Among the manuscripts of the William Marsden Collection, to which Sir E. Denison Ross has called the attention of scholars, by reproducing the entries of William Marsden (see the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, Vol. II, Pt. III, “The Manuscripts collected by William Marsden”), there are five with titles indicating their language as “Canari”, “Canarim”, or “Canarin” (p. 537), one as “Bramana Canarim” (p. 537), one as “Hindustani”, and two as “Mahratta” (p. 535).

The following texts have been selected to illustrate the religion of Khotan and to supplement the material already available from other sources.

JALĀL AL-DĪN RŪMĪ in Maihnawi, ii, 3478 sqq., recounts a story of a saint J falsely accused of theft, and of the miraculous manner in which he cleared himself. R. A. Nicholson in his annotation to the passage (vol. vii, p. 359) comments: “ Saints accused of theft, who produce miraculous proof of their innocence, appear in many legends related by Moslem hagiographers.”

The recent publication of the complete translation of the Yogasūtrabhāṣyavivaraṇa (also known as Pātañjalayogaśastrabhāṣyavivaraṇa and Bhagavatpadīya; henceforth abbreviated as Vivaraṇa) into English by Trevor Leggett is the latest contribution to the study of this intriguing and significant Sanskrit philosophical text. Prior to this publication (whose first two chapters were separately published already in 1981 and 1983 respectively) only a few excerpts thereof have been translated by Hajime Nakamura, into Japanese. It is a measure of the growing interest in the original text that it has attracted several astute preliminary studies, notably by P. Hacker, T. Vetter, W. Halbfass and A. Wezler in the West, and H. Nakamura in Japan.

As it stands, the title of the printed English translation reads: ‘The complete commentary by Ṥaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra-s-a full translation of the newly discovered text.’ This is regrettably likely to be misleading in more than one way.

The Library of the Wellcome Institute is devoted to the history of medicine and related sciences. Apart from some 250,000 printed books, it contains about 10,000 manuscripts, half of which are in Oriental languages.

In 1970 I was entrusted with describing the Ethiopian manuscripts belonging to this library. There were 34 of them: 17 mostly of religious content and completely unrelated to the interests of the Institute, 16 magical scrolls, and one manuscript mainly of divinatory content. Without constituting medical manuscripts in the strict sense of the term, the scrolls are designed to combat demons and diseases and to keep people in good health. They can be called magico-medical scrolls and belong to the field of ethnomedicine. The scrolls are written in Gə'az with strong Amharic influence. At the suggestion of Dr. F. N. L. Poynter, Director of the Wellcome Institute, the Wellcome Trust decided to donate the first group of manuscripts to the British Museum, to whom 14 were presented in June 1970 and 3 others in June 1971. All these manuscripts have been described by the present writer in the Catalogue of the Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1877 (in preparation). The present catalogue notes contain only the description of the 16 scrolls and the divinatory manuscript.

Before the discovery of the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia by Arnaud, Halévy, Glaser, and several other explorers, knowledge of the pre-Islamic peoples of Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt was incomplete and imprecise, and was derived from the Old Testament, the annals of Assyrian kings, and from the classical and Arab historians and geographers.

The following loan-words are taken from two newspapers, the Kheḍā vartamān of 5th December, 1928, and the Gujarat Times of 1st January, 1929.

The editors are both Hindus and the readers were for the most part Hindu also. The newspapers contain only a few words in English characters, perhaps eight or nine in each number. The proportion of English loan-words to the total may be about 2 per cent, but this is inevitably only a rough estimate.

The words have been transliterated faithfully with two exceptions—

(1) Inherent a of final consonants is omitted.

(2) Inherent a (not final) is omitted, if not pronounced. In such cases it is indicated by a dot. In Gujarati, however, there are certain consonants which do not alter their form when conjunct, such as “ ka ”. For practical purposes, this is of little importance, as conjunct consonants are often not used, when permissible.

In preparing the list some very uncommon words and transitory political expressions like “Sāyaman gobek” have been omitted. There are one or two words included, which are not English, e.g. peseṭā and Mādrīd, which have been included for their interest. Peseṭā has probably been taken for the English version of the Spanish word, as the t is retroflex. It is not clear, however, why the dental d is used for Mādrīd.

The articles in which few, if any, loan-words occur, are the political leading articles, a notice of a meeting of Brahmans, and a serial story about old Rajputana.

Poem No. CXL in the Diwan of Hassan b. Thabit is usually connected with the incident when the poet was attacked and wounded by Safwan b. al-Mu'attal. However, the poem itself, the incident, and the precise relation between poem and incident all seem to have been the subject of controversy. As for the poem, different versions exist in various sources. The opening line is:—

Judged in the context of the 18 Purāṇas, or even the 180 Upa-, or Subsidiary Purāṇas, the title, Pāṇḍava-Purāṇa, must seem unusual, since the Pāṇḍavas are neither gods nor avatāras, nor sages; for it is the exploits of these divine or semi-divine figures that form the subject matter of the traditional Purāṇas. The Jainas' choice of this title would therefore appear to be a deliberate effort to present a Jaina version of the Mahābhārata story, a version which would show how the virtuous Pāṇḍavas and the rather harmless Balarāma are reborn in heaven, whereas Kṛṣṇa, the ‘nārāyana’, and Jarāsandha, the ‘pratinārāyaṇa’, are consigned to hell.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.