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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.orgAcharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
( 11 ) Fa-kheu-pi-u, although the original translators in Chinese are very largely responsible for a violent distortion of the contents and sense of the Indian original. If the Fa-kheu-pi-u or its text portion the Fa-klieu-king be the specimen of the Chinese rendering of Indian texts, the student of Indian literature will surely labour in vain in grappling with the super-human and almost unsurmountable difficulty of mastering a knowledge of the Chinese alphabet and diction-a pursuit which, to put in the words of a witty Bengalee friend, will amount to breaking one's teeth in cracking the nut for so scanty and strange a kernel.
Grünwedel, Stein and Pelliot have placed bumanity under a deep debt of gratitude by their successive missions into Central Asia, or more correctly to say, the Chinese Turkestan, for bringing together numerous fragments of the manuscript of the Ud@navarga which is undoubtedly a Buddhist work of the Dhammapada class. We cannot but agree with M. de la Vallée Poussin in thinking that the text of this Ms. is a recension of the original of the Tibetan text attributed to Dharmatrāta and bearing the name of Udāvavarga. But one must naturally be tempted to join issue with him when he describes the language of the text as "quasi-Sanscrit,” for although in certain verses the older Pāli or Prakritic forms are retained, obviously for the sake of metre, the attempt at Sanskritisation appears to have reached in this text a stage well-nigh perfection as compared with previous attempts.
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