Text Documents And Extracts Chiefly From Manuscripts in Bodleian Vol 01 Part 05

SR No.: 020820
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller, H Wenzel
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1885
Total Pages: 107
Language: English, Sanskrit
Classification: Book_English & Book_Devnagari
File Size: 8 MB

Page 8

PREFACE.
he said, "Yes, many of my countrymen die of consumption." However, he was well enough to travel and to spend some time in Ceylon, seeing some of the learned Buddhist priests there, and discussing with them the differences which so widely separate Southern from Northern Buddhism. But after his return to Japan his illness made rapid strides. He sent me several dear letters, complaining of nothing but his inability to work. His control over his feelings was remarkable. When he took leave of me, his sallow face remained as calm as ever, and I could hardly read what passed within. But I know that after he had left, he paced for a long time up and down the road, looking again and again at my house, where, as he told me, he had passed the happiest hours of his life. Yet we had done so little for him. Once only, in his last letter, he complained of his loneliness in his own country. “To a sick man," he wrote, “very few remain as friends." Soon after writing this he died, and the funeral ceremonies were performed at Tokio on the 18th of July, 1883.
He has left some manuscripts behind, which I hope I shall be able to prepare for publication, particularly the " Dharma-samgraha," a glossary of Buddhist technical terms, ascribed to Nâgârguna. But it is hard to think of the years of work which are to bear no fruit; still harder to feel how much good that one good and enlightened Buddhist priest might have done among the thirty-two millions of Buddhists in Japan. Have, pia anima! I well remember how last year we watched together a glorious sunset from the Malvern Hills, and how, when the Western sky was, like a golden curtain, covering we knew not what, he said to me," That is what we call the Eastern gate of our Sukhâvatî, the Land of Bliss." He looked forward to it, and he trusted he should meet there all who had loved him, and whom he had loved, and that he should gaze on the Buddha Amitabha, i. e. Infinite Light.'
It has taken more time than I expected to prepare the text and notes of the Dharma-samgraha, as left by Kasawara, for Press, and I have gratefully to acknowledge the assistance which I received from Dr. H. Wenzel in this sometimes very troublesome work. While preparing my lectures for my Japanese pupils, I had myself to study that peculiar kind of Sanskrit in which their sacred books are written, and in collecting new materials, chiefly from MSS., I came across the MS. of the Dharmasamgraha at the India Office. As it contained long lists of technical