The Geographical Dictionary of Ancient and Mediaeval India c5.s9.220

c5.s9.220

Kustana—The kingdom of Khotan in Eastern or Chinese Turkestan, famous for the stone called Jade; hence it is called by the Chinese *Yu* (Jade)-tien. It was called by the Chinese Kü-sa-tan-na (*Bretschneider’s Mediæval Researches*, II, p. 48). It was visited by Fa Hian and Hiuen Tsiang. Its old capital was Yotkan, a little to the west of the modern town of Khotan, which in the ancient manuscripts discovered by Dr. Stein is called Khotana and Kustanaka. The territory of Khotan was conquered and colonised by Indian immigrants from Takshaśilâ (Taxila) about the second century before the Christian era. Dr. Stein identified the Buddhist *stûpa* and the Sa-mo-joh monastery of Hiuen Tsiang with the Döbe in the cemetery of Somiya, a mile to the west of Yotkan. Dr. Stein discovered many Buddhist shrines, *stûpas*, relievos and statues of Buddha and Bodhisattvas in stucco at Dandan-Ulig (ancient Li-sieh), Niya, Endere and Rawak buried in the sand of the desert of Taklamakan in the territory of Khotan, and exhumed from the ruins many painted panels and documents written in Brâhmī and Kharoshṭī characters on wooden tablets (*Takhtâs*), and papers ranging from the third to the eighth century of the Christian era (Dr. Stein’s *Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan*, p. 402). Fa Hian saw at Khotan in the fourth century the drawing of cars of the Buddhist *tri-ratnas*, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, which are the prototypes of the modern Jagannâth, Balarâma, and Subhadrâ. At Ujjayinī, at the time of Samprati, Aśoka’s successor, the Jainas used to draw a car on which Jivantaswâmi’s image was placed (*Sthavirâvalī*, Jacobi’s ed., XI). The name of Kustana has also been mentioned by It-sing (see *Records of the Buddhist Religion* by Takakusu, p. 20). Same as Stana.