Book Title: Notes On Manuscript Transmission Of Vaisesika Sutra And Its Earliest Commentaries
Author(s): Harunaga Issacson
Publisher: Harunaga Issacson
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followed by the VS, again without a commentary. Only the folios containing the Nyāyasūtra and the VS, together with the beginning of another work which I have not yet identified, are available to me at present, in the form of a photocopy (made from microfilm) kindly provided to me by Prof. A. Wezler. Hence I shall not, indeed can not, here provide a full description of the manuscript.
The manuscript is written in Jaina Devanāgarī script and by a single hand. The portion available to me bears no date. I am skeptical about the possibility of dating it on purely palaeographical grounds, but, for what it's worth, my personal judgement would be that the hand is relatively early; that it is to say, I should be a little surprised if it were to prove to be later than the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The text of the VS begins on folio 4 and ends on f.7". The individual sūtras are not numbered, nor is there always a single or double danda after them. On the other hand, there are occasional dandas in the middle of what must, on considerations of sense as well as in view of the other recensions, be a single sutra. I may remark that this, as well as the fact that sandhi is regularly applied between the end of a sutra and the beginning of the next, suggests that the text in this manuscript probably was not extracted directly from a manuscript containing the sūtras embedded in a commentary. For if we assume that the scribe of A went through a manuscript containing both sūtras and commentary and copied out the sūtras alone, it follows that he would have had to be able to identify the sūtras in the examplar he was copying from and recognize where each sūtra ended and the commentary began. Therefore the signs I mentioned, suggesting that in fact the scribe does not always identify the ends and beginnings of the sūtras correctly, speak against this theory. Of course it remains perfectly possible that an
11 Two other scenarios are at least as unlikely. One might consider the possibility that the scribe had before him a manuscript of a commentary which did not give each sutra separately, followed by its commentary, but merely contained occasional pratikas of the sūtras. This I find highly unlikely because I cannot credit that the result of such a scribal reconstruction of the sūtras would have been nearly as good as A in fact is. Furthermore, none of the manuscripts I have examined of the VS together with a commentary are in fact of this type. One more possibility could be that the manuscript was dictated to the scribe, whether by someone using a manuscript with sūtras and commentary, by someone using a manuscript with the sutrapatha alone or from memory. However A contains enough errors which point to copying from another manuscript for this hypothesis to be quite unconvincing. For instance, we find some clear cases of misreading of similar akşaras, as well as of probable eyeskip.
