Brief History Of Buddhist Studies In Europe And Maerica

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

Page 57

BUDDHIST STUDIES IN THE WEST
with Edgerton, but they are not willing to accept that the prose of the works of the second class and the works belonging to the third class belong to the BHS tradition. According to them these texts were written in a Buddhist Sanskrit which contains some elements of BHS. Edgerton has rejected this opinion: "It seems to me that hybrid forms in the prose of the second class are just what hybrid forms in the verses of the same texts are: relics of genuine BHS forms which must have been much more numerous. Similarly texts of the third class. And I hold that all the works I have classified as BHS (excepting perhaps the Jātakamālā), and some others, do constitute, on the whole, a unified tradition” (JAOS, 77, 1957, pp. 189–190). In his grammar (1.40–44) Edgerton pointed out that in the case of texts such as the Saddharmapundarīka, Vajracchedikā and the Udānavarga the Central Asian manuscripts show a more Middle Indic appearance than the Nepalese manuscripts. According to Regamey (Asiatica, p. 523) these texts have not been submitted to a conscious Sanskritization but copyists have corrected the texts. However, if one compares' for instance Chakravarti's edition of the Udānavarga with the later recensions, one observes not a mechanic Sanskritization but the transposition of words, the substitution of pādas by newly created pādas, etc. This is certainly due to a.deliberate attempt to re-write these verses in Sanskrit. It seems to me that it is not possible to make a unilateral decision. Some texts, written in Buddhist Sanskrit with a few BHS elements, may have directly been composed in this language but others may well be the end product of a long process of Sanskritization. It will probably be possible to arrive at a greater degree of certainty only when the available Central Asian and Gilgit manuscripts have been properly edited and accompanied by photographic facsimiles.
Another objection which has been raised against Edgerton is his use of Nepalese 'manuscripts. Edgerton has not himself studied any manuscripts of Buddhist texts. Scholars such as Brough, Regamey, Nobel and Waldschmidt have a long experience of studying manuscripts and are more keenly aware of the possibility of scribal errors than Edgerton. It is of course often difficult to distinguish between a genuine BHS form and a scribal error. It is perhaps methodically advisable to consider in the first place the possibility that an aberrant (from classical Sanskrit) form is a BHS form and not a scribal error.
* Festschrift Friedrich Weller, Leipzig, 1954, pp. 514-527.