Notes On Manuscript Transmission Of Vaisesika Sutra And Its Earliest Commentaries

Author(s): Harunaga Issacson
Publisher: Harunaga Issacson

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significantly, these sūtras are the two which occur earlier in the VS. The sūtra drstānām drstaprayojanānām drstābhāve prayogo 'bhyudayāya (C's 10.20; A, S and SM all have the same reading too) occurs earlier as 6.2.1, while the final sūtra tadvacanād amnāyaprāmānyam (thus C, S16 and A; ŚM reads tadvacanādāmnāyasya prāmānyam) is VS 1.1.3.
10 10.8 in A reads abhüd ity abhūtāt, agreeing with C and S, and differing
from SM which reads abhūd ity api. V is not available here.
The cases listed above, though a mere sample, 17 should I think be sufficient to establish that A represents a hitherto unknown recension of the VS, and one which is in numerous respects superior at least to the version commented on by Sankara Miśra. Among the commentaries, A's text is decidedly closest to that followed by Candrānanda, but the differences between the two versions, such as those noted under points 4, 5, 6 and 9 above, are too many to allow us to regard them as following the same recension.
INI Another manuscript which contains the text of the VS with no accompanying commentary is a palm-leaf manuscript in the Kerala University Manuscripts Library, Trivandrum.18 I shall refer to this MS in the following as T. As in A, the text of the VS is preceded by that of the Nyāyasūtras, again without a commentary.19
16 Thakur reports S as reading tadvacanād amnāyasya prāmānyam with ŚM (Thakur 1965, 21). But this is incorrect; the manuscript (which I have consulted from photocopies kindly provided by the Asiatic Society, Calcutta) is a little difficult to make out but definitely reads tadvacanãd amnāyapramanyam.
17A's readings of a number of other sūtras are quoted, by way of comparison, in several of the examples given in the following sections below.
18 The manuscript number is 22615B, although the photocopy kindly supplied to me erroneously has the number 921B written on it. It appears to be uncatalogued; it is not listed in the Alphabetical Inder of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library, Trivandrum. Vol. III (Ya to Sa) (Bhaskaran 1984).
I am not sure what conclusions, if any, may be drawn from the fact that both A and Tare Sammelhandschriften.' From having stumbled on these two cases in the course of my really rather limited examination of VS manuscripts, I suppose that there may well be other such manuscripts containing, for example, the text of the Nyāyasūtra and the VS, perhaps together with other texts. Unfortunately, such manuscripts are at a greater risk than most of being wrongly catalogued, since correct identification depends on the manuscript being gone through more carefully than the glance at beginning and end which is often all that a cataloguer will find time to do.
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