one was to translate the canonical books. This seems to
have been the joint work of Chinese who had acquired a knowledge of
Sanskrit during their travels in India, and of Hindus who settled in
Chinese monasteries in order to assist the native translators. The
translation of books which profess to contain a new religious doctrine
is under all circumstances a task of great difficulty. It was so
particularly when the subtle abstractions of the Buddhist religion had
to be clothed in the solid, matter-of-fact idiom of the Chinese. But
there was another difficulty which it seemed almost impossible to
overcome. Many words, not only proper names, but the technical terms
also of the Buddhist creed, had to be preserved in Chinese. They were
not to be translated, but to be transliterated. But how was this to be
effected with a language which, like Chinese, had no phonetic
alphabet? Every Chinese character is a word; it has both sound and
meaning; and it is unfit, therefore, for the representation of the
sound of foreign words. In modern times, certain characters have been
set apart for the purpose of writing the proper names and titles of
foreigners; but such is the peculiar nature of the Chinese system of
writing, that even with this alphabet it is only possible to represent
approximatively the pronunciation of foreign words. In the absence,
however, of even such an alphabet, the translators of the Buddhist
literature seem to have used their own discretion--or rather
indiscretion--in appropriating, without any system, whatever Chinese
characters seemed to them to come nearest to the sound of Sanskrit
words. Now the whole Chinese language consists in reality of about
four hundred words, or significative sounds, all monosyllabic. Each of
these monosyllabic sounds embraces a large number of various meanings,
and each of these various meanings is represented by its own sign.
Thus it has happened that the Chinese Dictionary contains 43,496
signs, whereas the Chinese language commands only four hundred
distinct utterances. Instead of being restricted, therefore, to one
character which always expresses the same sound, the Buddhist
translators were at liberty to express one and the same sound in a
hundred different ways. Of this freedom they availed themselves to the
fullest extent. Each translator, each monastery, fixed on its own
characters for representing the pronunciation of Sanskrit words. There
are more than twelve hundred Chinese