Philology, which till then had wandered
in the Egyptian darkness of etymological labyrinths, and was about
to ask the sanction of the scientific world to one of the wildest
of theories, suddenly stumbled on the clue of Ariadne. Philology
discovered, at last, that the Sanskrit language is, if not the
forefather, at least--to use the language of Max Muller--"the elder
brother" of all classical languages. Thanks to the extraordinary
zeal of Alexander Csoma de Koros, Tibet yielded a language the
literature of which was totally unknown. He partly translated it
and partly analyzed and explained it. His translations have shown
the scientific world that (1) the originals of the Zend-Avesta,
the sacred scriptures of the sun-worshippers, of Tripitaka, that
of the Buddhists, and of Aytareya-Brahmanam, that of the Brahmans,
were written in one and the same Sanskrit language; (2) that all
these three languages--Zend, Nepalese, and the modern Brahman
Sanskrit--are more or less dialects of the first; (3) that old
Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient Indo-European
languages, as well as of the modern European tongues and dialects;
(4) that the three chief religions of heathendom--Zoroastrianism,
Buddhism and Brahmanism--are mere heresies of the monotheistic
teachings of the Vedas, which does not prevent them from being
real ancient religions and not modern falsifications.
The moral of all this is evident. A poor traveler, without either
money or protection, succeeded in gaining admittance to the
Lamaseries of Tibet and to the sacred literature of the isolated
tribe which inhabits it, probably because he treated the Mongolians
and the Tibetans as his brothers and not as an inferior race--a
feat which has never been accomplished by generations of scientists.
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