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354
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1898.
Bühler was full of hope that it might be possible to fix some of the dates of those popular works at a much earlier time than is assigned to them by most scholars. I was delighted to see him boldly claim for the Veda also a greater antiquity than I had as yet ventured to suge gest for it, and it seemed to me that our two theories could stand so well side by side that it was my hope that I should be able to bring out, with his co-operation, a new and much improved edition of my chapter on the Renaissance of Sanskrit Literature. I doubt whether I shall be able to do this now without his help. The solution of many of the historical and chronological questions also, which remain still unangwered, will no doubt be delayed by the sadden death of the scholar who took them most to heart, but it is not likely to be forgotten again among the problems which our younger Sanskrit scholars have to deal with, if they wish truly to honour the memory and follow in the footsteps of one of the greatest and most useful Sanskrit scholars of our days.
These chronological questions were, of course, intimately connected with the question of the date of the Sanskțit alphabets and the introduction of writing into India, which produced a written in place of the ancient mnemonic literature of the country. There, too, we had a common interest, and I gladly handed over to him, and for his own purpose, a MS. sent to me from Japan that turned out to be the oldest Sanskrit MS. then known to exist, that of the Prajnaparamitá hridaya-sútra. It had been preserved on two palm-leaves in the Monastery of Horiuzi, in Japan, since 609 A. D., and, of course, went back to a much earlier time, as the leaves seem to have travelled from India through China, before they reached Japan. Bühler sent me a long paper of palæographical remarks on this Horinzi palm-leaf MS., which forms a most valuable Appendix to my edition of it. Thus we remained always united by our work, and I had the great satisfaction of being able to send him the copy of Ašvaghosha's Buddhacharita, which my Japanese papils had made for me at Paris, and which, whether Ašvaghosha's date is referred to the first or the fifth century A.D., when it was first translated into Chinese, represents as yet the only complete specimen of that ornate scholastic style which, as he had proved from numerous inscriptions, must have existed previous to the Renaissance. Thus our common work went on, if not always on the same plan, at all events on the same grond. We never lost touch with each other, and were never brought nearer together than when for a time we differed on certain moot pointer
I have here dwelt on the most important works only which are characteristic of the man and which will for ever mark the place of Bühler in the history of Sauskřit scholarship. Bu there are many other important services which he rendered to us while in India. Not only was he always ready to help us in getting MSS. from India, but our knowledge of a large number of Sanskrit works, as yet unknown, was due to his Reports on expeditions undertaken by him for the Indian Government in search for M88. This idea of catalogaing the literary treasures of India, first started by Mr. Whitley Stokes, has proved a great success, and no one was more successful in these researches than Bühler. And while he looked out everywhere for important MSS. his eyes were always open for ancient inscriptions also. Many of them he published and translated for the first time, and our oldest inscriptions, those of Asoka, in the third centary B. O., owe to him and M. Senart their first scholarlike treatment. This is not meant to detract in any way from the credit due to the first brilliant decipherers of these texts, such as Prinsep, Lassen, Barnouf, and others. Bühler was most anxious to trace the alphabets used in these inscriptions back to a higher antiquity than is generally assigned to them, but for the present, at least, we cannot well go beyond the fact that no dateable inscription has been found in India before the time of Asoka. It is quite true that such an innovation as the introduction of alphabetic writing does not take place on a sudden, and tentative
2 Anecdota Oxoniensia, 1884.
8 Th text of the Buddhacharita was published by Cowell in the Anecdota Oxoniensia, the translation in my Sacrel Books of the East.
