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 17

SUKHAVATỈ-VUHA.
xi
with the MSS. now at hand. There are five MSS. in Europe :. one at the Royal Asiatic Society in London (A), one in the Bodleian Library (B), one at Cambridge (C), and two at Paris (P and p)
Four of these, A, B, C, and P, have been copied and carefully collated by Mr. Bunyiu Nanjio and Mr. Kasawara ; one, p, has been consulted in certain passages only.
When I endeavoured with these materials to restore a text, I soon found that the task was almost impossible. All these MSS. come from one and the same country, from Nepal, and in all difficult passages they almost always share the same corruptions and omissions.
I pointed out on a former occasion that these corruptions must have crept into the Sanskrit texts of the Northern Buddhist literature at a very early time, even before the time when the Chinese translations were made, for we find that some of these translations presuppose corruptions which we now find in our Nepalese MSS., but which we can easily prove to be corruptions. Thus we read in the Lalita-vistara (ed. Calc. p. 543, 1. 8):
Kakshur anityam adhruvam tatha srotaghrânam gihvâpi,
Kaya-mana-duhkhå anåtma api riktasvabhavasünyal. Here the metre shows that we must omit gihvâpi in the first, and Kayamana in the second line. They are additions, and very natural additions, to the original text. But when we take Divakara's translation, the Fâr-kwân-ta-kwân-yen-kin, which was made about A. D. 685, we find both gihvapi,' also the tongue,' and Kaya-mana, 'body and mind,' reproduced, and we find exactly the same in the far later Tibetan version.
In the same chapter (p. 527), after Upaka had asked Bhagavat how he could bear witness of himself, and claim for himself the names of Arhat and Gina, Buddha answers :
Gina hi mâdrisâ gñeya ye prâpta asravakshayam
Gità me pâpakâ dharmâs tenopagino hy aham. Here the last pâda is clearly wrong in metre and matter. There is no such word as upagina, and the Pâli version of the same verse (Mahâvagga, vol. i. p. 8) shows that the Sanskrit text must have been 'tenopaka gino hy aham,' the sense being, Those who, like me, have reached the
Selected Essays, vol. ii. pp. 343-345.
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