How, then, were the translators to render Sanskrit names in Chinese? The most rational plan would have been to select as many Chinese signs as there were Sanskrit letters, and to express one and the same letter in Sanskrit always by one and the same sign in Chinese; or, if the conception of a consonant without a vowel, and of a vowel without a consonant, was too much for a Chinese understanding, to express at least the same syllabic sound in Sanskrit, by one and the same syllabic sign in Chinese. A similar system is adopted at the present day, when the Chinese find themselves under the necessity of writing the names of Lord Palmerston or Sir John Bowring; but, instead of adopting any definite system of transcribing, each translator seems to have chosen his own signs for rendering the sounds of Sanskrit words, and to have chosen them at random. The result is that every Sanskrit word as transcribed by the Chinese Buddhists is a riddle which no ingenuity is able to solve. Who could have guessed that 'Fo-to,' or more frequently 'Fo,' was meant for Buddha? 'Ko-lo-keou-lo' for Râhula, the son of Buddha? 'Po-lo-naï' for Benares? 'Heng-ho' for Ganges? 'Niepan' for Nirv_âna_? 'Chamen' for _S_rama_n_a? 'Feïto' for Veda? 'Tcha-li' for Kshattriya? 'Siu-to-lo' for _S_ûdra? 'Fan' or 'Fan-lon-mo' for Brahma? Sometimes, it is true, the Chinese endeavoured to give, besides the sounds, a translation of the meaning of the Sanskrit words. But the translation of proper names is always very precarious, and it required an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit and Buddhist literature to recognise from these awkward translations the exact form of the proper names for which they were intended. If, in a Chinese translation of 'Thukydides,' we read of a person called 'Leader of the people,' we might guess his name to have been Demagogos, or Laoegos, as well as Agesilaos. And when the name of the town of _S_ravasti was written Che-wei, which means in Chinese 'where one hears,' it required no ordinary power of combination to find that the name of _S_ravasti was derived from a Sanskrit noun, _s_ravas (Greek κλἑος, Lat. cluo), which means 'hearing' or 'fame,' and that the etymological meaning of the name of _S_ravasti was intended by the Chinese 'Che-wei.' Besides these names of places and rivers, of kings and saints, there was the whole strange phraseology of Buddhism, of which no dictionary gives any satisfactory explanation. How was even the best Chinese scholar to know that the words which usually mean 'dark shadow' must be taken in the technical sense of Nirvâ_n_a, or becoming absorbed in the Absolute, that 'return-purity' had the same sense, and that a third synonymous expression was to be recognised in a phrase which, in ordinary Chinese, would have the sense of 'transport-figure-crossing-age?' A monastery is called 'origin-door,' instead of 'black-door.' The voice of Buddha is called 'the voice of the dragon;' and his doctrine goes by the name of 'the door of expedients.'