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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
468 183. COTTON
dialects in which the s- had passed to s- as in the known Prâkrits and in Pali, but on forms *sambala, *sambali, *sammala (?), *samali, *sabali (EITEL's restitutions of shan-p'o-lo as « djambaiâ » [a mistake instead of jambira] and of shan-mo-lo as câmara, the first of which has passed into STUART, Materia Medica, 117, are of course wrong, and I have already corrected them in TP, 1921, 76; nevertheless, they have since been repeated in SOOTHILL and HODOUS, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist terms, 313 a). My own impression would be that these forms provide the necessary intermediates between Skr. sàlmali and Pali simbali, and that perhaps it is on account of forms like Pali simbali that mediaeval Vedic scholars have explained the Vedic simbalâ as meaning «flower of the sâlmali »; but this is a point which I have no authority to decide (I may remark, however, that J. BLOCH [loc. cit.] says nothing of Vedic simbalci, and connects Marathi sarnvar and serlivri, as well as Pali simbali and all modern dialectical forms, directly with Skr. salmali). What I wish to establish is that all the transcriptions occurring in Chinese translations begin with s-, not with s-, and that, except in one case, they are based not on sâlmali itself, but on forms without an -l- at the end of the first syllable.
So-Lo. — This last double characteristic has some bearing on the question of the interpreta-
tion of d so-lo (*sâ-lei), which occurs with four or five different meanings in Chinese texts.
Its most ancient and frequent use is to render Skr. sâla or sala, Shorea robusta, a lofty hard wood tree famous in Buddhism because àkyamuni attained parinirvana between a pair of them (cf. Bongo jiten, 217; ODA Tokuno, 428, 812; YULE, Hobson-Jobson 2, s. v. « saul-wood »).
SOOTHILL and HODOUS (pp. 242, 323, 363) give alternative forms i% sha-lo (*sa-/a) and i4P
so-lo (*suâ-lei), and the latter also occurs in TARANZANO, by the side of the regular one (Vocabulaire, II, 575, 576). But these forms have no authority. Sha-lo has been taken over from EITEL's Handbook, p. 139, where it was a misprint or an error; it would suppose *sales (*s'âla) rather than sâla, and moreover all the Chinese transcriptions are based on sala. The second so-lo, as far as I am aware, occurs only once in ancient texts, as a rendering of Skr. sàla, in Tuan Ch'eng-shih's Yu yang tsa-tsu (c. A.D. 860; Chin-tai pi-shu ed., hsii-chi, 6, 12 a); but our texts of the Yu yang tsa-tsu are often corrupt, and since Tuan Ch'êng-shih employs the usual form elsewhere (18, 4 b), there is little doubt that he had also done so in the present case. The only exceptions to the first
form indicated above are the cases when, as is so common in Chinese texts, the so of the tran-
scription has been graphically corrupted to 4 p'o. For so-lo in non-Buddhist works, cf. Ch'i-min yao-shu, 10, 47 a; T'ai-p'ing yü-lan, 961, 3 b; T'u-shu chi-ch'êng, ts'ao-mu tien, 309 (but no distinction is made there between the different values of so-lo, and even to-lo, tala [cf. supra, p. 432], is thrown in with so-lo). It may be that the earliest extant occurrence of so-lo in lay
works is in the fragments of the fit ± 71C IVei-wang ts'ao-mu chih (« Botanical notes by
the prince of Wei », 3rd cent. [?]; cf. BRETSCHNEIDER, Botanicon Sinicum, I, 39); but the quotation in the T'ai p'ing yü-lan, 961, 3 a (it is not included among the fragments of the Wei-wang ts'ao-mu chih in T'u-shu chi-ch'êng, ts'ao-mu-tien, 5, 7-8), which is extremely corrupt, clearly amalgamates a quotation beginning with « so-lo tree » and another from another source, referring to quite another sort of tree or bush (the t4U hsiang), this second text being altered from that of the Kuang-chou chi quoted in Ch'i-min yao-shu, 10, 46 b. In fact, the first text of importance comes
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