Book Reviews

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

Page 19

REVIEWS
G.M. Bongard-Levin, M. I. Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja, Pamjatniki indijskoj pis 'mennosti iz centralnoj Azii, vypusk 1. Izdanie tekstov, issledovanie i kommentarij (Pamjatniki pis'mennosti vostoka, LXXIII, 1; Bibliotheca Buddhica, XXXIII). Izdatel'stvo ‘Nauka', Glavnaja redakcija vostočnoj literatury, 1985. 285 pp. 3 r. 50 kop.
It is a pleasure to welcome this volume of the Bibliotheca Buddhica which contains much new manuscript material for the study of Buddhist Sanskrit texts. The present publication comprises an edition of six fragments of the Mahāparinirvānasūtra by Bongard-Levin, an edition of the text of a terminological work, called Dharmaśarīra, also by Bongard-Levin, and Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja's edition of 85 leaves and fragments belonging to seven different Central Asian manuscripts of the Saddharmapundarīkasūtra.
The book contains an English translation of the table of contents (p. 8) and a summary (pp. 174-176) which will be of limited help to scholars who do not read Russian. It will therefore probably be useful to give some more information without repeating the contents of the English summary.
The preface presents a brief history of the discoveries of manuscripts in Central Asia by Russian scholars at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The authors mention in the first place the contributions made by N. F. Petrovskij, who was Russian consul in Kashgar from 1882 to 1903, and by Serge Ol’denburg (1863-1934) to whom are due the first editions of Sanskrit manuscripts from Central Asia in the last decade of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since that period little attention has been paid to these manuscripts and it is only recently that their study was taken up again by V.S. Vorob'ev-Desjatovskij (1927–1956), who published several Sanskrit and Tibetan documents and who prepared a description and card-index of the Central-Asian manuscripts in Sanskrit, Khotanese, Kuchean and Tibetan,
The detailed description of the Central Asian Manuscript Fund of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences which is jointly written by both authors (pp. 14-21) is very useful. Of the eleven collections the most important is the Petrovskij collection, which contains 582 items (251 Sanskrit paper manuscripts, leaves and fragments written in Brāhmi script; 23 documents on wood of which 20 are in Sanskrit and written in Brahmi script; two manuscripts in North-Western Prakrit and written in Kharoşthi script; 297 paper manuscripts
Indo-Iranian Journal 30 (1987) 215.