Brief History Of Buddhist Studies In Europe And Maerica

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

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BUDDHIST STUDIES IN THE WEST
editors have not been able to make full use of all the existing materials. Moreover, although many variant readings are given in the foot-notes, the Taisho Daizōkyō cannot be said to be a truly critical edition of the Chinese texts. It is one of the traditions of Western scholarship that the study of philosophical, religious and historical problems in ancient Rome and Greece must be based in the first place on a sound philological basis. The same applies to the study of Buddhism which has produced such an enormous literature in many languages. One may expect that the publication of Sanskrit manuscripts will continue both in the West and in Japan. A critical study of the Chinese Buddhist texts can only be undertaken in Japan by Japanese scholars. It will be necessary to collect systematically the printed editions of the Chinese canon. Some of them, for instance the very important Chi-sha (Filmek) edition, had not even been discovered when the Taisho Daizōkyō was being published. Furthermore many old manuscripts are still preserved in Japanese temples and libraries. Last but not least the Tun-huang manuscripts have now become more accessible since many collections have been catalogued. The fact that at present many more manuscripts are available is of great importance for the study of the transmission of the Chinese texts. In ancient manuscripts many characters were written in a way different from the present and this accounts for confusion between characters and for scribal errors which have been perpetuated in the printed editions. Just as editors of Sanskrit manuscripts have to pay careful attention to the script in which a manuscript is written and to the errors the scribe may have committed in copying a manuscript written in a different script in order to establish a correct text, in the same way the editor of Chinese Buddhist texts will have to take into account historical and personal peculiarities in the writing of Chinese characters.
It is obvious that such an undertaking will demand many years and requires the co-operation of many scholars. It will probably be advisable to begin with texts which are rather short and of which the textual history is not too complicated. This depends of course also on the number of manuscripts available. The publication of a small number of critical text editions will make it possible to gradually work out a system of editorial methods before undertaking the editing of more difficult texts on a larger scale. In this way one will obtain a slowly increasing corpus of critical text editions which will form the essential basis for further comparative study of the Chinese texts with Indian originals
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