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162
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[MAY, 1891.
that, in line 4, there is no reason for seeking in sávané any thing other than the same instructions which are here recorded. It is exactly the same in the present passage. The exhortations of the text are purely and simply identical with those which the king, in many other passages, continually speaks of as emanating from him and in his own name, without ever invoking the authority of a sacred text of which we have no reason to expect the mention in the present case. But how then to understand vivutha ? The most experienced students of Hindu and of Buddhist literature, have hitherto discovered no proof of a technical use of the verb vi-vas. We can therefore only start from the ordinary sense of the word. This is well known, and gives rise to no doubt; it is that of 'to be absent,' 'to depart from one's country. The substantive vivása is used with the corresponding valae of absence, departure from home.' Under these conditions, nothing is simpler than to take viyutha as meaning these messengers, these, as it were, missi dominici, on the establishment of whom Piyadasi set so much value, the dutas or messengers of whom he speaks in the 13th Rock Edict. Subject, therefore, to these remarks, I would render the word by 'missionary.' Among the expressions which occur to me, it is the only one which allows me to retain for the participle vivutha, and for the verb vi-vas in its various applications, an equivalent which would give in the English translation the uniformity of expression used by the text. The word will have the advantage of directly reminding as of those missionaries of whom, as we know from the Mahavamsa, so great a number expatriated themselves during the reign of Asoka, to carry the teaching of Buddhism to all parts of his vast empire, and above all to the foreign nations, the antá, with whom our edict expressly deals a little higher up. The vyutha would be here, as is in the nature of things and in the essence of his role, only the representative, the substitute of the king. In this way the whole passage is perfectly consistent: the king, after having spoken of these instructions as coming from himself, returns to the subject saying that it is his messenger,' his 'missionary,' who is charged with spreading them abroad, with actually putting them into circulation, and he adds that there have been two hundred and fifty-six departures of similar messengers. It follows from this that sata can only be understood as corresponding to the Sanskrit sattva, living being, man,' as has been already recognized by Dr. Oldenberg. We could, if absolately necessary, follow Dr. Bübler in interpreting it as an equivalent of the Sansksit šástri, master, teacher.' This translation would, in no way, be incompatible with the meaning which I attribute to vivutha; but the phonetic difficulty, the presence of an unaspirated t, would render such an explanation only allowable as a last resource. There remains only one sligbt obscurity over a matter of detail. It is natural that, reduced as we are to a translation solely founded on etymology, we should not be in a position to determine the precise official signification of the title, and how far it corresponds with those mentioned in other inscriptions, dharmamahamátras, dútas, &c. We may, at the same time, remark that according to the 5th Girnâr Edict, the creation of the dharmamahámdtras belonged to the year following that from which our inscription takes its date. It is possible that, at the epoch at which we now are, Piyadasi had not yet conceived the idea of a regular organization, and that the somewhat vague term vyutha corresponds to this early stage of affairs, when, yielding to the first inspirations of his zeal, he sent abroad a large number of missionaries, without fixing their precise title, charging them to go as far as they could (cf. n. 6 of Rūpnåth) to spread abroad his teaching.
10. There can be hardly any doubt that the end of line 7 should read yata vd a-. It forms a correlative to the tata following. There remains therefore, for the verb which precedes, lilchápay áthá, and not lichápaya tháya, as Dr. Bühler writes. We thus escape the necessity of admitting with him a complication of forms and of constructions equally improbable. Likhápayátha is the second person plural. The king here directly addresses his officers (as we sball see that he does at Rapnath in another sentence) and says to them: 'cause to be engraved upon the mountains,' &c. It it clear that, according to this analogy, we must read at the end of the edict likhdpayatha ti. Ph. B. actually favours the reading, ti instead of yi. I have some hesitation regarding the analysis of the word hetų. The method which first suggestis itself, is, as Dr. Bühler has done, to seek in it the nominative plural of the pronoun; but the
