In the next place the Indian missionaries taught the Chinese scholars, as we have seen, to examine and study their own language and appreciate it properly. These missionaries seem to have been generally men of parts who had received a good education in their native land, and a necessary part of their education was the learning of grammar. India was perhaps the birth-place, but certainly the home of grammar even at a time far off in the past. Little children, as soon as they could be trusted away from their mothers, were sent to school, where they had to learn its intricacies and subtleties. The country had produced many great writers and learned treatises on the subject even before the time of Panini who lived perhaps in the fourth century B. C. His great work, however, not only put all his predecessors out of date but it has also continued to hold sway down to the present. Now the scholars of China, like those of Europe in times gone by, had studied their native language only as a means to the correct appreciation of their classical literature. But the Indian scholars had been accustomed to study grammar not merely as a subsidiary to rhetoric and philosophy but also and chiefly as an end in itself and as a science which treated of the forms and uses of language. And, accordingly, it was but natural that when such men came to China they should teach their disciples in that land how to analyse the sounds of their characters, how to classify the words of their language, and generally to study their language written and spoken on its own account.
But not only did the Indian missionaries teach grammar to the Chinese, they also contributed to other departments of learning already known in China, and in a special degree to astronomy (including astrology), arithmetic and medicine. Lists of treatises on these subjects by Indian Buddhist writers will be found in Chinese histories and encyclopoodias, but for the purposes of this chapter such treatises have for us little interest. We are concerned here not with Indian additions to Chinese learning generally but only with the effects which the introduction of Buddhism produced on the Chinese language. Before proceeding to treat of some of these we must direct our attention to
