nishka in 1, or 40 a.d., and elaborate commentaries were written in Sanskrit and, it is said, engraved on copper plates and buried beneath a great stupa—a prize for archæologists to search for, and for sensation-seekers to manufacture fraudulently. The separation between the Northern or Sanskrit school and the Pali or Southern school of Buddhists was definite then, and in 634 a.d. Hiouen Thsang, the Chinese priest, attended the great Sanskrit Council of Siladitya, when the Cingalese versions, the "Little Vehicle" of the Pali teachers, were formally condemned by the adherents of the Sanskrit "Great Vehicle." Hiouen Thsang acquired both languages, and studied both vehicles in monasteries in Kashmir and Magadha, translated innumerable works into Chinese, and by his description of the surroundings, the monuments, the images, treasures, and relics of the sacred places, made the work of archæologists and historians comparatively easy—his descriptions as precise as those of a modern Baedeker, his services comparable to those of Pausanias in classic Greece. A modern council of Buddhists was held in Ceylon in 1875, looking to the translation, revision, and publication of the Cingalese and Pali texts, and a Pali Text Society has forwarded the effort to present these oldest Buddhist books to modern readers, Dr. Rhys Davids having done most to introduce Buddhist literature to English-speaking people. Dr. Max Müller and many Continental scholars have given translations of the Sacred Sanskrit books.
It was a raw January morning, with the yellow
