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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
the Jews. When, however, a more profound acquaintance with the literature of the principal Buddhist nations began to shed genuine light upon the subject, it soon scattered the shadows which the darkness of ignorance had begotten. The language of the Chinese and of the Mongols were assiduously studied in the early part of the present century, especially by Klaproth, Remusat, and Schmidt; and the application of their acquirements to the illustration of Buddhism was evinced in numerous interesting and authentic contributions to the early volumes of the Journal Asiatique, and the transactions of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburgh, and more particularly in the copious annotations which accompany the French translation, by Remusat, Klaproth, and Landresse, of the travels of the Chinese priest, Fa Hian, in the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries. Valuable as this work undoubtedly is as a Buddhist picture of the condition of India at that period, it would have been in many respects almost unintelligible without the amplification of its brief notices into the extensive views of the sytem and its authors, which are to be found in the notes attached to the text; the details contained in which are mainly derived from the Buddhist literature of China, with some accessions from that of the Mongols.
In the mean time, however, the interest, which had languished in India, subsequently to the first vain conceits of the Bengal Asiatic Society, revived; and a whole flood of contributions of a character equally
