Indian Antiquary Vol 62

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 23

JANUARY, 1933 ]
MISCELLANEA
Translation.-Of these the manifested-earth, etc.—are perceptible in their true form even to the ploughman having his feet covered with dust.
Comment.-The peasant is to the mind of Vâchaspati Miśra the best example of the mentally undeveloped people. This clearly means that education was confined to the upper strata of society and did not reach as low as the poor ignorant peasants.
Conclusion. The few extracts given above by no means exhaust the information to be supplied by Váchaspati Misra. If some scholar well-versed in Sanskrit would undertake the laborious task of going through the great philosopher and commentator's voluminous works, he would probably find his toil amply repaid by the amount of information to be gleaned therefrom relative to the social conditions of the age.
MISCELLANEA. INDIA AND THE EAST IN CURRENT Later on, a number of leaves from this find were LITERATURE.
sent to Europe by Sir A. Stein. The oxamination Journal Asiatique, tome CCXX, No. 1, Janvier of all this material has enabled the learned French Mars, 1932. In this issue M. Sylvain Lévi con scholar to write this paper, in which ho confirma tributes & valuable note, illustrated by 4 plates on Sir Aurel's estimate of the date (around the sixth which eight specimens of the MSS. have been very century A.D.) of the MSS., and further emphasises clearly reproduced from photographs, on two the extreme value of the find. Eleven birch-bark important finds of Sanskrit MSS. at Bamian and leaves of large size, beautifully written in sixthDear Gilgit. At Bamian, in a cave to the east of Boventh century characters, form portion of a magnit tho 35 metres high figure of the Buddha, in a portion cent copy of the Vinaya of the Malasarvâstivadins, of the cupola that had fallen in, M. Hackin dis. the value of which can hardly be overestimated, covered, besides important remains of paintings the Sanskrit original of this Vinaya (with the and sculpture, a large quantity of Mss. on bark, excoption of the portions preserved in the Divya) unfortunately stuck together in & compact mess not being available hitherto. M. Lévi has added and very brittle, mostly in Brahmi script, but in a transcription (in Romans) of these leaves, to. cluding some rare records in Kharos thi. M. Hackin gether with a translation in French of portions succeeded in setting up some of the best preserved thereof. "It is useless," he writes, "to insist fragments under glass, and these were, with permis. upon the paramount importance of this document. sion of H. M. King Nadir Shah, sent to Paris. M. Lévi One shudders to think that the leaves of this tells us that the documents cover the period from Vinaya, recovered by a kind of miracle, may have the third-fourth century (Kupana) to the seventh. beon distributed among the peasants of Gilgit, eighth century (late Gupta) and besides the types of to be sold by little packets, if no worse fate even writing found in India proper, Central Asian types should befall ther." Six other leaves of smaller are reprosented, indicating that the library had con- dimension, of the same period but in a different tained MSS. from various sources, or else that handwriting, aro of a kind of thick carton paper copyists from different countries had been employed. (which seems to point to an Eastern Turkestan The chief interest of this find lies in its providing provenanco). These belong to a manuscript of an authentic portion of the Vinaya of the Mahathe Saddharmapundarika and include, fortunately, sârghikas, as also an authentic fragment of the the last page of the work with a part of the colophon. Bovon pddas of the Abhidharma of the Sarvâstiv&dins,
The difficulty of deciphering this latter, which hitherto known only from their Chinese translation, appears to contain a list of the benefactors asociated the Sangiti parydya.
with the pious work of making the copy, is increased In the March 1932 issue of this journal (vol. LXI, by the fact that most of the names recorded are p. 60) we published information received from Sir not Sanskrit, nor even Indian names. M. Lévi Aurel Stein of the very important find of a mess believes they are Turkish, or more prucisely, Tou. of ancient Sanskrit MSS. in the ruins of A ata pa kiue names, which he regards as "fairly probable near Naupur village, about 2 miles west of Gilgit since round about the year 600 A.D. Gilgit was cantonment. A member of the Citroen expedition, incorporated in the vast empire of the Western which happened to be passing Gilgit shortly after Tou-kiue." Sir Aurel had been there, managed to take some Archio Orientálns, vol. IV, No. 2, Aug. 1932.photographs of a few of the leaves, which were Monsr. J. Przyluski, in one of his intriguing and submitted to M. Lévi, who had also received a ingenious essays, suggests a non-Indo-European fragment of a loaf obtained by another traveller.origin for the name, and a Dravidian origin for