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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.orgAcharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
Introduction
1. Discovery of the Kharosthi Manuscript of the Dhammapada.—The Dhammapada, now edited and translated with improved readings and readjustments, is the only text of which a fragment has been preserved in Kharosthi, a script in which two recensions of Asoka's Rock Edicts, at Shahbazgarhi and Mapsebra, are inscribed, and this is the only Buddhist text which has been hitherto found composed in a Prakrit dialect. The manuscript is one of the earliest finds from Khotan. Among later finds in Khotan, we have to mention a few documents containing “dispositions and reports of local authorities instructions, regulations, official and private correspondenceall inscribed in the Kharo-thi script and drawn up in a Prakrit dialect."ı Prof. Lüders says," the date of the Prakrit documents is fixed by the Chinese wooden tablets which have been mixed with the later, and one of which is dated A.D. 269."9 The first discovery of the Prakrit text of the Dhammapada in Kharoşthi was made in 1892 by the French traveller Datreuil de Rhins, who found altogether three fragments in Khotan, which he despatched to Paris. With regard to these fragments Prof. Lüders notes: "In 1897 Senart made known their contents and value......... Senart's communication created a sensation in the Aryan section of the Oriental Congress beld in Paris. The find represented a Kharoşthi manuscript.
" These wo owe to Sir Aurel Stoin. Soo his monumental work, The Ancient Khotan, in two big volumos.
Lüdera' raper Uber die literarischen Funde ron Ostturkeatan, translatod by Mr. G. K. Nariman in his Literary History, p. 238.
For Private And Personal
