Chapter1

Introductory and GeographicalIn view particularly of Professor Tucci's revelatory volumes of travel and archaeological research in the more westerly regions of Tibet, and of his and Professor Petech's scholarly studies in the history, in view also of the continuing important work of both, an effort to extend a knowledge of the 2an-kun language may be considered opportune.Of the two notes contributed to the J.R. A.S., 1926 (pp.505-6) and 1933 (pp.405-10), the former, introducing the language as apparently akin to Lepcha, was content to present a specimen from a Stein Ms., obviously medical, which could have reached Tun-huang in connection with the Tibetan domination or armies there from the early part of the VIIIth century A.D. The second, relying upon another Stein fragment, likewise medical, recognized by (Sir) G., L. M. Clauson in the British Museum, proffered reasons for identifying the language as Zan-kun and related to the Kunawari and the Western Pronominalized Group' of Tibeto-Burman, described in the Linguistic Survey of India: some of the numerals and some medical terms and grammatical features were elicited, and a metrical passage was quoted, with a tentative translation.Despite the linguistic importance of a stage of Tibeto-Hinuilayan speech antedating its cognates by about 1000 years and approximately coaeval with the earliest known Tibetan a further concentrated effort was postponed, except for the compilation of a vocabulary, in favour of a search among Sanskrit medical texts for a possible original: aii-`21in medicine was likely to be of Indian derivation, either direct or via the Tibetan; and a more or less definite correspondence might furnish, as has happened in analogous cases, a wholesale solution of the linguistic problem.An intermittent search in the extensive Sanskrit and Tibetan medical literature not having materialized such a possibility, help was sought from Professor S. N. Dasgupta, a rare expert in Indian medical science, whose definite decision on the content of the specimen verse was that it did not correspond to an Indian text.A second possibility, since the two Mss.were written in Tun-huang, where there was activity in multilingual translation, was that there might be among the Tun-huang Mss. an original or version in some known language: but among the Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Khotani pieces of comparable nature no equivalent appeared; and recently Mr. C. H. Yuan, who with great kindness devoted time to a scrutiny of all the British Museum Stein pieces of medical character in Chinese, found nothing corresponding to the indications of the ,aft-kifi texts.Chinese medical literature is one of the last subjects to be envisaged by a nonexpert; but a slight examination of M. Dabri's work may suggest that it may have some general similarities to the Indian; and Mr. Yuan conceived that there might be popular Chinese tracts in the style of the Zan-kin.Chinese items, including the examination of the pulse, are recognized in Tibetan medicine in one way or another