The Sanskrit fragments of Vinītadeva's Triṃśikā-ṭīkā

Abstract

Scholars conversant with the history of the Yogācāra/Vijñnavāda school are familiar with the names of Vasubandhu and his renowned commentator, Sthiramati; the Buddhist logicians Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, who are also associated with that school, are equally well known for their scholastic achievements. A later commentator important in both schools is Vinītadeva (c. 645–715), who has received a great deal of attention in recent years. No less than a dozen of his commentaries, most of them called ṭīkās, are preserved in Tibetan translation. Sylvain Levi's publication in 1925 of Sthiramati's Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya first aroused scholarly interest in Vinītadeva's commentaries. The eminent buddhologist, Theodore Stcherbatsky, was probably the first scholar to study Vinītadeva's work in depth; Stcherbatsky utilized the Tibetan translation of Vinītadeva's Nyāyabinduṭīkā; in his pioneering translation of the Nyāyabindu which appeared in 1930 in his massive two-volume publication, Buddhist logic. The first complete translation of the Tibetan rendering of two of Vinītadeva's ṭīkās, namely, the Viṃśatikā-ṭikā and the Triṃśikā-ṭīkā. was undertaken by Yamaguchi Susumu and Nozawa Josho, respectively; this appeared in Japanese in 1953. More recently, in 1971, M. Gangopadhyaya published a Sanskrit reconstruction with English translation of Vinītadeva's Nyāyabindu-Ṡīkā. A still more recent work appears in the 1975 Ph.D. thesis of Dr. Leslie Kawamura of the University of Saskatchewan.