st scriptures. They exclude
from the latter works analogous to the Pali Nikayas and Vinaya, and
also the Abhidharma of the Sarvastivadins. But the labours of Hsuan
Chuang and I-Ching show that this does not imply the rejection of all
these works by Mahayanists.

5

Buddhist literary activity has an interesting side aspect, namely the
expedients used to transliterate Indian words, which almost
provided the Chinese with an alphabet. To some extent Indian names,
particularly proper names possessing an obvious meaning, are
translated. Thus Asoka becomes Wu-yu, without sorrow: Asvaghosha,
Ma-ming or horse-voice, and Udyana simply Yuan or park.[780] But many
proper names did not lend themselves to such renderings and it was a
delicate business to translate theological terms like Nirvana and
Samadhi. The Buddhists did not perhaps invent the idea of using the
Chinese characters so as to spell with moderate precision,[781] but
they had greater need of this procedure than other writers and they
used it extensively[782] and with such variety of detail that though
they invented some fifteen different syllabaries, none of them
obtained general acceptance and Julien[783] enumerates 3000 Chinese
characters used to represent the sounds indicated by 47 Indian
letters. Still, they gave currency[784] to the system known as
_fan-ch'ieh_ which renders a syllable phonetically by two characters,
the final of the first and the initial of the second not being
pronounced. Thus, in order to indicate the sound Chung, a Chinese
dictionary will use the two characters _chu yung_, which are to be
read together as _Ch ung_.

The transcriptions of Indian words vary in exactitude and the later
are naturally better. Hsuan Chuang was a notable reformer and probably
after his time Indian words were rendered in Chinese characters as
accurately as Chinese words are now transcribed in Latin letters. It
is true that modern pronunciation makes such renderings as Fo seem a
strange distortion of the original. But it is an abbreviation of
Fo-t'o and these syllables were probably once pronounced something
like Vut-tha.[785] Similarly Wen-shu-shih-li[786] seems a parody of
Manjusri. But the evidence of modern dialects shows that the
first two syllables may have been pronounced as Man-ju. The pupil was
probably taught to eliminate the obscure vowel of _shih_, and _li_ was
taken as the nearest equivalent of _ri_, just as European authors
write _chih_ and _tzu wi