Notes on the Nestobian Monument at Sianfu

Raban] consulted the omens in the sky and carried with him the true Scriptures; he observed the winds in their relation to the musical tubes, and quickly passed through difficulties and dangers.’ being defined in the dictionaiy as the plain sense of the passage is that Raban tried to forecast the weather by means of divination before starting on his journey; our translators, however, probably because they had an uneasy feeling that this was not quite the right thing for such an eminent Christian to do, have one and all fought shy of this obvious rendering. It is not necessary, of course, to assume that Raban actually did resort to such practices, for we have already seen that the author of the inscription suits his language to the taste of his audience; the second clause, indeed, alludes to a form of divination which is peculiarly Chinese

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