KOROS. Alexander Csoma de Koros, also written Csoma Korosi. This extraordinary man set out on his travels in 1826 from Paris, and went via Constantinople to Persia in the disguise of a darvesh. On his arrival at Teheran be lodged with Sir Henry Willock. Thence he went to Bokhara, Lahore, and Calcutta. He resided for several years at Kanum in Tibet, where be translated from the Tibetan language a cyclopedia of Tibetan knowledge. He afterwards pro ceeded to Calcutta, and continued to reside there, engaged in communicating to the public, under the patronage of the Bengal Government and the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, the result of his acquaintance with the language and literature of Tibet, of which he was the first European who had attained a critical knowledge. In the beginning of 1834 he published at Calcutta a Tibetan and English dictionary, and at the end of the same year a grammar of the Tibetan language. Before the appearance of these useful publications, he had communicated to the Asiatic Society of Bengal notices of the contents of the two great collections in which the principal works of the literature and religion of Tibet are comprehended,—tho Ka.h
gynr, a collection of one hundred largo volumes, and tho Stan-gyur, of two hundred and twenty live. Of the former, he also prepared a detailed analysis, part of which is printed in the twentieth volume of the Asiatic Researches. A summary account of both these works, compiled from his information, was printed in the Calcutta Gleanings of Science, iii., and an abridgment of his analytical view of the whole of the Kah-gyur, in the first volume of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He also furnished to the same periodical several interesting papers on subjects connected with Tibetan literature and the religion of Buddha in that country. He illustrated extensively the Buddhism of Tibet.