CORRESPONDENCE. 1. THE BENARES PANDIT. SIR,-Just a word on Colonel Jacob's interesting paper reproduced from the Academy in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, 1894, p. 650 :-The "decided muddle" of the valuable Benares Pandit, published by Mr. Lazarus, is, after all, not so great as appears on the surface. The separate pagination begins with vol. xiv.; but on the bottom of the pages we find a continuous numbering, just as in the preceding volumes. TH. AUFRECHT. 2. SANSKRIT MANUSCRIPTS IN CHINA. [The following letter appeared in the Academy of June the 16th:-] Göttingen. In a paper on "Sanskrit Texts discovered in Japan," published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (N.S., Vol. XII., pp. 153 ff.), Prof. Max Müller has told us that during the Middle Ages innumerable MSS. were taken from India to China, but that every effort to discover any of these MSS. in the temples or monasteries of China, up to 1880, had proved futile. "Being myself convinced," he writes, "of the existence of old Indian MSS. in China, I lost no opportunity, during the last five and twenty years, of asking any friends of mine who went to China to look out for these treasures, but-with no result!" By a piece of good fortune, I now have before me photographs and tracings of a few leaves of two or three Sanskrit MSS. or portions of MSS. which are preserved in one of the Chinese monasteries. In themselves these fragments may be considered to be of slight value; but they prove that Indian MSS. do exist in China, and encourage us to hope that more may in time be forthcoming. What I possess at present, I owe to the exertions of my friend and former pupil Dr. A. O. Franke, of Shanghai, to whom the thanks of Sanskrit scholars are due for the trouble which he has taken in this matter. When Dr. Franke, six years ago, went to China, I also urged him to look out for Indian MSS.; and I now have had the pleasure of receiving from him, on April 30th, a letter in which he writes as follows: "When, some years ago, I said good-bye to you at Göttingen, I promised to write about any Sanskrit MSS. which I might come across in China. I am rather late in fulfilling my promise, and even now can do so to a very modest extent only. But it is not my fault that such should be the case, for Sanskrit MSS. are indeed a rare article here... The only old MS. which has yet been found is in a small dilapidated Buddhist monastery in the mountainous wilds of the Tien t'ai shan, in the province of Chekiang, about 125 English miles south-west of the port of Ningpo, where it was seen by Dr. Edkins about thirty years ago. Last autumn I set out to have a look at the MS. myself, and I am sending you now a few results of my expedition. I have photographed a portion of the MS., which consists of twenty palm-leaves, and is evidently incomplete, and have copied other parts; and what I am sending are photographs of both sides of the first and second leaves, and tracings of the concluding lines on page 24, as well as of the writing on a leaf which is not numbered." Dr. Franke adds that by the people on the spot the MS. is believed to be 1300 or 1400 years old. In what follows I shall call the two palm-leaves, of which Dr. Franke has sent photographs, A and B, and shall denote the concluding lines of page 24, spoken of by him, by the letter C, and the unnumbered leaf by the letter D. Of the two palm-leaves which have been photographed, B is in a perfect state of preservation. In the middle it has the usual hole for the string by which the leaves were held together; and it is marked on the proper right of the back with the figure 2, and on the left with the letter numeral dei. On either side of the leaf there are five lines of writing, each of which contains from fifty-five to sixty aksharas. The leaf A is similar to B, but on the proper right a portion of it is broken away, so that at the commencement of each line from five to six aksharas are missing. This leaf also is marked, on the proper right margin of the back, with the figure 2, showing at once that A and B belong to two different MSS.; and it contains six lines of writing on the first side and five on the second, also with from fifty-five to sixty aksharas in each line. C presents two lines of wellpreserved writing; and D contains six lines, which cover a space of about eleven and three-quarter inches broad, by two and three-quarter inches high, and of which the beginning of the first line and the end of the last line are broken away, while the rest is well preserved. The writing on these fragments proves that the MSS to which they belong, so far from being 1300 or 1400 years old, were not written before the twelfth century A.D., and may possibly belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. For A, B, and C exhibit the distinctly Nepalese characters, characterized by the addition of a curve or hook to the top of each letter, of which we find the earliest specimens in the Nepalese MSS. of the second half of the twelfth century; and the writing of D differs little from the ordinary Nâgarî, and may be described as that particular variety of the Nâgarî alphabet which was current in parts of Bengal about the thirteenth century A.D. On these points there can be no doubt whatever, and it is, therefore, quite certain that the MSS., or fragments of MSS., which are now preserved in the Tien t'ai shan monastery, were brought to 1 China from Northern India or Nepal not earlier than 1200 A.D. I give below an exact transcript of the texts of the four fragments. Although the writing of A and B is very neat and distinct, it is quite possible that, owing to the small size of the photographs, I may have misread one or two letters; and the texts contain a number of clerical blunders, which it would hardly be worth while attempting to correct here. Even with these faults what I give will probably enable others to tell us to what works these fragments belong. The text of A is throughout in the Upajâti metre, and is in praise of Buddha, the true teacher, who is contrasted with false teachers. B apparently is a commentary on a work composed in Anushtubh verses, probably, as my friend Prof. Cowell suggests to me, a Tântric work connected with the Kalachakra-tantra. And the exact title of this work and the name of its author, or of the author of the commentary, may be given in C (Paramârthaserâ or Tattrávalókanasera, composed by Pundarîka or Srîpundarîka). Of D I do not know what to make, and will only point out that it gives us the initial verses of Kâlidâsa's three Mahâkâvyas, the Kumarasambhava, Meghadúta, and Raghuvamsa. F. KIELHORN. 3. THE SAINT PIR BADAR. DEAR SIR,-Perhaps the following particulars about Pir Badar, concerning whom Major Temple writes at p. 565 of the Journal for July, may be interesting. They are taken partly from Dr. Wise's unpublished work on Dacca, and partly from my own notes. This saint is well known all over Bengal and Upper India. His full name was Badru’ddin, i.e. “full moon of the Faith." He is also called Badr-i 'Alam, or "full moon of the world." Born at Mirat in the N.W. Provinces, he led |