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A RARE MANUSCRIPT OF ASAMGA'S
ABHIDHARMASAMUCCAYA
V. V. GOKHALE FERGUSSON COLLEGE, POONA
Among the list of Sanskrit manuscripts reported to have been discovered by Rāhula Sāmkrtyāyana' in the Tibetan monastery of Şa-lu near Si-ga-rtse, is an incomplete palm-leaf manuscript of Asamga's Abhidharmasamuccaya, described as being 214 by 2 inches and written in the Māgadhi script, with seven lines on each page. Four photographs of this manuscript, taken on quarter size films so as to include both sides of all the seventeen leaves, had to be enlarged to about four times their original size in order to make the writing legible with the help of a magnifying lens. Copies of such enlargements are available for consultation on the premises of the Bihar Research Society, Patna.
After Nāgārjuna had laid the foundations of a sūnyată dialectic, which came to be accepted after the second century A. D. as the irrefutable background of all Buddhist philosophizing, it was given to Asamga to establish, in the fourth century A.D., a complete scheme of the ways and means of realizing the logically inconceivable mode of Becoming. This philosophy rested on direct experience (yoga) rather than on intellectual criticism (prajñā) with respect to reality. It meant a return to the older realistic attitude of the founders of Buddhism on the new level of philosophic ability attained by the Mahāyānists. Just as Nāgārjuna's negativistic philosophy represented at its best the spirit of the unsettled, leveling, and yet peculiarly virulent political complex in northern India, dominated by Kanişka, Asamga seems to reflect in his thought the activising, reconstructing, and even compromising spirit of the Gupta age. The Yogācāra system, the foundation
*K. P. Jayaswal pays an enthusiastic tribute to his remarkable spirit of enterprise: "Lost Sanskrit Works Recovered from Tibet" in the Modern Review (Feb. 1937) 159-64.
Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (JBORS) 33 (Pt. 1).48, title no. 312.
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