The term ārya as a possibility for aja was also suggested off list by Elena Bashir. What makes the Tibetan translations so useful for textual criticism is that they are very literal, meaning that they follow the Sanskrit text very closely, and they use standardized translation equivalents for most technical terms. Thus, the word ārya is virtually always translated into Tibetan as 'phags pa. So even if aja is taken as a MIA form of ārya, like ajja or ayya, as long as its meaning was known to the Tibetan translator, he would have translated it as 'phags pa. Further, if this was an honorific added to the name, we would lose one of the twenty-five kings, besides being the only name to have an honorific.

While the verses giving the listing of the kings of Śambhala are given in my paper at the academia.edu link in my first post, I realized that it would also be helpful to have access to the Vimalaprabhā commentary on Kālacakra-tantra 1.27 where aja is found in prose three times. A printed edition of the first two chapters of the Vimalaprabhā was published in 1986, not long after my paper. There one can see the name aja in the prose commentary on 1.27, p. 78, lines 15, 16, and 24. The verses giving the list of kings are found in this edition on pp. 24-26. A scan of this book has been posted by me on the web at: http://www.downloads.prajnaquest.fr/BookofDzyan/Sanskrit%20Buddhist%20Texts/vimalaprabha_tika_vol_1_1986.pdf.

Best regards,

David Reigle

Colorado, U.S.A.