have been a vast and varied literature. Professor Takakusu has shown the possibility of several complete books belonging to it being still extant in Chinese translations,[1] and we may yet hope to recover original fragments in central Asia, Tibet, or Nepal.
At p. 66 of the Gandha Vaṃsa, a modern catalogue of Pali books and authors, written in Pali, there is given a list of ten authors who wrote Pali books in India, probably southern India. We may conclude that these books are still extant in Burma, where the catalogue was drawn up. Two only of these ten authors are otherwise known. The first is Dhammapāla, who wrote in Kāñcipura, the modern Conjevaram in south India, in the 5th century of our era. His principal work is a series of commentaries on five of the lyrical anthologies included in the miscellaneous Nikāya. Three of these have been published by the Pali Text Society; and Professor E. Hardy has discussed in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1897), pp. 105-127, all that is known about him. Dhammapāla wrote also a commentary on the Netti mentioned above. The second is Buddhadatta, who wrote the Jinālankāra in the 5th century A.D. It has been edited and translated by Professor J. Gray. It is a poem, of no great interest, on the life of the Buddha.
The whole of these Pali books composed in India have been lost there. They have been preserved for us by the unbroken succession of Pali scholars in Ceylon and Burma. These scholars (most of them members of the Buddhist Order, but many of them laymen) not only copied and recopied the Indian Pali books, but wrote a very large number themselves. We are thus beginning to know something of the history of this literature. Two departments have been subjected to critical study: the Ceylon chronicles Dy Professor W. Geiger in his Mahāvaṃsa und Dīpavaṃsa, and the earlier grammatical works by Professor O. Franke in two articles in the Journal of the Pali Text Society for 1903, and in his Geschichte und Kritik der einheimischen Pali Grammatik. Dr Forchhammer in his Jardine Prize Essay, and Dr Mabel Bode in the introduction to her edition of the Sāsana-vaṃsa, have collected many details as to the Pali literature in Burma.
The results of these investigations show that in Ceylon from the 3rd century B.C. onwards there has been a continuous succession of teachers and scholars. Many of them lived in the various vihāras or residences situate throughout the island; but the main centre of intellectual effort, down to the 8th century, was the Mahā Vihāra, the Great Minster, at Anwrādhapura. This was, in fact, a great university. Authors refer, in the prefaces to their books, to the Great Minster as the source of their knowledge. And to it students flocked from all parts of India. The most famous of these was Buddhaghosa, from Behar in North India, who studied at the Minster in the 5th century A.D., and wrote there all his well-known works. Two volumes only of these, out of about twenty still extant in MS., have been edited for the Pali Text Society. About a century before this the Dīpa-vaṃsa, or Island Chronicle, had been composed in Pali verse so indifferent that it is apparently the work of a beginner in Pali composition. No work written in Pali in Ceylon at a date older than this has been discovered yet. It would seem that up to the 4th century of our era the Sinhalese had written exclusively in their own tongue; that is to say that for six centuries they had studied and understood Pali as a dead language without using it as a means of literary expression. In Burma, on the other hand, where Pali was probably introduced from Ceylon, no writings in Pali can be dated before the 11th century of our era. Of the history of Pali in Siam very little is known. There have been good Pali scholars there since late medieval times. A very excellent edition of the twenty seven canonical books has been recently printed there, and there exist in our European hbraries a number of Pali MSS. written in Siam.
It would be too early to attempt any estimate of the value of this secondary Pali literature. Only a few volumes, out of several hundreds known to be extant in MS., have yet been published. But the department of the chronicles, the only one so far at all adequately treated, has thrown so much light on many points of the history of India that we may reasonably expect results equally valuable from the publication and study of the remainder. The works on religion and philosophy especially will be of as much service for the history of ideas in these later periods as the publication of the canonical books has already been for the earlier period to which they refer. The Pali books written in Ceylon, Burma and Siam will be our best and oldest, and in many respects our only, authorities for the sociology and politics, the literature and the religion, of their respective countries.
Selected Authorities.—Texts: Pali Text Society (63 vols., 1882-1908); H. Oldenberg, The Vināya Piṭakam (5 vols., London, 1879-1883); V. Fausböll, The Jatāka (7 vols., London, 1877-1897); G. Turnour, The Mahāvaṃsa (Colombo, 1837); H. Oldenberg, The Dīpavaṃsa (London, 1879); V. Trenckner, Milinda (London, 1880). Translations: Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts (3 vols., Oxford, 1881-1885); Rhys Davids, Milind (2 vols., Oxford, 1890-1894), Dialogues of the Buddha (Oxford, 1899); H. C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Cambridge, Mass., 1896); Mrs Rhys Davids, Buddhist Psychology (London, 1900); K. E. Neumann, Reden des Gotamo Buddho (3 vols.., Leipzig, 1896-1898); Lieder der Mönche und Nonnen (Berlin, 1899); Max Müller and V. Fausböll, Dhammapada and Sutta Nipāta (Oxford, 1881). Philology. R. C. Childers, Dictionary of the Pali Language (London, 1872-1875); Ernst Kuhn, Beiträge zur Pali Grammatik (Berlin, 1875); E. Müller, Pali Grammar (London, 1884); R. O. Franke, Geschichte und Kritik der einheimischen Pali-Grammatik und Lexicographie, and Pali und Sanskrit (Strassburg, 1902); D. Andersen, Pali Reader (London, 1904-1907). History (of the alphabet, language and texts): Rhys Davids, American Lectures (London, 3rd ed., 1908); Buddhist India (London, 1903); E. Windisch, Māra und Buddha (Leipzig, 1895), and Buddha's Geburt (Leipzig, 1908); W. Geiger, Mahāvaṃsa und Dīpavaṃsa (Leipzig, 1905); E. Forchhammer, Jardine Prize Essay (Rangoon, 1885); Dr Mabel Bode, Sāsana-vaṃsa (London, 1897).
PALIKAO, CHARLES GUILLAUME MARIE APPOLLINAIRE ANTOINE COUSIN MONTAUBAN, Comte de (1796-1878), French general and statesman, was born in Paris on the 24th of June 1796. As a cavalry officer young Montauban saw much service in Algeria, but he was still only a colonel when in 1847 he effected the capture of Abd-el-Kader. After rising to the rank of general of division and commanding the province of Constantine, he was appointed in 1858 to a command at home, and at the close of 1859 was selected to lead the French troops in the joint French and British expedition to China. His conduct of the operations did not escape criticism, but in 1862 he received from Napoleon III. the title of comte de Palikao (from the action of that name); he had already been made a senator. The allegation that he had acquired a vast fortune by the plunder of the Pekin summer palace seems to have been without foundation. In 1865 he was appointed to the command of the IV. army corps at Lyons, in the training of which he displayed exceptional energy and administrative capacity. In 1870 he was not given a command in the field, but after the opening disasters had shaken the Ollivier ministry he was entrusted by the empress-regent with the portfolio of war, and became president of the council (Aug. 10). He at once, with great success, reorganized the military resources of the nation. He claimed to have raised Marshal MacMahon's force at Châlons to 140,000 men, to have created three new army corps, 33 new regiments and 100,000 gardes mobiles, and to have brought the defences of the capital to a state of efficiency—all this in twenty-four days. He conceived the idea of sending the army of Châlons to raise the blockade of Metz. The scheme depended on a precision and rapidity of which the army of Châlons was no longer capable, and ended with the disaster of Sedan. After the capitulation of the emperor the dictatorship was offered to Palikao, but he refused to desert the empire, and proposed to establish a council of national defence, with himself as “lieutenant-general of government.” Before a decision was made, the chamber was invaded by the mob, and Palikao fled to Belgium. In 1871 he appeared before the parliamentary commission of inquiry, and in the same year established Un Ministère de la guerre de vingt-quatre jours. He died at Versailles on the 8th of January 1878.
- ↑ Journal of the Pali Text Society (1905), pp. 72, 86.
