Reviews Of Different Books

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228 REVIEWS Records of the Western Countries and of The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang. The editor points out discrepancies between the translations of these works by Stanislas Julien and Beal. It is a pity that he has not asked a Sinologist to make a new translation of these selections. Stanislas Julien's translations were excellent for the time in which they were made but Beal's translations have never been adequate. At least the transliteration should have been made uniform. On one page (p. 4) there appear such diverse transliterations as Si-yu-ki, Hwui Li and Hsuan-tsang. It is not entirely correct to say that Hsuan-tsang described his experiences in the Records of the Western Countries. This work was written by Pien-chi in 646 (cf. P. Demieville in L'Inde classique II (1953), 406). Beal's use of the term vajya (in tirantavajya and subantavajya) is not justified by the Chinese text which has sheng 'sound, voice'. The editor's speculations about vajya and vakya are otiose. The same must be said about his suggestions that I-tsing's pei-na refers to the name of Punyaraja (p. 16, note). No Chinese would ever transliterate punya by pei-na. The selection from al-Biruni's India is taken from Sachau's translation which was published for the first time in 1888 (not in 1910). The editor has not consulted the recent Russian translation by A. B. Xalidov and Ju. N. Zavadosvkij (Abu Rejxan Biruni, Izbrannye proizvedenija II [Taskent, 1963]). This translation contains an extensive commentary by V. G. Erman and A. B. Xalidov which gives valuable additional information not found in Sachau's translation. For instance, al-Biruni mentions a Sasidevavrtti by Sasideva. Staal remarks that this work is not known to him. The commentary of the Russian translation remarks that Sasideva is the author of a grammatical work, entitled Vyakhyanaprakriya (cf. also Aufrecht, Catalogus Catalogorum, Part I, p. 618a). Schiefner wrote in the introduction to his translation of Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India that Taranatha was born in 1573. However, the wood-hog year is 1575. Pelliot has shown in 1913 that Western scholars had miscalculated Tibe by one or two years ("Le cycle sexagenaire de la chronologie tibetaine", JA I (1913), 633-37). On p. 33 the editor writes that Colebrooke's grammar was never completed, because the printing of Sanskrit characters, manufactured in Calcutta, was so crude that the examples Colebrooke needed to illustrate his statements would have required an excessively large volume. He refers to a statement by A. W. von Schlegel on p. 58 of the Reader but neither here nor anywhere else in the Reader do we find any remarks of this kind by A. W. von Schlegel. I do not know if von Schlegel made this statement somewhere else in a passage not reproduced in the Reader but I am rather puzzled by it because the Sanskrit characters in the first volume of Colebrooke's grammar are far from being crude. The editor treats Friedrich von Schlegel with excessive severity in saying that it is likely that he never managed to learn Sanskrit well. It would be easier to subscribe to Windisch's opinion that he did not have "eine grundliche Kenntnis des Sanskrit" (Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie, p. 58). In a recent study on Schlegel's translations (which the editor does not mention) Ursula Oppenberg arrives at the following conclusion: "Da es Fr. Schlegel gelang, sich trotz der angefuhrten misslichen Umstande doch immerhin ganz beachtliche Kenntnisse des Sanskrit zu erwerben, die ausreichten, um nicht nur Manuskripte in zwei indischen Schriften zu lesen, Teile davon auszuwahlen und zu ubersetzen, sondern auch Wesentliches uber die Sprache auszusagen, konnen wir ihm billigerweise gleich seinem Bruder August Wilhelm unsere Anerkennung nicht versagen" (Quellenstudien zu Friedrich Schlegel's Ubersetzungen aus dem Sanskrit [Marburg, 1965), p. 128). It seems to me that the editor is also unduly harsh in his opinion of Weber's study on the Mahabhasya (Indische Studien 13 (1873), 293-496), of which he remarks only that in it "many of these topics were treated again and equally unsatisfactory". Weber was