99 66 29 66 According to popular belief the hañsas have the peculiar power of abstracting the milk from a mixture of milk and water, and leaving the water behind. Absurd as this belief is, it has led to the hañsa being reckoned as an emblem of superior powers of discrimination, and seldom does a Bengali author write a book in which he does not request his readers to separate, like the hañsa, the cream of his composition from its aqueous adjunct. In the Mahábhárata this is alluded to in the Udyoga Parva* where a great Bráhmana teacher is named the Hañsa or the goose" who was to separate the cream of theology from the dross of secular learning. It is probably from this circumstance that the term, from originally meaning "a duck,' a goose,' a swan,” or “a flamingo"† came to mean the omniscient Brahmá,‡ the benign Vishnu, the plenipotent Siva, the allobserving sun and, metaphorically in composition, "the best," 66 chief," or "excellent." The Jogis took it up as a term elect to indicate the vital airs, and many mystical prayers were got ready for the adoration of the deity as the Hañsa.§ Those who adopted this mystical prayer were generally ascetics, and hence several sects of Jogis used it as a title for their spiritual teachers. Subsequently the term had the augmentative prefix parama added to it, and in that compound form, it occurs frequently in the Bhagavat where S'ridhara Swámi explains it by the words সারাসার-বিবেক-নিপুণঃ or “ possessed of the knowledge of substance and dross, or truth and untruth.” When the term came to be used as indicative of a Vedantist ascetic it is difficult to determine, but it occurs very largely in the polemical literature of medieval India. However ridiculous the title may appear in its English version of "the great goose," S'añkara adopted it as pre-eminently his own,|| and most of his successors called themselves Paramahañsas. Several teachers of great eminence before the time of Sankara likewise had the same title, and it may be traced * Chapter 35, Vol II. p. 137. + Vide my translation of the Chhandogya Upanishad p. 66, foot note. The vehicle of Brahmá is likewise named hañsa. $ हंसेति प्रकृतिर्ज्ञेया चोङ्कार प्रकृतेर्गुणाः । हङ्कारेण वहियति सकारेण विशेत् पुनः ॥ The following is his definition of hañsa as given in his treatise on inference, Aparokhanubhuti. चोरान्नीरं पृथक् कृत्य हंमो भजति नान्यथा । चीरनीरविवेकज्ञेो हंस एव न चापरः ॥ as far back as the 7th century. In its simple form it must have been in use long before that time, and as the Jogis, as a sect, are of very ancient date and notices of their rigorous penances occur in books måny centuries before the commencement of the Christian era, it would not be too much to suppose that the term hañsa was well known at the time when the Bactrians held sway in Western India. If this be admitted, bearing in mind the well-established fact of the Buddhist having borrowed most of their terminology from the Hindus, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the duck under notice, was placed in the monument as an emblem of the superior intelligence of the saint whose memory it was to perpetuate. The inscription (Fig. 11) is in Arian characters, its language being Páli, similar to that of the Kapur-di-giri edicts of As'oka, and the Wardak record of the time of Huvishka. The letters have been punched on the gold leaf, and are in an excellent state of preservation, but several of them are peculiar in shape, and the difficulty of ascertaining their phonetic values throws much doubt on the meaning of the whole record. Moreover in the Arian alphabet, as far as yet known, four different letters either by themselves or with their vowelmarks, appear very much alike, and they constantly lead to misapprehensions and mistakes. They are all formed of an oblique line bending to the left with a top stroke more or less curved. The letters alluded to are v, r, t, and b. Of these v perhaps is the most characteristic with its perfectly horizontal top line, and yet it is liable to be mistaken for an r; the r is liable to be confounded with t and b, and the t has a strong tendency to merge into b. The 7 too in the first line of the Kapur-di-giri inscription has some resemblance to b. The v stands at the fourth remove from b and is not often liable to be mistaken for it, nor for a t, and yet when the horizontal top stroke is modified by a perpendicular stroke at its end to indicate the long vowel á, nothing save the context is left to guide the decypherer to their values, and even that dubious guide fails him whenever he has an unknown proper name with any of these letters before him. I feel myself, therefore, in my reading of the record, freely open to correction, and if I publish it in its tentative form, it is only to provoke enquiry, and to assist the researches of others into a subject fraught with the deepest interest in connexion with the history of Bactrian domination in India. I presume not to apply the "verifying faculty" so as to convert the plausible into the certain. The first word of the record appears to be distinct enough; the syllables are s'i, ri and e=s'irie, the singular dative in Páli of s'ri ; the meaning being, "For the sake of prosperity." The first and the third syllables are undoubted, the second may be read ti, vi, or ri at option, the t, v and r being, as aforesaid, liable to be confounded.* It has been taken for ri because no meaning can be got with vi or ti. Besides, in Oriental writings the word s'ri is always reckoned to be an appropriate beginning for a grave document, as it is supposed to be highly conducive to prosperity. The second word is Bhagava. When I first met it in the Wardak monument, I had some doubts about my reading, and I adopted it only on the analogy of the Burmese vocative of Bhagavan, but in Major Kittoe's collection of unpublished inscriptions, there is a Páli record in the Lát character, which has the word very distinctly in two places, and there seems to be no reason to object to it any longer. The syllable immediately succeeding Bhagava is of a very doubtful appearance. It makes the nearest approach to a bo. In Mr. Thomas's platet the lapidary b is written thus S, and if the vowel mark for o be put about its middle it would be changed to a shape, which would be very nearly that of the letter in the inscription. The vowel cannot be u, as that letter in the Kapur-di-giri record is given in a different way with a horizotal stroke at foot. The dha after it is undoubted, and then the first syllable is repeated. The prá which follows next is well formed and not liable to be questioned, but what the next syllable is, is quite uncertain. Taking it at a random for a jna, the whole word becomes Bodhaboprújna. Placed immediately after Bhagava, the word is expected to be the name of the saint whose death the record has to commemorate, but placed between two such pure Sanskrit terms as Boddha and prújna, it is not easy to account for bo, one feels disposed therefore to suppose that either it is a misscript for bi which is a very appropriate Sanskrita expletive meaning "certainty" and corresponding to the English adjunct di or dis; or the jna is a mislection of something else which with boprá made a proper noun, but what that is cannot now be guessed. If the syllable bo be taken for te, no advance whatever is *The facsimile prepared from a sealing-wax impression is not correct here. The original gold leaf has ra and not ri. Prinsep's Indian Antiquities, p. 166. made towards an explanation of its meaning, and the te itself is generally written in a very different way. In the Behat Kunanda coins, the jna occurs in the form of an h reversed, while the form of the letter in question is like a double v, . If it be taken for the latter it would make the name Bodhaboprávva or Boddhateprávva, but without making any advance to its meaning: the word, however, being a proper noun, its meaning cannot be of much help, and I despair, therefore, of coming to the right reading without extraneous aid. The next word is rátiyámaü, ráti for rátri "night," yama "a watch," or one fourth of the night, it being usual in India, as elsewhere, to divide the night into four watches. The u is supposed to be doubtful. I take it to be the case-mark for the locative. In the Lalita Vistara it is very largely used to indicate the omission of a case affix, and in the Hindi it is also met with.* The meaning of the whole clause is "in the first watch of the night." The second line begins with a word which may be taken for "drinking of joy" or "drunk with joy," from hasisa "laughter" and piü "drinking" or "having drunk." The radicals of both the words are well known, and the only thing doubtful is the si in hasisa, particularly as the next word hasasila "laughing" or "joyous" is written without the si. The next word is iva sasi or "like the moon," from iva "like" and sasi "the moon ;" the letters are distinct and the meaning undoubted. The syllables which follow to the end of the line, are likewise distinct, except the last which looks more like hra than ha. Taking it to be ha, on the authority of the Kapur-di-giri record in which h sometimes occurs with a prolonged tail,† the question arises as to the property of using the word yoha "a flock" or "herd" with reference to men, in Sanskrita the use of its radical yuha being confined exclusively to beasts and birds. But perhaps it would be conceded that for a saint to call his pupils his "flock," or for his pupils, disciples, and congregation to describe themselves as "his flock" even against the genus of the Sanskrita, is not such as to raise any serious obstacle to taking the word in that sense. The meaning would be "rising above his flock." The last word of the record is * Vide my paper on the Gáthá Dialect, ante vol. XXII. p. 608. Since writing the above I have had an opportunity of examining the original gold plate, from which I find that our facsimile is not correct, inasmuch as it shews the tail of the h to be longer than it is in the original, where it is of the same relative size as in ordinary hs, only not quite as curved, the difference proceeding from a desire on the part of the engraver to avoid bringing it into contact with the right foot of the preceding letter. the verb; it is distinctly vihayati; vi prefix ti the conjugational termination, and haya the root. In Wilson's Dictionary, this root is said to have four meanings "to move," "to worship," "to sound," "to be weary," but none of them seems to be appropriate. "To move” might be used in the sense of "to pass away." But a Buddhist would not in a hurry say of his saint that "he passed away." The more probable reading therefore appears to be viharati, a genuine Buddhist term for "taking pleasure" or "relaxation." To do this, however, the ya must be assumed to be a miscript for ra. But whether so assumed or not, the word must be taken as a metaphorical expression for death. My reading of the entire inscription according to the above analyses would be शिरए भगव वाघवोप्राज्ञ रातियामउ हसिसपिउ इससिलु इवaût afaère fafa and its translation: "In the first watch of ससी अतियोह ॥ the night, Bhagavan Bodhaboprájña or Bodhaboprávva, the joyous, for the sake of prosperity, drinking of joy, and rising above his flock, took his relaxation." One objection to this reading of the text, though not a serious one, is its style which is much more artistic and high flown than would be suited to a Bactro-Buddhist epitaph; but if the value assigned to the several letters composing it be admitted, the meaning cannot well be avoided. The only Arian records of any length that have yet been translated are the As'oka edicts of Kapur-di-giri and the Vase inscription from Wardak, and they are both, in nearly pure Páli. If they differ, the difference is due to their bearing a closer resemblance to the Sanskrit than to the Páli, and not to any deterioration from the Páli. Following the former, they retain the three sibilants and compound consonants with r, which are nowhere met with in the latter. The Arian legends on the bilingual Bactrian coins are likweise in Páli, and they fully justify the assumption that in the time of the Indo-Bactrian sovereigns the language of court and religion was the Páli, and since the inscription under notice is unmistakeably a Bactrian sepulchral record its language must be the same; which being conceded, the meaning I have given to it follows as a matter of course. I have found that it is possible by a segregation and rearrangement of the different syllables-the words being engraved continuously in the original and not separated-to form new words with different meanings, but as they could not be held together by any grammatical cement, I have not thought proper to advert to them |