Book Reviews

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

Page 23

REVIEWS
219
n. pl. This is of course the only interpretation possible, but it is difficult to see why Bongard-Levin wants to write aptamanabhikṣu as a compound.
The introduction to the edition of leaves and fragments of the Saddharmapundarikasūtra by M. I. Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja consists of a history of the study and the edition of the texts of the SP [= Saddharmapundarika] and a description of the leaves and fragments from the Petrovskij collection and the Lavrov collection (pp. 78-92), followed by two tables, the first indicating the concordance of the leaves and fragments with the Bibliotheca Buddhica edition, and the second the concordance with the Kashgar manuscript.
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In her survey of the history of the study of the SP, Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja refers to the Kashgar manuscript of Petrovskij, but without taking into account Emmerick's remarks on this manuscript: "Most of these fragments form part of a single MS. from the region of Khotan, and its very existence is owed to the joint donation of several Khotanese patrons." According to V.-D. [Vorob❜evaDesjatovskaja] the Kashgar manuscript was written no later than the fifth century, but in his recent edition of the Central Asian manuscripts H. Toda writes that it was written in the ninth or tenth century. The history of the discovery of this manuscript is not very clear. Both Bongard-Levin and V.-D. state that it was given in 1910 by Sir G. Macartney, British Consul-General in Kashgar, to the Russian Academy of Sciences (cf. pp. 17 and 78). However, according to V.-D. a photocopy was made in the beginning of this century and put at the disposal of Kern and Nanjio for the edition of the SP in the Bibliotheca Buddhica. Willy Baruch quotes from an article written by Ol'denburg in 1904 which I have not been able to consult. According to this article, the previous winter Ol'denburg had received from Petrovskij manuscripts found in Khotan. Among these manuscripts were fragments of eight different manuscripts of the SP. One of these fragments (sic) contained more than two hundred leaves. With the agreement of Petrovskij he would send all fragments to Kern.10 In his book, Toda quotes Hoernle's note on the fragments 142 and 148 edited by Lüders as applying to the entire Kashgar manuscript, but this is not certain. It is to be hoped that our Russian colleagues will be able to clarify the history of the Kashgar manuscript.
In his preface to the facsimile edition of the Kashgar manuscript, H. Bechert distinguished a Nepalese-Kashmirian recension and a Central Asian recension. According to V.-D., in the first centuries of our era there was only one recension diffused in India and Central Asia. At the time of the Sanskrit renaissance the text of the sutra was revised, some repetitions omitted, and the grammatical forms unified. The text obtained a more severe and laconic appearance. This revised text, which came into being at the time of the formation of Mahāyāna, was propagated in Northern India. It was selected for translation into Chinese by Kumārajīva and his school who belonged to a higher class of translators in comparison with their