certain circumstances which affect them in an important manner and which should be borne in mind when the effects are considered. In the first place, then, the foreign missionaries who brought the Buddhist religion into China did not all come from one Province or Kingdom of India, nor were they even all natives of that country. On the contrary some of them are described as natives of countries which in the period of the Han dynasty and for some time afterwards were occupied by Turkish, Scythian and other peoples beyond the region of the Aryans. So we are prepared to find that all the early missionaries did not pronounce Sanskrit words in the same way, and that some among them apparently did not use Sanskrit, but an Indian dialect such as the Magadhi. Long before their time Sanskrit had ceased to be a colloquial idiom, and had become "the language of religion and literature only. From the 6th century B. C. the Aryan people of India spoke popular dialects called Prakrits." The Buddhist missionaries who came from the West into China are often designated by Chinese writers hu (胡), that is, Tartar or Mongolian. But, as we have already seen, this terra had a vague and wide application among Chinese writers up to the period of the T'ang dynasty. It then, chiefly by the influence of the native ecclesiastic Yen-tsung mentioned above, became restricted properly to tribes and nations East of the Tsung-ling range, while Fan became the name to be given to the nations West of that range and specially to the people of India. This important distinction, however, has been often neglected by proud Confucianist writers who have continued to give the name Hu very often to natives of India and to others who are not Mongolians. But some of the foreign Buddhist missionaries did come from districts which were not Indian in any degree but rather Mongolian, though the monks in these regions knew Sanskrit and used it as their literary medium. Their knowledge of that language, however, was perhaps neither accurate nor extensive, and they seem to have imported into it sounds and words derived from their own dialects. We are expressly told, moreover, by Chinese authors that the Indian words which were introduced into China by foreign ecclesiastics
