Buddhist Sanskrit Research Articles

Tokharika

In the Učenye Zapiski, XVI (1958), 280–308, the late V. S. Vorobiev-Desiatovsky published facsimiles of some Central Asian fragments preserved in Leningrad. One fragment contained a bilingual text, a traveller's guide, a type familiar elsewhere in Saka of Khotan, in Buddhist Sanskrit and Saka; and also in Chinese and Saka. The two languages in the new fragment were Buddhist Sanskrit and Kuchean, the language of ancient Kuci, modern Kucha, the so-called Tokharian B.

Shanker Thapa Ph.D., Buddhist Sanskrit Literature of Nepal, Seoul: Minjoksa Publishing Company 2005, 194 pp. Appendices, Bibliography, Index, Soft cover, Price. US $ 15.

Shanker Thapa Ph.D., Buddhist Sanskrit Literature of Nepal, Seoul: Minjoksa Publishing Company 2005, 194 pp. Appendices, Bibliography, Index, Soft cover, Price. US $ 15.

Tibetan astronomy

Towards the end of the first millenium, there existed in the north-west of India a remarkable Buddhist teaching, called Kâlacakra (the Wheel of Time). This religious system presents us with various cosmographic and astronomical conceptions, not only from India but also from other countries, even from Persia. Some of the Kâlacakra pamphlets give instructions on the reckoning of time and how to calculate the planets' passage of the Zodiac. There are lists of the lunar mansions and descriptions of heaven and earth. One of the texts is ascribed to the legendary Indian astronomer Garga. It may be that a close study of the Tibetan texts will enable us to elucidate the pre-siddhântic epoch of Indian astronomy; but the apparently crude character of the calculations might also be due to a secondary simplification for practical use. Geometry is nowhere used; nor do we read anything about actual observations. Although most of the original Buddhist Sanskrit texts are lost, fortunately two of the Kâlacakra texts on astronomy have been preserved in both languages. Critical editions of the pertinent texts will be given in collaboration with the indologist, Professor H. Hoffmann, who is head of the flourishing centre of Tibetan and Buddhistic studies in Munich. Besides the several Kâlacakra texts from about the eleventh century, there exists a huge encyclopedia on astronomy and related matters. It was compiled originally in Tibetan, in the second half of the seventeenth century and is called Vaidûrya-dkarpo (White Beryl). Notwithstanding its late date, its astronomy looks essentially the same as in the much earlier Kâlacakra treatises. Chinese influence is secondary and mostly superficial. The influence of Indian astronomy extended even beyond Tibet. In mediaeval Uigur (Turkish) fragments from Turfan, the lunar mansions are listed by their Sanskrit names and in the same way as in the Tibetan books. Moreover, a survey of the history of astronomy in Mongolia (L. S. Baranovskaya, 1955) reveals that the Indo-Tibetan astronomical ideas and names were alive there until modern times.

EDGERTON, FRANKLIN : Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (I: BHSG, II: BHSD); Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Reader (BHSR). New Haven (Yale University Press)-London (Cumberledge, Oxford University Press). 1953. (In the William Dwight Whitney Linguistic Series.)

Abstract Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is the appellation used by Professor Franklin Edgerton to design the peculiar religious language employed in the Buddhist texts of Northern India that have become known to us during the last 125 years in manuscripts found chiefly in Nepal, Japan, and Chinese Turkestan. Indologists will know this very curious idiom by other names, such as Buddhist Sanskrit, Mixed Sanskrit, the Gatha-dialect. The last term, which was the first to be used, when the linguistic individuality of the idiom was realized, suggests the fact that scholars investigating the texts first believed that the verse portions (or some of them) were composed in another dialect than the prose parts, which were thought to be simply Sanskrit, rather poor Sanskrit most of it, and badly treated by scribal tradition. However, as early as 1882, when Senart published the first volume of his edition of the Mahavastu, one of the oldest texts, it was made generally known that also the prose portions of at least this text belonged to the Gatha-dialect, for which term Senart substituted the designation “Mixed Sanskrit”. In his widely read History of Indian Literature (Vol. I, 1905), Winternitz expressly states that an old Middle Indie dialect is employed in verse portions and also in large parts of the prose of this literature.

Indian and Ancient Chinese Buddhism: Institutions Analogous to the Jisa

The Tibetan term which is pronounced jisa and written spyi signifies literally terra commune or, like spyi, the principal or capital piece of land. The fact it is not to be found in the classical dictionaries of the Tibetan language, such as those of Sarat Chandra Das and Jäschke, seems to show that it is fairly recent. In these works the terms closest to it are spyi-tor and, better still, spyi-thog, which refer to a common fund or a common piece of property. These terms, too, appear to be relatively recent or at least exclusively Tibetan, for the dictionaries give no Sanskrit equivalent and they suggest that the terms belong solely to the dialects of Western Tibet. The Sanskrit terms corresponding to spyi would be sāmanyabhūmi and sādharanabhūmi in the first and most satisfactory sense, of common land, and agrabhūmi, murdhabhūmi and sirobhūmi in the second sense. But these do not occur in the dictionaries of classic Sanskrit, nor of Buddhist Sanskrit (Edgerton), nor of Pali. Nor were any equivalent expressions either developed in Chinese Buddhism or preserved through Chinese translations of Sanskrit terms. If any Indian or Chinese terms corresponding to the Tibetan spyi-sa existed, they obviously formed no part of the canonical or even of the paracanonical literary language of Indian or ancient Chinese Buddhism. It follows that if Indian or Chinese Buddhism had an institution resembling the Tibetan jisa, the Buddhist monks must have considered it to be foreign to their activities and in some way unworthy.

Buddhist Sanskrit

Professor Edgerton has offered us in his recent work on Buddhist Sanskrit (a monument to almost twenty years' labour) a material of delightful richness. It required both courage to undertake such a work and great persistence to carry it through. No doubt each reader will at first look eagerly to see how the cruces which have long baffled him have been resolved here; then to see how much new matter is offered in the elucidation of texts where he has himself after long searching been able to gather up some small amount of the widely scattered evidence. He may even venture to estimate how much of the harvest has been garnered and how much still remains to be brought in.

Candra and Caṇḍa

In a brief article entitled Kaṇaiska in the Journal for 1942, pp. 14–28, was published for the first time a Central Asian text touching Kaniṣka, a repetition of the well-known story of Kaniṣka's stūpa. The fragmentary text began with three lines in the Buddhist Sanskrit of Khotan. These lines were then translated and the story continued in Khotanese. In the text the epithet of Kaṇaiska was pointed out in the form cadrra, that is, a Khotanese spelling of Indian candra. The epithet could be recognized as the equivalent of the epithet *tśiän-d'an (later ṭṣant'an) in Chinese references to Kaniṣka, and implied, as it seems, also in the Tibetan play upon the word zla-ba ‘moon’. The Khotanese and Buddhist Sanskrit cadrra (for candra) seemed to decide the problem in favour of candra- ‘moon’.

A Second Chinese Buddhist Text in Tibetan Characters

The text contained in the MS. described below begins with three syllables śa-li-ẖbur, which scholars will naturally (unless illuded for a moment by the thought of sāli “year”) find suggestive of Śāriputra. The recurrence of the syllables will confirm this impression, more especially when far on in the document appears 'an.nog.da.la.sam. yag.sam.bu.de, previously recognized as=Sanskrit anuttara samyak-sambodhi. But, since the conjunction of this expression with the name of Śāriputra is frequently exemplified in the mass of Sanskrit Buddhist writings, we are grateful for the occurrence early in the text of the combination 'a.myi.ẖda, i.e. obviously Amitābha or Amitāyus, pointing to the Amitābha literature. When we come to try the smaller Sukhāvatīvyūka (published by Max Müller and Bunyiu Nanjio in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan Series, vol. i, part ii, pp. 92–100), the distribution and character of the paragraphs soon enables us to fix upon sections ix(viii)–xx, of which several afford great assistance by furnishing names of numerals or of Buddhas in succession. As in the former case, some apparent divergencies from the Sanskrit original direct attention to the Chinese version translated into French by Messrs. Ymaizumi and Yamata in Annales du Musée Guimet, vol. ii, pp. 39–44. And this has enabled Captain Clauson to verify the whole text as a transcription, syllable for syllable, of Kumārajīva's rendering (Nanjio, No. 200). We give the Chinese characters from the India Office copy, and append a direct and inverse index of the syllables as represented in the Tibetan writing. From the interesting colophon it appears that the copy was a work of piety.

Art. I.—Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society (Hodgson Collection)

The manuscripts of Buddhist works described in the following pages were collected in Nepal by Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson—who has contributed so largely to the elucidation of Northern Buddhism—and presented by him to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1835 and 1836. The great importance of a thorough examination of the Buddhist Sanskrit works of Northern India, both for Prâkrit philology and for Buddhist research, is becoming more and more apparent; and it seemed very desirable that the contents of this collection, which, though deficient in many of the standard works, is perhaps the finest of original manuscripts in Europe, should become better known to scholars interested in these inquiries. A detailed analysis of the works was beyond the scope of the present catalogue, as it would in many cases be extremely difficult, if not impossible, without comparing other copies. It is hoped, however, that the brief description now offered will, at least, suffice for the identification of the works, and will for that reason be acceptable to Sanskrit scholars.