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' He might have added tonsure, relics, and the confessional.] Mr. Hodgson himself gave to the world a number of valuable essays written on the spot, and afterwards collected under the title of 'Illustrations of the Literature and Religion of the Buddhists,' Serampore, 1841. He established the important fact, in accordance with the traditions of the priests of Nepal, that some of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered had existed in the monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of our era, and that the whole of that collection had, five or six hundred years later, when Buddhism became definitely established in Tibet, been translated into the language of that country. As the art of printing had been introduced from China into Tibet, there was less difficulty in procuring complete copies of the Tibetan translation of the Buddhist canon. The real difficulty was to find a person acquainted with the language. By a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, however, it so happened that about the same time when Mr. Hodgson's discoveries began to attract the attention of Oriental scholars at Calcutta, a Hungarian, of the name of Alexander Csoma de Koeroes, arrived there. He had made his way from Hungary to Tibet on foot, without any means of his own, and with the sole object of discovering somewhere in Central Asia the native home of the Hungarians. Arrived in Tibet, his enthusiasm found a new vent in acquiring a language which no European before his time had mastered, and in exploring the vast collection of the canonical books of the Buddhists, preserved in that language. Though he arrived at Calcutta almost without a penny, he met with a hearty welcome from the members of the Asiatic Society, and was enabled with their assistance to publish the results of his extraordinary researches. People have complained of the length of the sacred books of other nations, but there are none that approach in bulk to the sacred canon of the Tibetans. It consists of two collections, commonly called the Kanjur and Tanjur. The proper spelling of their names is Bkah-hgyur, pronounced Kah-gyur, and Bstan-hgyur, pronounced Tan-gyur. The Kanjur consists, in its different editions, of 100, 102, or 108 volumes folio. It comprises 1083 distinct works. The Tanjur consists of 225 volumes folio, each weighing from four to five pounds in the edition of Peking. Editions of this colossal code were printed at Peking, Lhassa, and other places. The edit
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