ABSTRACT
Scholars and monks, such as these, returned to their own country laden with precious manuscripts, written in Sanskrit and Pali. With meticulous care they transliterated these, syllable by syllable, into the nearest Chinese ideograms. One of the most difficult tasks of modern scholarship has been to decipher this strange Chinese script and turn it back into its original Sanskrit and Pali. In our research library at Santiniketan I have often watched Pundit Vidusekara Bhattacharya labouring at this fascinating study in conjunction with some Chinese scholar. I have also seen him puzzling out some Tibetan manuscript from Nepal and finding beneath its unintelligible text a pure Sanskrit work, which had hitherto been unknown.
