Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 135

MAY, 1923)
THE WORK OF THE ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME ORIENT
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to be done : but the School is established on a firm basis and looks forward to more rapid work in the immediate future.
Indo-Chinose ethnography has occupied a large share of the School's attention, and the Bulletin describes in detail the researches carried out among the Moi, i.e., the savage peoples inhabiting the mountainous regions of Annam, and the northern tribes, including the Thai, Muong, Man, Miao-tson and Lolo. Here we meet instances of tribal kings regarded as divi. nities, of exogamy allied with totemism, of spirit-belief as the basis of custom. Among the Thai oucur festivals, marked by sexual license, which undoubtedly were meant to glorify "la reprise des travaux des champs interdits depuis la recolte," -in brief the Indo-Chinese equivalent of the festival of the vernal equinox. Side by side with its purely ethnographical work, the School has studied the historical and political geography of Annam, and has compiled through the researches of its leading experts and collaborators a tolerably complete political history of the country. The conclusions now artived at may need modification or revision when the work of epigraphy is more advanced. At the moment little has been done in this direction except to collect 12,000 facsimiles of inscriptions from the provinces of Tonkin, which still await expert elucidation. A linguistic and literary survey, at present incomplete, constitutes another important branch of the work of the School in Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China.
The chapter on the researches carried out among the Chams contains some curious information. Degraded though their present religion is, 'it still preserves fragments of Hindu ritual in the form of corrupt and unintelligible expressions and formule. The prayers used at the great festivals contain whole pages of corrupt Sanskrit, of which the original meaning has been irretrievably lost. In these Siva is usually invoked, as also the joint Siva.Uma under the title of Sivome. M. Durand has made a special study of the corrupt Muhammadan faith ombracod by some of the Chams, and has decided that they belonged originally to the Shia sect. This, coupled with the fact that their cosmogony is embodied in a treatise bearing the name of Anouchirvan, leads him to infer that the Chams first received the Muhammadan faith from Persia. It was probably brought by Persian seamen and navigators. On the other hand, the fact that Brahmanio Hinduism was the original basis of Cham religion is proved by survivals of the abhishek ritual and by the discovery of a statue of a female bearing an inscription, which shows that it is the statue of Queen Suchih, who refused to become a sati with her royal spouse. In consequence of this refusal, her statue was excluded from the principal tower of the temple of Po Rome, and that of the second Queen Sansan, who mounted the pyre with the dead king, was placed there instead.
The later portion of this most interesting publication contains much information about Cambodia, Laos, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, Java, India, China and Japan, to all of which countries the French Far Eastern School has sent scientific missions. As regards Burma, Mr. Duroiselle, the Superintendent of the Archæological Survey, has him. self been a corresponding member of the French School since 1905, and has furnished the School with copies of some of the inscriptions found in that country. M. Finot has edited some of the Burmese texts and has dealt exhaustively with the origin and evolution of Buddhism in Burma. His view is briefly, that from the 6th century A.D. Prome and Pegu were the two centres in which southern Buddhism and Pali culture flourished and that the writing in use at that date was a South Indian script. "Cette région côtière professait donc le Theravada six à sept siècles avant qu'il ne fit son apparition sur les bords du Mékhong." It is quite possible that Siam borrowed the creed from Pegu to hand it on to her eastern neighbours, and that therefore the inscriptions of Maunggun and Hmawza are indirectly the