M. Jacolliot when he published his Bible clans I’Inde

from Sanskrit originals, supplied to him by learned Pandits at Chandranagor. Madame Blavatsky, if I remember rightly, never even pretended to have received Tibetan manuscripts, or, if she had, neither she nor Mr. Sinnett has ever seen fit to publish either the text or an English translation of these treasures.
But M. Notovitch, though he did not bring the manuscripts home, at all events saw them, and not pretending to a knowledge of Tibetan, had the Tibetan text translated by an interpreter, and has published seventy pages of it in French in his Vie inconnue de Je'sus-Christ. He was evidently prepared for the discovery of a Life of Christ among the Buddhists. Similarities between Christianity and Buddhism have
ALLEGED SOJOURN OF CHRIST IN INDIA. 175
frequently been pointed out of late, and the idea that t frist was influenced by Buddhist doctrines has more than once been put forward by popular writers. The c 1 cultj has hitherto been to discover any real historical channel through which Buddhism could have reached Palestine at the time of Christ. M. Notovitch thinks that the manuscript which he found at Himis explains the matter in the simplest way. There is no doubt as he says, a gap in the life of Christ, say from ■His fifteenth to His twenty-ninth year. During that very time the new Life found in Tibet asserts that Christ was in India, that He studied Sanskrit and Pali, t at He read the Vedas and the Buddhist Canon, and then returned through Persia to Palestine to preach the Gospel. If we understand M. Notovitch rightly this Life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India imme- diately after the Crucifixion (p. 237). It was written down in Pali, the sacred language of Southern Bud- dhism ; the scrolls were afterwards brought from India to Nepaul and Makhada ( quaere Magadha) about A. d. 200 (p. 236), and from Nepaul to Tibet, and are at present carefully preserved at Lassa. Tibetan translations of the Pali text are found, he says, in vanous Buddhist monasteries, and, among the rest, at Himis. It is these Tibetan manuscripts which were translated at Himis for M. Notovitch while he was laid up in the monastery with a broken leg, and it
l8.;VOf Tthese manuscripts that he has taken his new Life of Jesus Christ and published it in French with an account of his travels. This volume, which has already passed through several editions in France is soon to be translated into English.
176
LAST ESSAYS.
There is a certain plausibility about all this. The language of Magadha, and of Southern Buddhism in general, was certainly Pali, and Buddhism reached Tibet through Nepaul. But M. Notovitch ought to have been somewhat startled and a little more sceptical when he was told that the Jewish merchants who arrived in India immediately after the Crucifixion knew not only what had happened to Christ in Palestine, but also what had happened to Jesus, or Issa, while He spent fifteen years of His life among the Brahmans and Buddhists in India, learning Sanskrit and Pali, and studying the Vedas and the Tripkaka. With all their cleverness the Buddhist monks would have found it hard to answer the question, how these Jewish merchants met the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India —for India is a large term— and still more, how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that He was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate. Even His name was not quite the same. His name in India is said to have been Issa, very like the Aiabic name ts&'l Masih, Jesus, the Messiah, while, strange to say, the name of Pontius Pilate seems to have remained unchanged in its passage from Hebrew to Pali, and from Pali to Tibetan. We must remember that part of Tibet was converted to Mohammedanism. So much for the difficulty as to the first composition of the Life of Issa in Pali, the joint work of Jewish merchants and the personal friends of Christ in India, whethei in Sind or at Penares. Still greater, however, is the difficulty of the Tibetan translation of that Life having been preseived for so many centuries without ever
ALLEGED SOJOURN of CHRIST IN INDIA. 177
being mentioned. If M. Notovitch had been better cquainted with the Buddhist literature of Tibet and China he would never have allowed his Buddhist hosts to tell him that this Life of Jesus was well known in ibetan literature, though read by the learned only
bInhP°SSpSS+LeXClllent Catal°Sues of manuscripts and books of the Buddhists in Tibet and in China
A compiete catal°gue of the Tripifeka or the Buddhist lanon m Chinese has been translated into English bv
a frPi the Kev' BunJiu Nanjio, M.A., and
published by the Clarendon Press in 1883. It contains
no less than 1,663 entries. The Tibetan Catalogue is bkewiso a most wonderful performance, and has been published in the Asiatic Researches, vol. xx by Csorna Korbsi, the famous Hungarian traveller, ’who spent years in the monasteries of Tibet and became an excellent Tibetan scholar. It has lately been re-
VGuimet Th- c’ ^ ^ Annales du Musee
?/' JtlS Ca a °gUe 18 not confined to what we should call sacred or canonical books, it contains veiythmg that was considered old and classical in ibetan literature. There are two collections, the Kandjur and the Tandjur. The Kandjur consists of 108 large volumes, arranged in seven divisions:—
1. Dulva, discipline (Vinaya).
2. Sherch’hin, wisdom (Pra^mparamita).
avfta 2tt’b<>n’ t>W garIa”d °f BuddbaS (Buddha'
4- Kon-tsegs, mountain of treasures (Ratnakftfa)
5- Mdo, or Sutras, aphorisms (Sutranta).
6. Myang-Hdas, or final emancipation (Nirvana).
7. Gyut, Tantra or mysticism (Tantra).
11.
N
178
LAST ESSAYS.
The Tandjur consists of 225 volumes, and while the Kandjur is supposed to contain the Word of Buddha, the Tandjur contains many books on grammar, philosophy, &c., which, though recognized as part of the Canon, are in no sense sacred.
In the Tandjur, therefore, if not in the Kandjui, the story of Issa ought to have its place, and. if