Kwan-yin "looks on" (kwan) "the region" (shi) of sufferers whose "voices" (yin) of many tones, all acknowledging misery and asking salvation, touch the heart or the pitiful Bodhisattwa. She looks with a thousand eyes that she may see them all, and stretches out a thousand arms that she may save them all.

Kumarajiva himself adopted the name Kwan-shi-yin. The translators of the T'ang period, two centuries later, brought to view the true etymology as given by our author, but they did not succeed in changing the course of the legend or the name of the divinity. Kumarajiva preferred the more popular and edifying designation. The two meanings, Kwan-tsi-tsai and Kwan-shi-yin, doubtless existed together in Kumarajiva's country, Cashmere, just as afterwards in China. The Mahayana doctrine had prevailed there already for nearly two hundred years, from the time of Nagarjuna, given in the Hand-book, A.D. 194

The remarkable extension of the Mahayana literature (Hwa-yen-king, Fa-hwa-king, &c.) in Cashmere, Kashgar, Balkh, and what is now Cabul, aided by the conversion

to Buddhism of the Indian Getae, the Yue-ti of Chinese history, renders the dialects there spoken early in the Christian era important for the determination of the language employed by the first Hindoo missionaries in China.

Our author says the Pali was first used, and afterwards the Sanscrit. It would be more correct to say that the Magadha dialect was first used, then the dialect of Northern India, such as was spoken in Cashmere, and afterwards the Sanscrit. In the Han dynasty, under Ming-ti, Kashiapmadanga, who came from Magadha, the modern Bahar, used the dialect of that country, which differed from the Pali among other things in retaining from Sanscrit the letter sh. If Kashiapmadanga, the most ancient of the translators, had chosen Chinese words whose initial was s to write the Sanscrit Shramana and Kashiapa, it might be said that he used the Pali. In the "Sutra of Forty-two Sections" he used Sha-men, and thus originated that name, to be used ever after as the designation of the members of the Buddhist community in China. For Kashiapa he wrote Ka-shiap.

The second era of translators, A.D. 400, was that of Kumarajiva of Cashmere. There can be no doubt that he made use of sh and s as separate letters, for he never confounds them in his choice of Chinese characters. The Chinese words already introduced by his predecessors he did not alter, and in introducing new terms required in the translation of the Mahayana literature (Ta-ch'eng), or "Greater Development," he uses sh for sh, and usually b for v. Thus the city "Shravasti" was in Pali Savatthi, and in Chinese Sha-ba-ti. Probably Kumarajiva himself, speaking in the Cashmere dialect of Sanscrit, called it Shabati.