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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
123. CASCAR 203
Hsin T'ang shu who, under the influence of phonetic analogy, duplicated the name which they found in Hsüan-tsang for Kâsyar). Hsüan-tsang's notice, in this case as in many others, has been taken over by the compilers of the Hsin T'ang shu, who say that Shu-lo (Kâsyar) was also called Ch'ieh-sha, but add that the king resided in the city of A nil; Chia-shih (*Ka-si); cf. CHAVANNES, ibid. 121 (the A u Chia-sê in STEIN, Ancient Khotan, 66, is a slip; Chia-sê is quite another name, which just comes before Chia-shih in the Index of CHAVANNES'S book, p. 336). STEIN (loc. cit. 48) says that in Ch'ieh-sha « it is impossible to mistake the phonetic rendering of some form connected with the present Kashgar », and that the name of the capital Chia-shih «is evidently also closely related in origin ». But I doubt that there should be any original connection between Ch'ieh-sha and Chia-shih.
The original of Ch'ieh-sha, Khasa, is perfectly plain; it is the name so frequently found in Indian texts in the form Khasa, Khasa, Khasa, as a designation of a number of hill-tribes of the Himalayan regions. Already in the 18th cent., scholars connected the name with Ptolemy's Kdoca 6p>7; nowadays, the Khakha tribes to the west and north-west of Kashmir are Khasa; the Gurkhas of Nepal call themselves Khas and their language is known under the name of the Khas language as well as under that of Parbatiya (STEIN, Ancien Khotan, 50-51; Ltvi, in BEFEO, IV, 556). BURNOUF had thought of connecting the name of the Khasa with that of Kâsyar. STEIN is right in his objection that Kg) ar is far from the ordinary seats of the Khasa tribes, but the fact is that a moment came when the equivalence Khasa or Khasa = Kâsyar became current in Central Asia. As I have said above, the original word of the Avatarpsaka which was rendered Shu-lo (Kg) ar) in the translation of 696-699 must have been Khasa; but the earlier translation of the 5th cent. rendered the same name with a vague 4 j` pien-i, « Barbarians of the frontier », and a parallel text of the Saryagarbha, translated c. 600, gave Yü-tien, Khotan; the Tibetan version of the Saryagarbha specifies that Khotan was in the land of the Khasa (cf. Ltvi, in BEFEO, iv, 546-547, 556). In the list of yaksa of the Mahe/may/2d, the name of the land of
Khasa is simply transcribed #11 Chia-shê (*Ka-41a) in the translation of the beginning of the
6th cent. (due to a bad phonetician), but is rendered Shu-lo (Kâs) ar) in the translation of I-ching (705) and half a century later by Amoghavajra (cf. LINT', in JA, 1915, I, 52, 102). This equivalence did not originate with Hsüan-tsang, since in the list of writings of the Lalitavistara, the
translation of 587 transcribes Khasa as K'o-sha (*K'â-sa), but adds that it is Shu-lo, Ka ; ar
(cf. LLvi, in BEFEO, Iv, 575; the translation of 308 transcribes ,U Ch'ieh-sha and that of 683
it K'o-so [*K'â-sâk], both without translation). The form used in the translation of 308
shows that Hsüan-tsang was not the first to use those two characters for Khasa. I think it is even more ancient than 308, and goes back to the version of the âgama made in the 3rd cent. (cf. NANJIO, No. 547; and the quotation in ch. 43 of the Fa-yuan chu-lin).
While the name of the Khasa often occurs in Chinese translations from the 3rd cent. onwards, we have so far no indication that it was brought into connection with Ka; ar before the end of the 6th cent. The new identification was evidently not due to purely geographical or historical reasons, but must have been suggested by phonetic analogy between the names. The inference may be drawn that the name « Kâsyar », the first part of which resembles Khasa, Khasa, is perhaps not much older than A. n. 600.
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