sentence printed in six lines and repeated innumerable times upon a leaf 49 feet long and 4 inches broad. When Baron Schilling de Canstadt paid a visit to the temple Subulin in Siberia, the Lamas were just occupied with preparing 100 millions of copies of this prayer to be put into a prayer cylinder. His offer to have the necessary number executed at St. Petersburg was most readily accepted, and he was presented, in return for the 150 millions of copies he forwarded to them, with an edition of the Kanjur, the sheets of which amount to about 40,000.-When adorning the head of religious books, or when engraved upon the slabs resting on the prayer walls,' the letters of the above-mentioned sentence are often so combined as to form an anagram. The longitudinal lines occurring in the letters "mani padme hum" are traced close to each other, and to the outer longitudinal line at the left are appended the curved lines. The letter "om" is replaced by a symbolical sign above the anagram, showing a half-moon surmounted by a disk indicating the sun, from which issues a flame. Such a combination of the letters is called in Tibetan Nam chu vangdan, "the ten entirely powerful (viz. characters, six of which are consonants, and four vowels);" and the power of this sacred sentence is supposed to be increased by its being written in this form. This kind of anagrams are always bordered by a pointed frame indicating the leaf of a fig-tree.

See about them Chapter XIII.

CHAPTER XI.

TRANSLATION OF AN ADDRESS TO THE
BUDDHAS OF CONFESSION.

TRANSLATION AND EXPLANATORY REMARKS.

In the chapter on "Metempsychosis" I have already alluded to the various means of purification from sins, a very efficacious one, it will be remembered, consisting in the supplication of the deities. I have likewise there referred to the addresses offered up to the Buddhas of confession, which are contained in various compilations of prayers. A sacred treatise of this nature forms the subject of the present chapter. The original I found concealed in a Chorten my brother Hermann had obtained from the Lama at Saimonbóng, in Sikkim;1 it is written in small characters (the Vumed) on two sheets

The Chorten stood on the altar in the Lama's praying-room already when Hooker was there. See the View of the interior of the house of the Lama at Saimonbóng in his "Himalayan Journals."

DETAILS ABOUT THE DOCUMENT.

123

of unequal size. The larger is about four feet square, its height being two feet four inches, its breadth one foot nine inches; the smaller has the same breadth, but its height is only six inches, giving a surface of square foot. These two sheets were lying one upon the other, but separated by grains of barley interposed between them. They were wound round a wooden four-sided obelisk which filled the central part of the Chorten. The four sides of this obelisk were covered with Dharani inscriptions.

As the size of the two sheets does not allow of my reproducing here this invocation of the Buddhas of confession in the form of a facsimile, I preferred giving it transcribed in the head characters in the ordinary form of Tibetan books, at the end of the chapter. The contents of the two parts are separated by a distance left between them; the beginning of the second part is besides also marked in the Tibetan text by the recurrence of the initial sign.1

Its full title runs thus: Digpa thamchad shagpar terchoi, "Repentance of all sins, doctrine of the hidden treasure."2 The words ter-choi were illegible in the sentence at the head of the treatise, and it was only through their occurring at the foot of the larger leaf in connexion with the rest of the phrase that the hiatus could be filled up. Here also the other words preceding them had suffered considerable injury, but the general

1 In the English translation the words in parenthesis are rather explanatory paraphrases, than literal translations of the Tibetan.

2 Sdig-pa "sin, vice;" thams-chad "all;" bshags-pa "repentant confession;" r, the sign of the locative, is often used in stead of the genetive sign (comp. Foucaux, Gram. Tib., p. 94); gter "a treasury;" chhos "the doctrine."