On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v2.c21.s9.2

v2.c21.s9.2

The *Kung-yü-t'o* of this passage has been tentatively restored by Julien as *Konyodha* and this restoration has been accepted. But the characters (恭御陀) were pronounced *Kong-gu-t'o* or *Kong-ya-t'o* and the original was probably a word like Kongudha or Konyadha. In his translation of the text Julien makes the author state that "Les frontières de ce royaume embrassent plusieurs dizaines de petites villes qui touchent à des montagnes, et sont situées au confluent de deux mers". But there is no word for *two* in the text aud the term *hai-chiao* (海交) here means "the meeting of sea and land". The pilgrim wished his readers to understand that the towns at one extremity "continued the hills" (*chie-shan-ling* 接山嶺), and at the other were on the sea-shore (據海交). This is also the sense in which the compiler of the Fang-chih understood the description. Cunningham and Fergusson agree in identifying *Kung-yü-t'o* with the district about the Chilka Lake, and the latter investigator thought that the capital "was situated to the northward of the Chilka lake and somewhere between Kuttack and Aska, where one of Asoka's great edict tablets still exists".¹ This *Kung-yü-t'o* of our pilgrim's narrtive may perhaps be the Kūṇḍya of the Hemakūṇḍya (called also Hemakuṭya) in the south-eastern division of the Bṛihat-Saṃhitā's topography.²