Obituary Notices

Emile Charles Marie Senart The greatest part of M. Senart's productivity as a scholar was concerned with Buddhism. In 1871, at the age of 24, he made his debut, in the Journal Asiatique (vi, xvii, pp. 193-540), by a publication of Kaccayana's Pali Grammar, sutras and commentary, a work of great difficulty; the translation and notes betrayed no signs of immaturity and manifested a familiarity with the Sanskrit grammarians, whose model Kaccayana had followed. Next, published likewise as a series of articles in the Journal Asiatique, 1873-5, and issued as a volume in 1875, came the celebrated Essai SUT la legende du Buddha, a book which has always been provocative to the more literal Buddhologists. No one can doubt that the story of Buddha, largely miraculous, is also in part mythological. The speciality of M. Senart's theory was that the person of Buddha had absorbed not merely isolated mythological factors, but a fairly compact body of conceptions, originally solar. The case would be parallel to a wellknown illustration accompanying one of Thackeray's essays and showing three designs : (1) Eex (an imposing royal costume, standing by itself), (2) Ludovicus (a mere man), and (3) Ludovicus Eex, the combined awe-inspiring figure. It seems rather clear that the idea of the cakravartin was pre-Buddhistic and ultimately solar : the events preceding the abandonment of home are at least highly poetical, the accounts of the birth and childhood in fact mythical : the detailed incidents of the illumination and the defeat of Mara are surely mythology, and, even if the Bodhi-tree was an actuality, it was a conventional adjunct of ascetics, and, as such, symbolical too—though the symbolism need not have been solar. M. Senart may not have gone too far in suggesting a doubt whether Maya is a fictitious name for Buddha's mother or even that of Suddhodana for his father ; but