________________ ThREFACE The most important work of Aryadeva (c. 200-225 A.D.) is the Catuh sa t a ka comprising, as the name itself shows, four hundred karikas or verses in sixteen chapters (prakaranas) cach of them containing twentyfive. It has two commentaries, one by Candrakirtti and the other by Dharmapala. But neither the original nor the commentaries in their entirety are now available in the Sanskrit text. The complete work with Candrakirtti's commentary is, however, found in the Tibetan version (Tanjur, Mdo, Tsh, 1 ; and Y, 2; Cordier, II, pp. 296, 304), both of them being jointly translated by Suksmajnana of India and Suryakirtti (si ma grags) of Tibet. In Chinese we have only the last eight chapters (IX-XVI) of the book. It is called there Sata sastra vai pulya (Kwan pai lun pan ; Nanjio, No. 1189). There is also the commentary by Dharmapala extending like the original only from Chapter IX to XVI (Nanjio, No. 1198). * Whether Dharmapala wrote his commentary also on the first eight chapters is pot known ; but it appears from Candrakirtti's observation which we shall presently see in the preliminary Introduction, that he did not do so. The last eight chapters of the work with Dharmapala's commentary were translated into Chinese by Hiuen-tsang himself (650 A.D.). In 1914 Mahamabopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri published some fragments of the Catuh sa ta ka mixed with Capdrakirtti's commentary in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. III, No. 8, pp. 449-514. In 1923 Dr. P. L. Vaidya in his Etudes sur Ary a deva et son Catuhsa ta ka published the last nine chapters (VIII-XVI) of the work. Here he first gave the karikas in the Tibetan version adding the Sanskrit original where available ; but where it was not available, he reconstructed the karikas in Sanskrit from the Tibetan version. And then he translated all the karikas into French. Then in 1925 Prof. G. Tucci in Rivista degli
