The transcriptions of Indian words vary in exactitude and the later are naturally better.  Hsuan Chuang was a notable reformer and probably after his time Indian words were rendered in Chinese characters as accurately as Chinese words are now transcribed in Latin letters.  It is true that modern pronunciation makes such renderings as Fo seem a strange distortion of the original.  But it is an abbreviation of Fo-t’o and these syllables were probably once pronounced something like Vut-tha.[785] Similarly Wen-shu-shih-li[786] seems a parody of Manjusri.  But the evidence of modern dialects shows that the first two syllables may have been pronounced as Man-ju.  The pupil was probably taught to eliminate the obscure vowel of shih, and li was taken as the nearest equivalent of ri, just as European authors write chih and tzu without pretending that they are more than conventional signs for Chinese sounds unknown to our languages.  It was certainly possible to transcribe not only names but Sanskrit prayers and formulae in Chinese characters, and though many writers sneer at the gibberish chanted by Buddhist priests yet I doubt if this ecclesiastical pronunciation, which has changed with that of the spoken language, is further removed from its original than the Latin of Oxford from the speech of Augustus.

Sanskrit learning flourished in China for a considerable period.  In the time of the T’ang, the clergy numbered many serious students of Indian literature and the glossaries included in the Tripitaka show that they studied the original texts.  Under the Sung dynasty (A.D. 1151) was compiled another dictionary of religious terms[787] and the study of Sanskrit was encouraged under the Yuan.  But the ecclesiastics of the Ming produced no new translations and apparently abandoned the study of the original texts which was no longer kept alive by the arrival of learned men from India.  It has been stated that Sanskrit manuscripts are still preserved in Chinese monasteries, but no details respecting such works are known to me.  The statement is not improbable in itself[788] as is shown by the Library which Stein discovered at Tun-huang and by the Japanese palm-leaf manuscripts which came originally from China.  A few copies of Sanskrit sutras printed in China in the Lanja variety of the Devanagari alphabet have been brought to Europe.[789] Max Muller published a facsimile of part of the Vajracchedika obtained at Peking and printed in Sanskrit from wooden blocks.  The place of production is unknown, but the characters are similar to those used for printing Sanskrit in Tibet, as may be seen from another facsimile (No. 3) in the same work.  Placards and pamphlets containing short invocations in Sanskrit and Tibetan are common in Chinese monasteries, particularly where there is any Lamaistic influence, but they do not imply that the monks who use them have any literary acquaintance with those languages.

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