Text Documents And Extracts Chiefly From Manuscripts in Bodleian Vol 01 Part 02

SR No.: 020817
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller, Bunyiu Nanjio
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1883
Total Pages: 131
Language: English, Sanskrit
Classification: Book_English & Book_Devnagari
File Size: 10 MB

Page 16

BUDDHIST TEXTS FROM JAPAN.
commonly called (1) Ta-kin (Dai-kio) or Large Sätra,' (2) Kwan-kiri (Kwan-gio) or 'Sûtra of Meditation,' and (3) Siâo-kiń (Shio-kio) or Small Satra.'
But although the Sukhavati-vyuha and, more particularly, the Larger Sukhâvatî-vyuha, was so widely studied, translated, and commented upon in China and Japan, all efforts for obtaining a MS. of the Sanskrit text, either from Japan or from China or from Corea, have hitherto proved vain, and even the hope of future success has been very much reduced.
I had a visit last year from a Chinese Buddhist, an excellent scholar, Yang Wen-hoei, who has devoted the whole of his life, in connection with his friend Miao-khung (died in 1881), to a new edition of the Chinese Tripitaka. He had travelled for that purpose during thirteen years, collecting alms to enable him to defray the expense of his costly undertaking. He has published already more than 3000 volumes, and he thinks it will take him ten or twenty years more to finish his task. The Chinese Government does not help him, as few only among the officials now believe in Buddhism. He therefore follows, as he said, the old maxim of 'gathering the hairs from under the armpit of foxes, and thus making a garment. He publishes as much as he can with the alms he is able to collect.
When I asked him whether in his travels from monastery to monastery he had ever met with any Sanskrit or Pali MSS., he told me that he had never seen any, and that there was at present hardly a single Chinese priest who knew Sanskrit. And when I inquired what he thought could have become of the Sanskrit MSS. which, as we know, were exported from India to China in very large numbers, from the first to at least the twelfth century, he replied that since the time of the Thang and Sung dynasties (A.D. 618-1280) several old pagodas had been burnt, and that the MSS. had most likely perished with them. However, as Sanskrit MSS. had formerly been preserved in such places as Shen-si (the eighth of the eighteen provinces of modern China), Shan-si (the sixth), Ho-nan (the seventh), and Peking, he promised, after his return to his own country, to visit these Northern places, in order to ascertain whether any Sanskrit MSS. might still be discovered there.
When all hope of new material had thus for the present, at least, to be surrendered, it became a question whether it would be possible or desirable to attempt to restore a text of the Larger Sukhâvati-vyuha