Geography of Early Buddhism c2: Foreword
Geography of Early Buddhism c2
- Language
- English
Foreword
c2.1
The *Vedic Index of Names and Subjects*, by the late Professor A. A. Macdonell and Professor A. Berriedale Keith, incorporates in dictionary form all the geographical information contained in the most ancient Sanskrit writings; it is furnished with references to the works of the scholars of whose studies it has formed in some respects the culmination.
c2.2
For the *Rāmāyaṇa* and the *Mahā-Bhārata* the analyses of Professor Jacobi, with their useful indexes, had long been in the hands of students; and Sōrensens' *Index to the Mahā-Bhārata*, now happily completed, had been since several years in progress.
c2.3
In the year 1904, Professor Rhys Davids had projected, as an item in his Indian Texts Series, a dictionary of Pali proper names, and a basis for such a work has been steadily constructed in the indexes appended to the Pali Text Society's Editions. It seems that there is now good hope that the volume will actually be achieved. But naturally the geographical items will be scattered amid a mass of other subjects, and can hardly present a general view. Dr. Bimala Churn Law, to whom we owe so many investigations of early Indian conditions, and whose publication of a volume of *Buddhistic Studies*, by so many respected scholars, is in recent favourable memory, has had the idea of assembling the geographical and topographical information in a somewhat systematic exposition. At this point Dr. Law has avoided a danger. For he might have been tempted with the domain of cosmography, which in Indian conceptions, as we may see, for instance, in Professor Kirfel's valuable work, *Die Kosmographie der Inder*, is so much interwoven with geography, and which is not unrepresented in the Buddhist *Piṭakas*. Instead he has adopted the practical distinction of the ‘five Indies’, which has respectable authority in Sanskrit literature and is countenanced by the Chinese travellers in India. Under each division, he commences with a general description of the boundaries and larger divisions; he continues in dictionary order with the minor subdivisions, towns, villages, etc., and proceeds similarly through the rivers, lakes, etc., and the mountains. In a concluding chapter he treats of Ceylon, Burma and other extra-India countries; and an appendix discusses the import of the term *caitya*. Reinforced with an adequate index, the brief treatise, which is furnished with references in detail, will serve an useful purpose. The localities mentioned in the Pāli writings (even in the *Jātakas*) belong for the most part to the real world; the cities