, or Laoegos, as well as Agesilaos. And when the name of the
town of _S_ravasti was written Che-wei, which means in Chinese 'where
one hears,' it required no ordinary power of combination to find that
the name of _S_ravasti was derived from a Sanskrit noun, _s_ravas
(Greek [Greek: kleos], Lat. cluo), which means 'hearing' or 'fame,'
and that the etymological meaning of the name of _S_ravasti was
intended by the Chinese 'Che-wei.' Besides these names of places and
rivers, of kings and saints, there was the whole strange phraseology
of Buddhism, of which no dictionary gives any satisfactory
explanation. How was even the best Chinese scholar to know that the
words which usually mean 'dark shadow' must be taken in the technical
sense of Nirva_n_a, or becoming absorbed in the Absolute, that
'return-purity' had the same sense, and that a third synonymous
expression was to be recognised in a phrase which, in ordinary
Chinese, would have the sense of 'transport-figure-crossing-age?' A
monastery is called 'origin-door,' instead of 'black-door.' The voice
of Buddha is called 'the voice of the dragon;' and his doctrine goes
by the name of 'the door of expedients.'

Tedious as these details may seem, it was almost a duty to state them,
in order to give an idea of the difficulties which M. Stanislas Julien
had to grapple with. Oriental scholars labour under great
disadvantages. Few people take an interest in their works, or, if they
do, they simply accept the results, but they are unable to appreciate
the difficulty with which these results were obtained. Many persons
who have read the translation of the cuneiform inscriptions are glad,
no doubt, to have the authentic and contemporaneous records of Darius
and Xerxes. But if they followed the process by which scholars such as
Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson arrived at their results,
they would see that the discovery of the alphabet, the language, the
grammar, and the meaning of the inscriptions of the Achaemenian dynasty
deserves to be classed with the discoveries of a Kepler, a Newton, or
a Faraday. In a similar manner, the mere translation of a Chinese work
into French seems a very ordinary performance; but M. Stanislas
Julien, who has long been acknowledged as the first Chinese scholar in
Europe, had to spend twenty years of incessant labour in order to
prepare himself for the task of translating the 'Travels of
Hiouen-thsang.' He had to learn Sanskrit, no very easy lang