In the Khotanese Sudhana story it is related that Sudhana will come upon a rākṣasī and must slay her with his sword. The Khotanese text reads at this point kāḍara jse vara ṣṭau raysga vīra jsanauña (Ch 00266.178–9 KBT 28) = kāḍąrinai vara ṣṭāṃ raysgi vī jsanñä (P 2957.118 KBT 37), which Sir Harold Bailey rendered “There he must promptly slay her with his sword” (BSOAS XXIX, no. 3, 1966, 512). MS. P. 4089a presents a variant reading for this line: kāḍara-birre raysaga vīra jsanauña (P 4089a.2–3 KBT 20). In his Dict. p. 287 Bailey renders it “with cut of sword, she must swiftly be slain”. In birre he sees a word attested only here and meaning “with cut”.

The late Walter Simon discussed the Tibetan particle re in two important articles published in this journal: ‘The Tibetan particle re’ (BSOAS, xxx, 1, 1967, 117–26) and ‘Tibetan re in its wider context’ (BSOAS, xxxi, 3, 1968, 555–62).

Writing in 1941, in the foreword to his Khotanese texts I (Cambridge, 1945), H. W. Bailey related concerning the Jvaka-pustaka: The late Dr A. F. Rudolf Hoernle had begun a study of part of this text. Some six years ago I saw the MS on one afternoon, but when about two years later I wished to examine it, it was not to be found. I have not seen it again and do not know what Dr Hoernle had done.

In JRAS, 1967, 22–5, I was able to prove that Khotanese bihīysde means ‘it increases’ and not ‘it decreases’ as had been thought earlier. In BSOAS, XXIX, 3, 1966, 616–17, I showed how bihīysde could be connected with bihīyu ‘very’ and bihīta- ‘intense’. The forms discussed there were analysed under the lemmata *bihis-, bihījs-, *bihīys-, and bihīs- in SGS 100.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.

It seldom occurs that a philologist has the opportunity of seeing the results of his labours confirmed or disproved by the discovery of new material. In the field of Oriental studies such events occur relatively less seldom but bear equal testimony to the value of philological studies. What would in many instances have remained conjectures concerning the text of the Siddhasāra, conjectures having various degrees of probability according to the arguments advanced and the material available, have now been proved correct by the discovery of three previously unknown MSS of the Siddhasāra composed by Kavigupta. It could, of course, be claimed that this discovery has rendered superfluous the philological studies hitherto made, but it is in fact precisely these studies which enable us to appreciate the value of the readings provided by the newly dis-covered MSS. Moreover, the confirmation provided by the new discovery shows that the state of knowledge achieved by philological research was in fact a definite advance in our knowledge of the text.

In 1970 I was privileged to hear in the rooms of the Linnaean Society the Burkill Memorial Lecture delivered by J. R. Marr. His discursive but interesting paper “An examination of some plant-names and identities in India” has now appeared in JRAS, 1972, 40–56. On the last page of that paper the Sanskrit word mālākanda is discussed, and its properties are described in a Sanskrit verse quoted from a “Malayāḷam ‘herbal’”, which apparently was published in Trivandrum in 1950. Marr provides a translation of the verse. I was, on reading it, immediately struck by the odd property attributed to mālākanda of “destroying perfumed garlands”, not at all the sort of property one normally finds in Indian medical sources.