shall never be born again';

(13) That the universe was again illumined with brilliant light.

This brief summary will show that in the ancient Majjhima Nikaya we have the kernel (and a great deal of the husk) of the Jātaka version of the Buddha's birth, and that, if the Sutta be genuine, fiction was embroidering historic truth within (perhaps) a century of his death. I hope to have an early opportunity of presenting to the R.A.S. the text of this Sutta and of Buddhaghosa's Commentary thereon. The latter has an importance of its own as bearing on a question which has been much debated, namely, whether the Jātakatthavaṇṇana was written by Buddhaghosa or not. Yours truly,

To the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society.

J.R.A.S. 1894.

ROBERT CHALMERS.

26

4.

DEAR SIR,-With reference to the interesting article by Surgeon-Major Waddell, dealing with the ancient conception of life under the figure of a wheel, of which each re-birth is a revolution, I should like to point out that this fancy finds an echo more than once in Hellenic literature. In the Orphic theogony we come come across the notion of re-birth considered as a weary unending cycle of fate or necessity—κύκλος τῆς γενέσεως, ὁ τῆς μοίρας τροχός, etc. from which the soul longs to escape, and entreats the gods, especially Dionysos (Διόνυσος λυσεύς, θεσὶ λύσιου), for release,—κύκλου τε λῆξαι καὶ ἀναπνεῦσαι κακότητος. In the verses inscribed on one of three golden funereal tablets dug up near the site of Sybaris the line occurs: "And thus I escaped from the cycle, the painful, misery-laden " (Inscr. gr. Sicil. et Ital. 641). These allusions may be referred to at second-hand in Herr Erwin Rohde's study of Hellenic ideas respecting the soul and immortality, entitled Psyche (4to. Hälfte, pp. 416 et seq.; 509), recently completed. Pindar, Empedocles, and Plato, as is well known, all entertained the notion of repeated re-birth in this world at intervals ranging from nine to one thousand years, repeated twice, thrice, or an indefinite number of times, and, according to the two latter writers, often including in its phases incarnation as an animal, or even as a vegetable. And throughout there runs the Orphic idea of each re-birth being a stage in a course of moral evolution and effort after purification. But I do not know whether the actual image of the wheel occurs in other instances besides those I have quoted. Empedocles, for instance, sees rather a toilsome road or roads of lifeἀργαλέας βιότοιο κελεύθους. With Plato again, we more readily associate his simile of a re-birth as a fall of the soul from heaven to earth, as it drives its chariot after the procession of the gods, through the steed of Epithumia being dragged down by its craving for carnal things—or,

as the Buddhist might say, the steed of Chandarago overcome by Upādāna for the skandhas.

The question of a genetic connection between Oriental and Hellenic notions as to re-birth is of the greatest interest. Prof. Leopold von Schroeder's opinion that such a connection exists (Pythagoras und die Inder, especially pp. 25-31) seems on the whole to be well founded. And the common parable of the Wheel may, or may not, add a link to the further arguments making for such a connection in Prof. Richard Garbe's disquisition contributed to the MONIST of last January. I will only add that, if the typical Greek were always as enamoured of this life in the glad sunlight and amongst the sons of men as he is commonly represented to be, we should expect as his dying plaint,

I am gone down to the empty weary house,
Where no flesh is, nor beauty, nor swift eyes,

Nor sound of mouth, nor might of hands and feet.

All the more remarkable is it to find such passages as the above describing his haunting dread of re-visiting, on the wheel of Anangkē, the scenes he was so loth to leave.

April, 1894.

CAROLINE A. FOLEY.

P.S. Since the above was in type I have found, through a reference in Maine's Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, p. 50, that the account of the construction of the picture of the wheel just as we see it in the Tibetan painting occurs already in the Divyāvadāna, pp. 299, 300.

There it is related how Buddha instructed Ananda to make a wheel (cakram kārayitavyam) for the purpose of illustrating what another disciple, Maudgalyāyana, saw when he visited other spheres, which it seems he was in the habit of doing. The wheel was to have five spokes (pañcagandakam), between which were to be depicted the hells, animals, pretas, gods, and men. In the middle a dove, a serpent, and a hog, were to symbolise lust, hatred, and ignorance. All round the tire was to go the twelve-fold circle of