Fragments Of Sthiramatis Trimsikavijnaptibhasya In Patna Ccollection Of Tibetan Manuscript Materials

Author(s): V V Gokhale
Publisher: V V Gokhale

Page 1

Fragments of Sthiramati's Trimsikavijñaptibhasya in the
Patna collection of Tibetan manuscript materials
by
V. V. Gokhale
Since the first publication by Sylvain Lévi (Paris, 1925) of Vasubandhu's Vijñaptimâtratāsiddhi, Part I-Texts, containing the Sanskrit text of the commentary of Sthiramati on Vasubandhu's Trimśikāvijñaptikārikā, the text has been studied by several eminent Indianists of the West and the East, and has been translated and corrected on the basis of Tibetan and Chinese sources or emended in the light of various contexts.1
After Levi's edition, no new manuscript of this important text is known to have come to light and Ui's list of corrections may be said to present, therefore, the latest revised form of the original text. However, while looking through some of the photographs of Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts, discovered by the late Pandit Rahulabhadra Sāmkriyāyana and found at present in the K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute at Patna, (which were kindly made available to me by the said Institute through the good offices of the Bombay University), I came across two fragments of this text, which I wish to treat here as a small addenda to the available textual material on the subject.
The photographs in question seem to correspond to what has been described as No. 66 in the VIJI. bundle, found in the Ngor monastery of Tibet and entitled : (“Darśanagrantha") in the list of Palm-leaf mss. in Tibet, published in JBORS, Vol. XXI, pt.i, p.33. Actually, we have in this collection four Plates, marked as: “N-Darsana, IA, IB, 2A and 2B", each containing photographs of nine pages, arranged one below the other. These 36 pages contain apparently three different texts, including fragments of Mahāyānasvtralamkara and Cakrasamvaravivrti besides the present fragments of the Trimsikāvijñaptibhäsya. It is probably the general title : Daršana', assigned by Pandit Rahulabhadra to the contents of these Plates coupled with the illegibility of the photographs, which has discouraged scholars from identifying the texts represented in them.
Out of the four Plates, we are concerned here only with the first two Plates, viz., IA and IB, which contain two fragments of our text, covering one full folio (i.e. two pages) and the right half page of another folio. The two fragments as located in Lévi's text are as belaw:
(1) The first fragment is found on the topmost folio (in the Plate
called: “N(i.e. Ngor Darsana IA" only the right half of