Harry benda's association with Asian studies stemmed from bitter accident, for he had been of a Prague Jewish family; when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, his father arranged for Harry's exodus by getting him a job in a Dutch trading firm in the East Indies. A brother was the only other member of the family to escape death under Nazi rule. In Java, Benda settled down to learn the life of a European merchant, but he had too lively a mind to be content with latter-day colonial society. He saw the remnants of a great indigenous tradition around him, and the stirrings of a new life; he began to meet scholars who were interested in Indonesian culture and from them developed a broad intellectual interest in the people of Java. Many of these intellectuals vanished into concentration camps with the coming of the Japanese; and in 1943 Benda joined them, when the Japanese decided to intern Jews. For many of those intellectuals who survived the camps, the experience was a time of learning and reorientation; so also for Benda, whose interest in Indonesian society deepened into the determination to pursue its study as a career.

Modern religious movements together with their saintly leaders in Hinduism constitute an area where-from little scholarly research appears, yet, in print. This study of the Sāi Bābā Movement attempts to show on the one hand that, regarding the saints in question (Sāi Bābā, Upasani Baba, Mata Godavari, and Sathya Sāi Bābā), one can trace their origins to ancient forms of religious life in India and on the odier that they display the effects of influences stemming from Muslim and later Hindu practices. Moreover, the interrelations of the members of the Movement appear to harmonize on the basis of common motifs whose origins are capable of the kind of reconstruction suggested above. The scholarly task in describing the phenomena of India's modern saints should focus on the relationship that obtains between the structural elements of Demonstration, Organization and Intention for the task of communicating one's understanding of the religious expression; hence, while this study provides substantive material concerning some modern Indian saints, it also proposes issues of a methodological nature in their regard.

If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.

The failure of Chinese agriculture to undergo a transformation whereby production could increase rapidly and institutional change could occur has been long regarded by many scholars to be one of the principal reasons China did not achieve modernization after the 1880's but instead became engulfed in revolution and war during the first half of the twentieth century. During the 1930's, various schools of thought explained this absence of agrarian transformation on the grounds that either institutional and social class relationships led to exploitation of the peasantry or that the lack of leadership and organizations failed to provide the peasantry with new farming technology and the resources needed to increase production.

Although Māra, the Buddhist symbol of evil, has been the subject of a number of books and essays, little has been written about the numerous Pali and Sanskrit textual references to a plurality of Māras. In Buddhist literature there are passages, more characteristic of the Pali canonical texts, which can be interpreted as references to a general, often unspecified plurality of Māras, while other passages, more frequently found in the Sanskrit treatises, specify four Māras and designate a name for each. The purpose of this study is to show how the four Māras function as a summary formula for the diverse ways in which the term “Māra” came to be used, and following that, to consider the meaning this plurality of Māra symbols has for the Buddhist understanding of evil (pāpa).

To perceive more fully the particular meaning and aesthetic power of the Hsi-yu chi, it is necessary to examine more closely certain of its features hitherto ignored in criticism. One such feature is the vast amount of poetic “insertions” within the narrative. Though the mixture of prose and poetry is common in classic Chinese fiction, and has its antecedents in the pien-wen texts and in the popular stories and dramas of earlier periods, the poetry of the Hsi-yu chi has its own significant function. By its descriptive realism, its encyclopedic range, and its peculiar technique of versification, the poems serve to heighten both scenic situations and character developments. The narrative effect thus achieved may best be appreciated when it is compared with epic songs and heroic sagas of other cultures. Another means with which the novel is endowed with epic magnitude is the greatness of its theme, the sacred mission of Tripitaka. To understand the crucial importance of this mission, it is necessary to discern how it functions to create in both plot and characters a sense of heroic grandeur and epic immensity.

One of the most striking facts about the history of modern Vietnam has been the persistent strength of the communist movement. In part, of course, this strength must be attributed to the organizational abilities of the communists themselves. But it might also be said that it is a testament to the weakness of the more moderate elements within the nationalist movement. Resistance to French control has a long history in Vietnam, dating back to the original conquest in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet only after the Second World War, when the communist-dominated Vietnam Independence League (Vietminh) led resistance to French authority, did a movement of truly national proportions arise in the country. By their leadership of the Vietminh, the communists became the most potent political force within the nationalist movement. By contrast, non-Marxist parties were consistently plagued by political factionalism and lack of unity, a reality that has been a major contributing factor to the contemporary tragedy in that country today.

In a 1926 article Wada Sei criticized the chronology of early Ming history given in the Ming T'ai-tsu shih-lu and other official sources. His conclusions have won general acceptance. Wada based his revisions on the Chi-shih-lu of Yu Pen, a lost work surviving only in fragmentary quotation. Recently, a more extensive text of the latter has come to light, and internal analysis of the longer text shows that its chronology is too confused for any of the Chi-shih-lu to be reliable as a corrective to the official sources. This removes the evidential basis for Wada's revised chronology, and requires the substitution for it of the order of events given in the Ming T'ai-tsu shih-lu.

The general direction of research on Indonesian politics has come under severe criticism at least twice. In 1964 Harry J. Benda charged that students have essentially presented us “highly sophisticated and persuasive answers to an intrinsically mistaken, or irrelevant, question.” Castigating what he sees as a general approach to explain Indonesian politics on the premise of “What is wrong with Indonesia?,” he concludes that “perhaps our basic error all along has been to examine Indonesia with Western eyes; or, to be more precise and more generous, with eyes that, though increasingly trained to see things Indonesian, have continued to look at them selectively, in accordance with preconceived Western models.”

The historical experience of the Chinese Communist Party before 1949 has often assumed the dimension of a myth. As in any myth, what actually happens is not as important as the significant lesson to be learned. A case in point is the battle of “the last and the most strategic pass” of La-tzu-k'ou in the Long March. The Chinese annals contain at least five differing versions of this encounter on September 17–18, 1935. This may be attributed, inter alia, to the desire of the authors to glorify their own part in the Long March as much as that the battle of La-tzu-k'ou is of greater political than military significance. By publishing these accounts, the Chinese authorities hope to prove the correctness of Mao Tse-tung's policy of the northward march in mid-1935. Indeed Lin Piao's role was largely a magniloquent account of relevant events at La-tzu-k'ou, following his appointment as Minister of National Defense to succeed the disgraced P'eng Te-huao in 1959—notwithstanding the fact that Mao Tse-tung had in 1935 composed a well-known poem praising only P'eng's valor during the battle. True, history is historiography and historiography is politics in the People's Republic of China.

By the 1940's, China already had a well-established tradition of student activism. The most famous of the Chinese student movements had originated with the demonstration of May 4, 1919, against the Versailles Peace Settlement. Punctuating Chinese politics thereafter were numerous student demonstrations: the protest against the unequal treaties on May 30, 1925; the condemnation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931; and the demand for resistance to Japan on December 9, 1935. Youth leaders of the 1940's were conscious of the May 4th tradition, as they called it. They were proud of the tradition and felt an obligation to keep it alive. They accepted a role as a politicized elite with the right and duty to speak for the Chinese people. As the competition between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party for control of China's destiny entered its critical stage between 1945 and 1949, Chinese students sought active participation in China's revolution.

Since the appearance of Hulbert's The History of Korea in 1905 there has been no really new history of Korea in English based on twentieth century research until the publication of a translation from the Japanese of Chōsen no shirube (1963) based on research done in the early years of the Japanese occupation of Korea. In the following year Wagner's and Choc's A Syllabus of Korean History (1964) appeared. Five years later a translation of Hatada's History of Korea (1969) appeared. The Japanese edition was published in 1951. Since 1969 four new histories of Korea in English have been published. From the standpoint of readability W. E. Henthorn's A History of Korea (1971) is the best of the four, but it is choppy in organization. It covers Korea from its prehistory to the opening years of the twentieth century. The Koryŏ period and the Yi dynasty to 1800 are well done, but the post-1800 material is too sketchy to be adequate. Sohn Kim and Hong's The History of Korea (1970), except for the sections written by Dr. Sohn, was translated from the Korean. It is a sound history with emphasis on political and social institutions and has the best coverage of prehistoric Korea to date. It shares with Han's The History of Korea (East West Center edition, 1972, first printing in Korea, 1971) their common fault of treating the history of the Republic of Korea with such brevity as to be devoid of any depth. Han's work, also a translation, complements the other two with its slightly different emphasis on political history. B. Y. Choy's Korea: A History does not compare in scholarship with the other three histories. Its treatment of traditional Korea is shallow and sketchy. Choy does, however, devote more than half of the book to the post-1945 period, but the treatment can not be termed adequate.

The poetry of the “Chhayavad” group and the later fiction of Premchand together represent the first, and thus far the finest, flowering of the new literary Hindi, based on Khaṟī bolī, that became accepted as standard during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Before that time the phase of Hindi known as Braj, spoken chiefly around Mathura, had been preferred to khaṟī bolī, the Hindi of the Delhi-Meerut region. The credit for the triumph of khaṟī bolī is usually attributed to Pandit Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who devoted himself energetically to the reform and propagation of the language, particularly from 1903 to 1920, when he was editor of the influential journal Saraswatī. But although he contributed greatly to the improvement of Hindi style and diction and to the development of its literary potential, it must also be noted that the so-called “Dwivedi-yug” saw the creation of no masterpieces in the new idiom. None of the poets published in Saraswatī during Dwivedi's editorship commands much more than historical interest now, with the exception of Maithili Sharan Gupta, whose great work, in any case, was not to appear until the thirties. It was the Chhayavadins who first fulfilled the promise of the Bharatendu and Dwivedi periods (ca. 1870–1920) with the publication of such volumes as Nirala's Anāmikā (first version, 1922) and Parimal (1930), Prasad's revised Jharnā (1927), Pant's Pallav (1928), and Mahadevi Verma's Nihār (1930).

Bibliographic control of South Asian P.L. 480 materials in local languages presents numerous problems in spite of the useful aids and services provided by the Library of Congress. In order to record in machine readable form entries for the items received, and to add them to the existing data bank a simple automated system was devised. It consists of sequential and alphabetical listings for each language and a subject index based on a thesaurus of descriptors, taking into account characteristic features of a given language. Instantaneous retrieval via the above-mentioned elements is assured. Furthermore the system provides data for subject content analysis of the collection by language.