Brief History Of Buddhist Studies In Europe And Maerica

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

Page 62

THE EASTERN BUDDHIST
which have been assimilated in other Prakrits. Chinese transcriptions of Indian words in the translation of the Dírghāgama of the Dharmaguptakas are based upon a Prakrit dialect which, according to Bailey and Brough, must have been the Gāndhāri language. Undoubtedly, other Chinese translations must have been made from texts written in Gāndhārī. Only a careful study of Chinese translations will make it possible to discover which translations are based upon a Gāndhāri original. It is not possible to determine to which school the Gāndhārī Dharmapada belonged. The Sarvāstivāda school is the one most frequently mentioned in the Kharoşthi inscriptions of northwestern India. From the publications of Central Asian manuscripts by Waldschmidt and other German scholars it is obvious that the same school was once prevalent in Central Asia. However, Brough shows that the Gāndhāri Dharmapada is different from the Sarvāstivāda tradition as preserved in the Udānavarga. Brough mentions as possibilities the Dharmaguptakas and the Kāśyapīyas which are both mentioned also in northwestern inscriptions. He carefully compares the Gāndhārī versions of the Dharmapada stanzas with those of other versions in the extensive commentary (pp. 177–282) which follows his edition of the text. This commentary is of fundamental importance for the study of many linguistic and grammatical problems in the Sanskrit, Pāli and Gāndhāri versions of the Dharmapada. Brough's work can be called without hesitation the definitive work on the subject. Further research and the discovery of new materials are not likely to cause any substantial changes in the main body of this work. K. R. Norman, an excellent specialist in Middle Indic, who has made a thorough study of Brough's work, has recently shown that only very few revisions can be suggested.14
In the last thirty years great progress has been made with the publication of the Sanskrit manuscripts that were brought back by the German Turfan expeditions. Most of the Hīnayāna fragments belong to the Sarvāstivāda school. This has been proved by comparison with Chinese translations for fragments of the Vinaya and also for an Abhidharma text, the Samgitiparyāya, fragments of which were published by Stache-Rosen.15 Fragments of the same
14 Notes on the Gāndhāri Dharmapada, Indian Linguistics, 32, 1971, pp. 213-220.
15 Valentina Stache-Rosen, Dogmatische Begriffsreihen im ältern Buddhismus, II. Das Sangitisūtra und sein Kommentar Sangitiparyāya. Berlin, 1968.