thout pretending that they are more than
conventional signs for Chinese sounds unknown to our languages. It was
certainly possible to transcribe not only names but Sanskrit prayers
and formulae in Chinese characters, and though many writers sneer at
the gibberish chanted by Buddhist priests yet I doubt if this
ecclesiastical pronunciation, which has changed with that of the
spoken language, is further removed from its original than the Latin
of Oxford from the speech of Augustus.

Sanskrit learning flourished in China for a considerable period. In
the time of the T'ang, the clergy numbered many serious students of
Indian literature and the glossaries included in the Tripitaka show
that they studied the original texts. Under the Sung dynasty (A.D.
1151) was compiled another dictionary of religious terms[787] and the
study of Sanskrit was encouraged under the Yuan. But the ecclesiastics
of the Ming produced no new translations and apparently abandoned the
study of the original texts which was no longer kept alive by the
arrival of learned men from India. It has been stated that Sanskrit
manuscripts are still preserved in Chinese monasteries, but no details
respecting such works are known to me. The statement is not improbable
in itself[788] as is shown by the Library which Stein discovered at
Tun-huang and by the Japanese palm-leaf manuscripts which came
originally from China. A few copies of Sanskrit sutras printed in
China in the Lanja variety of the Devanagari alphabet have been
brought to Europe.[789] Max Muller published a facsimile of part of
the Vajracchedika obtained at Peking and printed in Sanskrit from
wooden blocks. The place of production is unknown, but the characters
are similar to those used for printing Sanskrit in Tibet, as may be
seen from another facsimile (No. 3) in the same work. Placards and
pamphlets containing short invocations in Sanskrit and Tibetan are
common in Chinese monasteries, particularly where there is any
Lamaistic influence, but they do not imply that the monks who use them
have any literary acquaintance with those languages.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 708: [Chinese: ] For an account of some of the scriptures
here mentioned see chap. XX.]

[Footnote 709: _A catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist
Tripitaka_. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1893. An index to the Tokyo
edition has been published by Fujii. Meiji XXXI (1898). See too Forke,
_Katalog des Pekinger Tripitaka_, 1916.]