They were not allowed to wear any dress except rags collected in
cemeteries, and these rags they had to sew together with their own
hands. A yellow cloak was to be thrown over these rags. Their food was
to be extremely simple, and they were not to possess anything, except
what they could get by collecting alms from door to door in their
wooden bowls. They had but one meal in the morning, and were not
allowed to touch any food after midday. They were to live in forests,
not in cities, and their only shelter was to be the shadow of a tree.
There they were to sit, to spread their carpet, but not to lie down,
even during sleep. They were allowed to enter the nearest city or
village in order to beg, but they had to return to their forest before
night, and the only change which was allowed, or rather prescribed,
was when they had to spend some nights in the cemeteries, there to
meditate on the vanity of all things. And what was the object of all
this asceticism? Simply to guide each individual towards that path
which would finally bring him to Nirva_n_a, to utter extinction or
annihilation. The very definition of virtue was that it helped man to
cross over to the other shore, and that other shore was not death, but
cessation of all being. Thus charity was considered a virtue; modesty,
patience, courage, contemplation, and science, all were virtues, but
they were practised only as a means of arriving at deliverance. Buddha
himself exhibited the perfection of all these virtues. His charity
knew no bounds. When he saw a tigress starved, and unable to feed her
cubs, he is said to have made a charitable oblation of his body to be
devoured by them. Hiouen-thsang visited the place on the banks of the
Indus where this miracle was supposed to have happened, and he remarks
that the soil is still red there from the blood of Buddha, and that
the trees and flowers have the same colour.[72] As to the modesty of
Buddha, nothing could exceed it. One day, king Prasena_g_it, the
protector of Buddha, called on him to perform miracles, in order to
silence his adversaries, the Brahmans. Buddha consented. He performed
the required miracles; but he exclaimed, 'Great king, I do not teach
the law to my pupils, telling them, Go, ye saints, and before the eyes
of the Brahmans and householders perform, by means of your
supernatural powers, miracles greater than any man can perform. I tell
them, when I teach them the law, Live, ye saints, hiding your good
works and showing your sins.' And yet, all this self-sacrificing
charity, all this self-sacrificing humility, by which the life of
Buddha was distinguished throughout, and which he preached to the
multitudes that came to listen to him, had, we are told, but one
object, and that object was final annihilation. It is impossible
almost to believe it, and yet when we turn away our eyes from the
pleasing picture of that high morality which Buddha preached for the
first time to all classes of men, and look into the dark pages of his
code of religious metaphysics, we can hardly find another explanation.
Fortunately, the millions who embraced the doctrines of Buddha, and
were saved by it from the depths of barbarism, brutality, and
selfishness, were unable to fathom the meaning of his metaphysical
doctrines. With them the Nirva_n_a to which they aspired, became only
a relative deliverance from the miseries of human life; nay, it took
the bright colours of a paradise, to be regained by the pious
worshipper of Buddha. But was this the meaning of Buddha himself? In
his 'Four Verities' he does not, indeed, define Nirva_n_a, except by
cessation of all pain; but when he traces the cause of pain, and
teaches the means of destroying not only pain itself, but the cause of
pain, we shall see that his Nirva_n_a assumes a very different
meaning. His 'Four Verities' are very simple. The first asserts the
existence of pain; the second asserts that the cause of pain lies in
sin; the third asserts that pain may cease by Nirva_n_a; the fourth
shows the way that leads to Nirva_n_a. This way to Nirva_n_a consists
in eight things--right faith (orthodoxy), right judgment (logic),
right language (veracity), right purpose (honesty), right practice
(religious life), right obedience (lawful life), right memory, and
right meditation. All these precepts might be understood as part of a
simply moral code, closing with a kind of mystic meditation on the
highest object of thought, and with a yearning after deliverance from
all worldly ties. Similar systems have prevailed in many parts of the
world, without denying the existence of an absolute Being, or of a
something towards which the human mind tends, in which it is absorbed
or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it
leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of
dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have
nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun
akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may
be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver,
Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of the child have
re-entered the heart of man, the name of father will come back to the
lips which had uttered in vain all the names of a philosophical
despair. But from the Nirva_n_a of the Buddhist metaphysician there is
no return. He starts from the idea that the highest object is to
escape pain. Life in his eyes is nothing but misery; birth the cause
of all evil, from which even death cannot deliver him, because he
believes in an eternal cycle of existence, or in transmigration. There
is no deliverance from evil, except by breaking through the prison
walls, not only of life, but of existence, and by extirpating the last
cause of existence. What, then, is the cause of existence? The cause
of existence, says the Buddhist metaphysician, is attachment--an
inclination towards something; and this attachment arises from thirst
or desire. Desire presupposes perception of the object desired;
perception presupposes contact; contact, at least a sentient contact,
presupposes the senses; and, as the senses can only perceive what has
form and name, or what is distinct, distinction is the real cause of
all the effects which end in existence, birth, and pain. Now, this
distinction is itself the result of conceptions or ideas; but these
ideas, so far from being, as in Greek philosophy, the true and
everlasting forms of the Absolute, are here represented as mere
illusions, the effects of ignorance (avidya). Ignorance, therefore, is
really the primary cause of all that seems to exist. To know that
ignorance, as the root of all evil, is the same as to destroy it, and
with it all effects that flowed from it. In order to see how this
doctrine affects the individual, let us watch the last moments of
Buddha as described by his disciples. He enters into the first stage
of meditation when he feels freedom from sin, acquires a knowledge of
the nature of all things, and has no desire except that of Nirva_n_a.
But he still feels pleasure; he even uses his reasoning and
discriminating powers. The use of these powers ceases in the second
stage of meditation, when nothing remains but a desire after
Nirva_n_a, and a general feeling of satisfaction, arising from his
intellectual perfection. That satisfaction, also, is extinguished in
the third stage. Indifference succeeds; yet there is still
self-consciousness, and a certain amount of physical pleasure. These
last remnants are destroyed in the fourth stage; memory fades away,
all pleasure and pain are gone, and the doors of Nirva_n_a now open
before him. After having passed these four stages once, Buddha went
through them a second time, but he died before he attained again to
the fourth stage. We must soar still higher, and though we may feel
giddy and disgusted, we must sit out this tragedy till the curtain
falls. After the four stages of meditation[73] are passed, the Buddha
(and every being is to become a Buddha) enters into the infinity of
space; then into the infinity of intelligence; and thence he passes
into the region of nothing. But even here there is no rest. There is
still something left--the idea of the nothing in which he rejoices.
That also must be destroyed, and it is destroyed in the fourth and
last region, where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and
where there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not
nothing.[74] There are few persons who will take the trouble of
reasoning out such hallucinations; least of all, persons who are
accustomed to the sober language of Greek philosophy; and it is the
more interesting to hear the opinion which one of the best
Aristotelean scholars of the present day, after a patient examination
of the authentic documents of Buddhism, has formed of its system of
metaphysics. M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, in a review on Buddhism,
published in the 'Journal des Savants,' says:
'Buddhism has no God; it has not even the confused and vague
notion of a Universal Spirit in which the human soul,
according to the orthodox doctrine of Brahmanism, and the
Sankhya philosophy, may be absorbed. Nor does it admit
nature, in the proper sense of the word, and it ignores that
profound division between spirit and matter which forms the
system and the glory of Kapila. It confounds man with all
that surrounds him, all the while preaching to him the laws
of virtue. Buddhism, therefore, cannot unite the human soul,
which it does not even mention, with a God, whom it ignores;
nor with nature, which it does not know better. Nothing
remained but to annihilate the soul; and in order to be
quite sure that the soul may not re-appear under some new
form in this world, which has been cursed as the abode of
illusion and misery, Buddhism destroys its very elements,
and never gets tired of glorying in this achievement. What
more is wanted?
[Footnote 72: Vol. i. p. 89, vol. ii. p. 167.]
[Footnote 73: These 'four stages' are described in the same manner in
the canonical books of Ceylon and Nepal, and may therefore safely be
ascribed to that original form of Buddhism from which the Southern and
the Northern schools branched off at a later period. See Burnouf,
'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 800.]
[Footnote 74: See Burnouf, 'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 814.]
If this is not the absolute nothing, what is Nirva_n_a?'
Such religion, we should say, was made for a mad-house. But Buddhism
was an advance, if compared with Brahmanism; it has stood its ground
for centuries, and if truth could be decided by majorities, the show
of hands, even at the present day, would be in favour of Buddha. The
metaphysics of Buddhism, like the metaphysics of most religions, not
excluding our own Gnosticism and Mysticism, were beyond the reach of
all except a few hardened philosophers or ecstatic dreamers. Human
nature could not be changed. Out of the very nothing it made a new
paradise; and he who had left no place in the whole universe for a
Divine Being, was deified himself by the multitudes who wanted a
person whom they could worship, a king whose help they might invoke, a
friend before whom they could pour out their most secret griefs. And
there remained the code of a pure morality, proclaimed by Buddha.
There remained the spirit of charity, kindness, and universal pity
with which he had inspired his disciples.[75] There remained the
simplicity of the ceremonial he had taught, the equality of all men
which he had declared, the religious toleration which he had preached
from the beginning. There remained much, therefore, to account for the
rapid strides which his doctrine made from the mountain peaks of
Ceylon to the Tundras of the Samoyedes, and we shall see in the simple
story of the life of Hiouen-thsang that Buddhism, with all its
defects, has had its heroes, its martyrs, and its saints.
[Footnote 75: See the 'Dhammapadam,' a Pali work on Buddhist ethics,
lately edited by V. Fausboell, a distinguished pupil of Professor
Westergaard, at Copenhagen. The Rev. Spence Hardy ('Eastern
Monachism,' p. 169) writes: 'A collection might be made from the
precepts of this work, that in the purity of its ethics could scarcely
be equalled from any other heathen author.' Mr. Knighton, when
speaking of the same work in his 'History of Ceylon' (p. 77), remarks:
'In it we have exemplified a code of morality, and a list of precepts,
which, for pureness, excellence, and wisdom, is only second to that of
the Divine Lawgiver himself.']
Hiouen-thsang, born in China more than a thousand years after the
death of Buddha, was a believer in Buddhism. He dedicated his whole
life to the study of that religion; travelling from his native country
to India, visiting every place mentioned in Buddhist history or
tradition, acquiring the ancient language in which the canonical books
of the Buddhists were written, studying commentaries, discussing
points of difficulty, and defending the orthodox faith at public
councils against disbelievers and schismatics. Buddhism had grown and
changed since the death of its founder, but it had lost nothing of its
vitality. At a very early period a proselytizing spirit awoke among
the disciples of the Indian reformer, an element entirely new in the
history of ancient religions. No Jew, no Greek, no Roman, no Brahman
ever thought of converting people to his own national form of worship.
Religion was looked upon as private or national property. It was to be
guarded against strangers. The most sacred names of the gods, the
prayers by which their favour could be gained, were kept secret. No
religion, however, was more exclusive than that of the Brahmans. A
Brahman was born, nay, twice-born. He could not be made. Not even the
lowest caste, that of the _S_udras, would open its ranks to a
stranger. Here lay the secret of Buddha's success. He addressed
himself to castes and outcasts. He promised salvation to all; and he
commanded his disciples to preach his doctrine in all places and to
all men. A sense of duty, extending from the narrow limits of the
house, the village, and the country to the widest circle of mankind, a
feeling of sympathy and brotherhood towards all men, the idea, in
fact, of humanity, were in India first pronounced by Buddha. In the
third Buddhist Council, the acts of which have been preserved to us in
the 'Mahavansa,'[76] we hear of missionaries being sent to the chief
countries beyond India. This Council, we are told, took place 308
B.C., 235 years after the death of Buddha, in the 17th year of the
reign of the famous king A_s_oka, whose edicts have been preserved to
us on rock inscriptions in various parts of India. There are sentences
in these inscriptions of A_s_oka which might be read with advantage by
our own missionaries, though they are now more than 2000 years old.
Thus it is written on the rocks of Girnar, Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri--
'Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the
ascetics of all creeds might reside in all places. All these
ascetics profess alike the command which people should
exercise over themselves, and the purity of the soul. But
people have different opinions, and different inclinations.'
And again:
'A man ought to honour his own faith only; but he should
never abuse the faith of others. It is thus that he will do
no harm to anybody. There are even circumstances where the
religion of others ought to be honoured. And in acting
thus, a man fortifies his own faith, and assists the faith
of others. He who acts otherwise, diminishes his own faith,
and hurts the faith of others.'
[Footnote 76: 'Mahavanso,' ed. G. Turnour, Ceylon, 1837, p. 71.]
Those who have no time to read the voluminous works of the late E.
Burnouf on Buddhism, his 'Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme,' and
his translation of 'Le Lotus de la bonne Loi,' will find a very
interesting and lucid account of these councils, and edicts, and
missions, and the history of Buddhism in general, in a work lately
published by Mrs. Speir, 'Life in Ancient India.' Buddhism spread in
the south to Ceylon, in the north to Kashmir, the Himalayan countries,
Tibet, and China. One Buddhist missionary is mentioned in the Chinese
annals as early as 217 B.C.;[77] and about the year 120 B.C. a Chinese
General, after defeating the barbarous tribes north of the Desert of
Gobi, brought back as a trophy a golden statue, the statue of
Buddha.[78] It was not, however, till the year 65 A.D. that Buddhism
was officially recognised by the Emperor Ming-ti[79] as a third state
religion in China. Ever since, it has shared equal honours with the
doctrines of Confucius and Lao-tse, in the Celestial Empire, and it is
but lately that these three established religions have had to fear the
encroachments of a new rival in the creed of the Chief of the rebels.
[Footnote 77: See 'Foe Koue Ki,' p. 41, and xxxviii. preface.]
[Footnote 78: See 'Foe Koue Ki,' p. 41.]
[Footnote 79: 'Lalita-Vistara,' ed. Foucaux, p. xvii. n.]
After Buddhism had been introduced into China, the first care of its
teachers was to translate the sacred works from Sanskrit, in which
they were originally written, into Chinese. We read of the Emperor
Ming-ti,[80] of the dynasty of Han, sending Tsai-in and other high
officials to India, in order to study there the doctrine of Buddha.
They engaged the services of two learned Buddhists, Matanga and
Tchou-fa-lan, and some of the most important Buddhist works were
translated by them into Chinese. 'The Life of Buddha,' the
'Lalita-Vistara,'[81] a Sanskrit work which, on account of its style
and language, had been referred by Oriental scholars to a much more
modern period of Indian literature, can now safely be ascribed to an
ante-Christian era, if, as we are told by Chinese scholars, it was
translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, as one of the canonical books
of Buddhism, as early as the year 76 A.D. The same work was translated
also into Tibetan; and an edition of it--the first Tibetan work
printed in Europe--published in Paris by M.E. Foucaux, reflects high
credit on that distinguished scholar, and on the Government which
supports these studies in the most liberal and enlightened spirit. The
intellectual intercourse between the Indian peninsula and the northern
continent of Asia remained uninterrupted for many centuries. Missions
were sent from China to India, to report on the political and
geographical state of the country, but the chief object of interest
which attracted public embassies and private pilgrims across the
Himalayan mountains was the religion of Buddha. About three hundred
years after the public recognition of Buddhism by the Emperor Ming-ti,
the great stream of Buddhist pilgrims began to flow from China to
India. The first account which we possess of these pilgrimages refers
to the travels of Fahian, who visited India towards the end of the
fourth century. His travels have been translated by Remusat, but M.
Julien promises a new and more correct translation. After Fahian, we
have the travels of Hoei-seng and Song-yun, who were sent to India, in
518, by command of the Empress, with a view of collecting sacred books
and relics. Of Hiouen-thsang, who follows next in time, we possess, at
present, eight out of twelve books; and there is reason to hope that
the last four books of his Journal will soon follow in M. Julien's
translation.[82] After Hiouen-thsang, the chief works of Chinese
pilgrims are the 'Itineraries' of the fifty-six monks, published in
730, and the travels of Khi-nie, who visited India in 964, at the head
of three hundred pilgrims. India was for a time the Holy Land of
China. There lay the scene of the life and death of the great teacher;
there were the monuments commemorating the chief events of his life;
there the shrines where his relics might be worshipped; there the
monasteries where tradition had preserved his sayings and his doings;
there the books where his doctrine might be studied in its original
purity; there the schools where the tenets of different sects which
had sprung up in the course of time might best be acquired.
[Footnote 80: 'Lalita-Vistara,' p. 17.]
[Footnote 81: Two parts of the Sanskrit text have been published in
the 'Bibliotheca Indica.']
[Footnote 82: They have since been published.]
Some of the pilgrims and envoys have left us accounts of their
travels, and, in the absence of anything like an historical literature
in India itself, these Chinese works are of the utmost importance for
gaining an insight into the social, political, and religious history
of that country from the beginning of our era to the time of the
Mohammedan conquest. The importance of Mohammedan writers, so far as
they treat on the history of India during the Middle Ages, was soon
recognised, and in a memoir lately published by the most eminent
Arabic scholar of France, M. Reinaud, new and valuable historical
materials have been collected--materials doubly valuable in India,
where no native historian has ever noted down the passing events of
the day. But, although the existence of similar documents in Chinese
was known, and although men of the highest literary eminence--such as
Humboldt, Biot, and others--had repeatedly urged the necessity of
having a translation of the early travels of the Chinese Pilgrims, it
seemed almost as if our curiosity was never to be satisfied. France
has been the only country where Chinese scholarship has ever
flourished, and it was a French scholar, Abel Remusat, who undertook
at last the translation of one of the Chinese Pilgrims. Remusat died
before his work was published, and his translation of the travels of
Fahian, edited by M. Landresse, remained for a long time without being
followed up by any other. Nor did the work of that eminent scholar
answer all expectations. Most of the proper names, the names of
countries, towns, mountains, and rivers, the titles of books, and the
whole Buddhistic phraseology, were so disguised in their Chinese dress
that it was frequently impossible to discover their original form.
The Chinese alphabet was never intended to represent the sound of
words. It was in its origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having
its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to
write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No
word is allowed more than one consonant and one vowel,--the vowels
including diphthongs and nasal vowels. Hence the possible number of
words is extremely small, and the number of significative sounds in
the Chinese language is said to be no more than 450. No language,
however, could be satisfied with so small a vocabulary, and in
Chinese, as in other monosyllabic dialects, each word, as it was
pronounced with various accents and intonations, was made to convey a
large number of meanings; so that the total number of words, or rather
of ideas, expressed in Chinese, is said to amount to 43,496. Hence a
graphic representation of the mere sound of words would have been
perfectly useless, and it was absolutely necessary to resort to
hieroglyphical writing, enlarged by the introduction of determinative
signs. Nearly the whole immense dictionary of Chinese--at least
twenty-nine thirtieths--consists of combined signs, one part
indicating the general sound, the other determining its special
meaning. With such a system of writing it was possible to represent
Chinese, but impossible to convey either the sound or the meaning of
any other language. Besides, some of the most common sounds--such as
r, b, d, and the short a--are unknown in Chinese.
How, then, were the translators to render Sanskrit names in Chinese?
The most rational plan would have been to select as many Chinese signs
as there were Sanskrit letters, and to express one and the same letter
in Sanskrit always by one and the same sign in Chinese; or, if the
conception of a consonant without a vowel, and of a vowel without a
consonant, was too much for a Chinese understanding, to express at
least the same syllabic sound in Sanskrit, by one and the same
syllabic sign in Chinese. A similar system is adopted at the present
day, when the Chinese find themselves under the necessity of writing
the names of Lord Palmerston or Sir John Bowring; but, instead of
adopting any definite system of transcribing, each translator seems to
have chosen his own signs for rendering the sounds of Sanskrit words,
and to have chosen them at random. The result is that every Sanskrit
word as transcribed by the Chinese Buddhists is a riddle which no
ingenuity is able to solve. Who could have guessed that 'Fo-to,' or
more frequently 'Fo,' was meant for Buddha? 'Ko-lo-keou-lo' for
Rahula, the son of Buddha? 'Po-lo-nai' for Benares? 'Heng-ho' for
Ganges? 'Niepan' for Nirv_ana_? 'Chamen' for _S_rama_n_a? 'Feito' for
Veda? 'Tcha-li' for Kshattriya? 'Siu-to-lo' for _S_udra? 'Fan' or
'Fan-lon-mo' for Brahma? Sometimes, it is true, the Chinese
endeavoured to give, besides the sounds, a translation of the meaning
of the Sanskrit words. But the translation of proper names is always
very precarious, and it required an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit and
Buddhist literature to recognise from these awkward translations the
exact form of the proper names for which they were intended. If, in a
Chinese translation of 'Thukydides,' we read of a person called
'Leader of the people,' we might guess his name to have been
Demagogos, 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 language; he
had to study the Buddhist literature written in Sanskrit, Pali,
Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese. He had to make vast indices of every
proper name connected with Buddhism. Thus only could he shape his own
tools, and accomplish what at last he did accomplish. Most persons
will remember the interest with which the travels of M.M. Huc and
Gabet were read a few years ago, though these two adventurous
missionaries were obliged to renounce their original intention of
entering India by way of China and Tibet, and were not allowed to
proceed beyond the famous capital of Lhassa. If, then, it be
considered that there was a traveller who had made a similar journey
twelve hundred years earlier--who had succeeded in crossing the
deserts and mountain passes which separate China from India--who had
visited the principal cities of the Indian Peninsula, at a time of
which we have no information, from native or foreign sources, as to
the state of that country--who had learned Sanskrit, and made a large
collection of Buddhist works--who had carried on public disputations
with the most eminent philosophers and theologians of the day--who had
translated the most important works on Buddhism from Sanskrit into
Chinese, and left an account of his travels, which still existed in
the libraries of China--nay, which had been actually printed and
published--we may well imagine the impatience with which all scholars
interested in the ancient history of India, and in the subject of
Buddhism, looked forward to the publication of so important a work.
Hiouen-thsang's name had first been mentioned in Europe by Abel
Remusat and Klaproth. They had discovered some fragments of his
travels in a Chinese work on foreign countries and foreign nations.
Remusat wrote to China to procure, if possible, a complete copy of
Hiouen-thsang's works. He was informed by Morrison that they were out
of print. Still, the few specimens which he had given at the end of
his translation of the 'Foe Koue Ki' had whetted the appetite of
Oriental scholars. M. Stanislas Julien succeeded in procuring a copy
of Hiouen-thsang in 1838; and after nearly twenty years spent in
preparing a translation of the Chinese traveller, his version is now
before us. If there are but few who know the difficulty of a work like
that of M. Stanislas Julien, it becomes their duty to speak out,
though, after all, perhaps the most intelligible eulogium would be,
that in a branch of study where there are no monopolies and no
patents, M. Stanislas Julien is acknowledged to be the only man in
Europe who could produce the article which he has produced in the work
before us.