On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v1.c7.s9.16

v1.c7.s9.16

The *Ti-wei* (提謂) and *P'oli* (波利) of this very curious passage are the names of men not of cities. They stand for Trapusha (or Tapassu) and Bhallika (or Bhalluka) and are the transcriptions used by some of the early translators.¹ The former is sometimes translated as *Huang-kua* (黃瓜) "a gourd" or "melon" and in Tibetan as Ga-gong with similar meaning: Bhallika is translated *Ts'un-lo* (村落), "a village," but the Tibetan rendering means "good" or "fortunate" (Bhalluka).² These two men were travelling merchants or caravan-chiefs from a far land.³ The story of their giving the Buddha his first food after he attained Buddhahood is told in many books with some variations. In a late Sinhalese text these pious merchants erected a tope over the precious hair- and nail-cuttings in Ceylon;¹ in a Burmese story the monument was erected in Burmah;² and in the account which Yuan-chuang gives in Chüan VIII a monument was erected at the place where the incident occurred.³ Some versions represent the two traders as being men from the north, some represent them as brothers, and in some versions there is only one man. The ridiculous story told here of the Buddha’s extemporized model of a tope does not seem to be found in any other account of the incident. It gives us, however, the plain outline of the original or early Buddhist tope or pagoda,—a square base surmounted by a cylinder on which was a dome topped by a spire. Julien evidently misunderstood the passage and he had a faulty text. He makes the pilgrim state that Julai took off his saṅghāṭi “formé de pièces de coton carrées”. He had the Ming text reading *tieh* meaning “cotton” but the C and D texts have the *tieh* which means to *double, fold, pile*. The topes which these two merchants erected in their respective native places are not represented as the first structures of the kind, but only as the first in the Buddhadom of Sākyamuni. The very next sentence, as we have seen, tells of a Kāśyapa Buddha tope in the same district.