Gandhari Prakrit Version of Rhinoceros Sutra

Author(s): J C Wright
Publisher: ZZ_Anusandhan

Page 14

test 500 verses, but appears rather to survive as a demonstration that any given gāthā involving khadgavişāņa might be multiplied with slight variations in order to provide individual enlightenment for 500 'Pratyekabuddhas’: sarvā khadgavişāna-gātā vistarena kartavyā. pancānām pratyekabuddhasatānām eka-ekā gāthā. The instruction that the text can be expanded in this way justifies neither the inference that all 500 verses were already in existence nor N. A, Jayawickrama's idea that the specimen dozen verses might be evidence of an original nucleus. Certainly it does not justify his imputation of a title 'Khadgavişāņagāthā' to the Sanskrit text(Univ. of Ceylon Review, 1949, 120,= Pali Buddhist Review, 1977,23), which leads to Salomon's suggestion (p.10) that Ga. might have borne such a title.
The view that paccekabuddha represents original pratyayabuddha / patteyabuddha' is cited non-committally by Salomon (p. 9, n., referring to Norman, Coll. papers, II, 233ff.). The evidence, however, points rather strongly in the opposite direction. De Jong, in his discussion of the Chinese renderings (The Eastern Buddhist, Oct. 1977, 173f.) was insistent that the transcription yüan-i-chüeh must be more original than yüan-chüch, i.e. that something interpreted as pratyaya-eka-buddha preceded any notion of pratyayabuddha; and that the basis for this would be the eminently appropriate term pratyeka (rather than *prātyayika, which in any case would give the inappropriate sense “reliable”).
Despite Norman, the aberrant palatalization in Prakrit patteya < pratyaya is rather a matter of dissimilation in that particular word (and no more evidence of a non-palatalizing dialect than dosinā < jyotsna, where -fs- may be subject to palatalization, or addhabhavi, which is clearly < *abbhabhavi). Sanskrit pratyayabuddha (patteyabuddha, yüan-chüch) would have been substituted for pratyekabuddha, on the assumption that paccekabodhi 'individual enlightenment' (Salomon, p.8)