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THE POMEGRANATE   283

China. How this would have been possible, is not explained by him. The Sanskrit term for the pomegranate (and this is evidently what Hirth hinted at) is dâdima or dulima, also dâcdimva, which has passed into Malayan as delima.' It is obvious that the Chinese transcription bears some relation to this word; but it is equally obvious that the Chinese form cannot be fully explained from it, as it leads only to *du-lim, not, however, to dalim. There are two possibilities : the Chinese transcription might be based either on an Indian vernacular or Apabhrariça form of a type like *dulim, *dudim,2 or on a word of the same form belonging to some Iranian dialect. The difficulty of the problem is enhanced by the fact that no ancient Iranian word for the fruit is known to us.3 It appears certain, however, that no Sanskrit word is intended in the Chinese transcription, otherwise we should meet the latter in the Sanskrit-Chinese glossaries. The fact remains that these, above all the Fan yi min yi tsi, do not contain the word Vu-lin; and, as far as I know, Chinese Buddhist literature offers no allusion to the pomegranate. Nor do the Chinese say, as is usually stated by them in such cases, that the word is of Sanskrit origin; the only positive information given is that it came along with General Can Kien, which is to say that the Chinese were under the impression that it hailed from some of the Iranian regions visited by him. *Dulim, dulima, or *durim, durima, accordingly, must have been a designation of the pomegranate in some Iranian language.

(2) f- Zi tan-so, *dan-zak, dan-yak, dan-n'iak. This word appears in the Ku kin &u4 and in the Yu yan tsa tsu.5 Apparently it represents a transcription, but it is not stated from which language it is derived. In my estimation, the foundation is an Iranian word still unknown to us, but congeners of which we glean from Persian dânak (" small grain "),

1 J. CRAWFURD (History of the Indian Archipelago, Vol. I, p. 433) derives this word from the Malayan numeral five, with reference to the five cells into which the fruit is divided. This, of course, is a mere popular etymology. There is no doubt that the fruit was introduced into the Archipelago from India; it occurs there only cultivated, and is of inferior quality. On the Philippines it was only introduced by the Spaniards (A. DE MORGA, Philippine Islands, p. 275, ed. of Hakluyt Society).

2 The vernacular forms known to me have the vowel a; for instance, Hindustani darim, Bengali ddlim, ddlim or ddrim; Newari, dhdde. The modern Indo-Aryan languages have also adopted the Persian word andr.

3 In my opinion, the Sanskrit word is an Iranian loan-word, as is also Sanskrit karaka, given as a synonyme for the pomegranate in the Amarakosa. The earliest mention of dadima occurs in the Bower Manuscript; the word is absent in Vedic literature.

4 At least it is thus stated in cyclopdias; but the editions of the work, as reprinted in the Han Wei ts'un Su and Ki fu teuti Su, do not contain this term.

i Ch. 18, p. 3 b (ed. of Pai hai).