Note 21 — INTRODUCTION.

About the time when Csoma Körösi was starting from Bucharest on his adventurous pilgrimage, another equally genuine and disinterested scholar, Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, was commencing his long residence in Nepal. Living continuously in that country for three-and-twenty years, and occupying from 1831 to 1843 the important post of British Resident at Kathmandu, he was able to succeed in making the immense collections of Buddhistic works which he afterwards, with a generosity as great as his industry, made gratuitously accessible to European scholars. “The real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha,” says Professor Max Müller (“Chips,” i. 190), “dates from the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal.” But there is no need to dwell here on the well-known fact that an immense amount of such Sanskrit literature was discovered by Mr. Hodgson in Nepal, and presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Société Asiatique of Paris. We have at present to deal only with the stores of information which he extracted from Tibet. Mr. Hodgson not only established the fact, Professor Max Müller goes on to say, “that some of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered had existed in the monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of our era,” but he also showed 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.” Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans, translated into their language from Sanskrit, Mr. Hodgson received a copy as a present from the Dalai Lama, and this he presented to the East India Company. As early as 1828 he printed in the “Asiatic Researches” (vol. xvi.) an article on Nepal and Tibet, in which he stated that “the body of Bhotiya [i.e., Tibetan] literature now is, and long has been, a mass of translations from Sanskrit; its language native; its letters (like its ideas) Indian.”21 To that statement he in 1837 appended this note: “It is needless now to say how fully these views have been confirmed by the researches of De Körös. It is but justice to myself to add that the real nature of the Kahgyur and Stangyur was expressly stated and proved by me to the secretary of the Asiatic Society some time before M. De Körös’s ample revelations were made. Complete copies of both collections have been presented by me to the Honourable East India Company, and others procured for the Asiatic Society, Calcutta: upon the latter M. De Körös worked.” It was a fortunate combination which brought the special knowledge and the patient industry of Csoma Körösi into contact with the immense mass of materials obtained by Mr. Hodgson from Tibet.