The present paper investigates one of those cases in which our understanding of ancient texts is impeded by both the natural disappearance of words from the living lexicon of a language and the corruption inevitable in the course of long-term textual transmission. *miuaηxmauh, the term under scrutiny, is introduced by way of the form in which it appears in the editions of Hui-chao's commentary on the Suvar.naprabhaasasuutra. Here, it is already written in such a way that the original pronunciation of the second syllable is no longer recognizable and any attempt to understand the “literal” meaning of the word will lead to rather amusing results. However, this does not imply that the term has been correctly interpreted even when the characters avoided major corruption. That quite the opposite is true is documented in those cases in which the pronunciation of the word is not influenced by the choice of characters employed in its written representation. A complete survey of the traditional Chinese Buddhist canon revealed that all instances in which *miuaηxmauh occurs in translation -only three-are found in Hsüan-tsang's work. These cases are analyzed, if possible with reference to Indian sources, and so is the usage of the term in native Buddhist literature. As a result, the conclusion is reached that, contrary to the general understanding reflected in old glosses, modern commentaries, and the rare definition in a dictionary, *miuaηxmauh is a binome with one basic meaning -“confused”.
