districts, where they also ruled as petty princes. Hodde left four sons,—Phabdese, Thide, Thich'ung, and Gnagpa. The first and fourth became masters of Tsangrong, the second took possession of Atndo and Tsongkha, the third became king of Dblls, and removed the capital to Yarlung, south of Lhasa. He was followed on his throne from son to son by eleven successors. History is silent as to the fate of the eastern king, the other son of gLang-dharma, and his successors, but the geographical names of the chieftainships enumerated above make it clear that the western kingdom had extended its power to the east. Chronology is deficient for all that period. While the dynasty of Khorre in Shang-shung and that of Thich ung in Dblls were running, another authority, destined to become the superior of both, had arisen in Tibet. Khorre left his throne to his son Lhade, who was himself succeeded by his three sons, the youngest of whom invited the celebrated Indian Buddhist, Atisha, to leave his monastery Vikrama Shila for Tibet, where he settled in the great lamaserai of Thoding in Ngari. Besides religious books and teachings, he introduced in 1026 the method of computing time by cycles of sixty years, "obtained from the Indian province of Shambala." He was the first of the several chief priests whose authority became paramount in the country. The kings of Dblls greatly patronized them, as for instance in the case of the celebrated Sakya Pandita by the seventh of these kings. Pandita, at the special request of Kuyuk, the successor of Ogdai, paid a visit to his court in 1246-48. Five years afterwards Kublai Khan conquered all the east of Tibet; and, after he had ascended the throne of China, the Mongol emperor invited to his court Phagspa Lodoi Gyaltshan, the nephew of the same Pandita. He remained twelve years with the emperor, and at his request framed for the Mongol language an alphabet imitated from the Tibetan, which, however, did not prove satisfactory, and disappeared after eighty-five years without having been very largely used. In return for his services, Kublai invested Phagspa with sovereign power over (1) Tibet proper, comprising the thirteen districts of U and Tsang, (2) Kham, and (3) Amdo. From this time the Sakya-pa lamas became the universal rulers of Tibet, and remained so, at least nominally, under twenty-one successive lamas during seventy years (1270-1340). Their name was derived from the Sakya monastery, which was their cradle and abode, and their authority for temporal matters was exercised by specially appointed regents. When the power of the Sakya began to wane, that of the rival monasteries of Digung, Phagdub, and Tshal increased largely, and their respective influence and authority overbalanced that of the successors of Phagspa. It was at this troubled epoch that Chyang Chub Gyalt shan, better known as Phagmodu from the name of his native town, appeared on the scene. He subdued Tibet proper and Kham, for the continued possession of which he was, however, compelled to fight for several years; but he succeeded in the long run, and with the approval of the court of Peking established a dynasty which furnished twelve rulers in succession. When the Mongol dynasty of China passed away, the Mings confirmed and enlarged the dominion of the Tibetan rulers, recognizing at the same time the chief lamas of the eight principal monasteries of the country. Peace and prosperity gradually weakened the benign rule of the kings of this dynasty, and during the reign of the last but one internecine war was rife between the chiefs and nobles of U and Tsang. This state of things, occurring just as the last rulers of the Ming dynasty of China were struggling against the encroachments of the Manchus, their future successors, favoured the interference of a Khoskot Mongol prince, Tengir To, called in the Tibetan sources king of Koko-nur. The Mongols were interested in the religion of the lamas, especially since 1576, when Altan, khakan of the Tumeds, and his cousin summoned the chief lama of the most important monastery to visit him. This lama was Sodnam rGyamtso, the third successor of Gedundub, the founder of the Tashilumbo monastery in 1447, who had been elected to the more important abbotship of Galdan near Lhasa, and was thus the first of the great, afterwards dalai, lamas. The immediate successor of Gedundub, who ruled from 1475 to 1541, had appointed a special officer styled depa to control the civil administration of the country. To Soduam rGyamtso the Mongol khans gave the title of Vadjra Dalai Lama in 1576, and this is the first use of the widely known title of dalai lama. During the minority of the fifth (really the third) dalai lama, when the Mongol king Tengir To, under the pretext of supporting the religion, intervened in the affairs of the country, the Pan-chen Lo-sang Ch o-kyi Gyal-ts ang lama obtained the withdrawal of the invaders by the payment of a heavy war indemnity, and then applied for help to the first Manchu emperor of China, who had just ascended the throne. This step enraged the Mongols, and caused the advance of Gushri Khan, son and successor of Tengir To, who invaded Tibet, dethroned all the petty princes, including the king of Tsang, and, after having subjugated the whole of the country, made the fifth dalai lama supreme monarch of all Tibet, in 1645. The Chinese Government in 1653 confirmed the dalai lama in his authority, and he paid a visit to the emperor at Peking. The Mongol Khoskotes in 1706 and the Sungars in 1717 interfered again in the succession of the dalai lama, but the Chinese army finally conquered the country in 1720, and the present system of government was established. The events which have happened since that time have been recorded in the articles Lhasa and Ladak.
Language[1] and Literature.
Bod-skad is the general name of the language of Tibet, which Lanis also occasionally called Gangs-can-gyi skad (i.e. "the glaciers guage. language "). This name is specially applied to the forms in use in Dblls-gTsang. The vernacular is called p dl-skad or common language in contradistinction to the Kos-skad or book language. Besides the Bod-skad there are two chief dialects[2] in Great Tibet, that of Khams, spoken in the three provinces of Mdo (Darrtsemdo), Kham, and Gong in the east, and that of Ngari-Khorsum in the west. Jaeschke arranged these dialects under three heads, (1) western, including those of Balti and Purig, the most archaic, and of Ladak and Lahul; (2) central, including those of Spiti and of Dblls and gTsang; (3) Khams. To the same Bhot group belong the Changlo or Bhutani or Lhopa, the language of Bhutan, of which we have a grammatical notice by Robinson (1849), and the Serpa and the Takpa, of Tawang, both of which are only known through the vocabularies collected by Hodgson. The later Takpa forms the transition between the Bhot group and the Si-fan group, which includes the Miniak, Sungpan, Lifan, and Thochu dialects, spoken near the eastern borders, as well as the Horpa, spoken on a larger area west of the preceding, and much mixed with Turkic in-
- ↑ The Capuchin friars who were settled in Lhasa for a quarter of a century from 1719 studied the language; two of them, Francisco Orazio della Penna, well known from his accurate description of Tibet, and Cassian di Macerata sent home materials which were utilized by the Augustine friar Aug. Ant. Georgi of Rimini (1711-97) in his Alphabetum Tibetanum (Rome, 1762, 4to), a ponderous and confused compilation, which may be still referred to, but with great caution. The Tibetan characters were drawn by Della Penna, and engraved by Ant. Fontarita in 1738. In 1820 Abel Remusat published his Recherches sur les Langues Tartares, a chapter of which was devoted to Tibetan. The next work of importance was a dictionary, intended for European students, which was published, with Tibetan types, at the expense of the East India Company, in 1826 at Serampur, and edited by John Marshman, from a MS. copy made by FT. Chr. G. Sehroeter, a missionary in Bengal, who had substituted English for the Italian of the original. It was the unsifted result of the labours of an unknown Italian missionary, who had been stationed either in eastern Tibet or close to the frontier in Bhutan. It was properly a collection of all the sentences he could get written by a native teacher, completed with extracts from the Padma tangyig, a popular series of legends about Padma Sambhava. Unfortunately the work was left unfinished, and unrevised, as there was no Tibetan scholar to correct the proofs. Though richer in words than later dictionaries, the work cannot, for these reasons, be accepted as an authority on any doubtful point. The grammatical notice, consisting of forty pages from Schroeter, prefixed to this Dictionary of the Bhotanta, or Butan Language, hardly deserves mention. At Calcutta in 1834 the Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Koros (1784-1842) brought out his Dictionary, Tibetan and English, and his Grammar of the Tibetan Language in English, prepared on the western frontier, where he had resided for several years at the monasteries of Yangla and Pukdal in Zanskar, and finally at Kanum in Upper Besahr, enjoying the help of native scholars. His works are admirable so far as concerns the literary language (chiefly that of the Buddhist translations). At St Petersburg J. J. Schmidt published his Grammatik der Tibetischen Sprache in 1839 and his Tibetisch-Deutsches Worterbuch in 1841, but neither of these works justified the great pretensions of the author, whose access to Mongolian sources had enabled him to enrich the results of his labours with a certain amount of information unknown to his predecessors. In France, P. E. Foucaux published in 1847 a translation from the Rgya teher rol pa, the Tibetan version of the Lalita Vistara, and in 1858 a Grammaire Thibetaine; while Ant. Schiefner had begun at St Petersburg in 1849 his series of translations and researches. His Tibetische Studien (1851-68) is a valuable collection of documents and observations. In 1861 Lepsius published his paper Ueber Chinesische und Tibetische Lautverhdltnisse; and since 1864 Leon Feer has brought out in Paris many translations of texts from Tibetan Buddhist literature. In 1849 the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal published comparative vocabularies of spoken and written Tibetan by Bryan H. Hodgson, and grammatical notices of Tibetan (according to Csoma's grammar) and of Changlo, a Tibetan dialect, by W. Robinson. But it was at Singapore in 1852 that the general relationship of the Tibetan and the Burman, now admitted in comparative philology, was established for the first time, by J. R. Logan, in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago. Prof. Max Miiller, in his "Letter on the Classification of the Turanian Languages" of 1853, arrived in dependently at a similar conclusion. In 1857 the Moravian missionaries established a station at Kyelang, district of Garza, British Lahul, in Ladak, a school, and a lithographic press, and it is to the labours of H. A. Jaeschke of this mission that we are indebted for the most valuable materials for the practical study of Tibetan. From 1860 to 1867 that scholar made several important communications, chiefly with reference to the phonetics and the dialectical pronunciation, to the academies of Berlin and St Petereburg, and in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In 1868 at Kyelang he published by lithography A Short Practical Grammar of the Tibetan Language, with special reference to the spoken dialects, and the following year a Romanized Tibetan and English Dictionary. He also published in 1871-76 at Gnadau in Prussia by the same process a Tibetan and German dictionary. Afterwards he prepared for the English Government^ Tibetan-English Dictionary, with special reference to the prevailing dialects, in 1881. Dr H. Wenzel, one of his pupils, brought out in 1883 from his Mb. a Simplified Tibetan Grammar. Major Th. H. Lewin with the help of a lama compiled A Manual of Tibetan, or rather a series of colloquial phrases, which was brought out at Calcutta in 1879. A portion of the New Testament has been translated into Tibetan. As regards native philology, the most ancient work extant is a grammar of the Tibetan tongue, by Tonmi Sambota, the introducer of the Indian alphabet, preserved in the Bstan-hgyur (mdo cxxiv). This collection also contains other works of the same kind, diction aries by later writers, translations of many Sanskrit works on grammar vocabulary, &c., and bilingual dictionaries, Sanskrit and Tibetan. As separate publications there are several vocabularies of Chinese and Tibetan; Mongol and Tibetan; Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Oelo t, Tibetan, and Turkish; Tibetan, Sanskrit, Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese.
- ↑ There are without doubt many minor skad-lugs or dialects which are still unknown. For instance, in the Pan-yul valley north of Lhasa the inhabitants are said to speak an indistinct skad lugs.
