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A Corpus of Indian Studies
great accuracy and consistency of most Tibetan translations of works from this school and our generally increasing know. ledge of the Tibetan translation-techniques usually allow a good idea of what the original Sanskrit might have looked like, but there is no critical certainty in this and with regard to the details of phraseology and syntactical arrangement we can never reach such a standard of probability that a re-translation can be considered as a real substitute of the original text.
These re-translations have the same distance to the original as e.g. English or German translations from the Tibetan, although this distance is deceptively minimized by the seeming identity of the la nguage used with the language of the original. They have to be considered, therefore, as modern translations into Sanskrit, and not as restorations or reconstructions of the Sanskrit original. The merit of re-translations consists only in that they render intelligible the Tibetan translations to the traditional Indian scholar or Indologist who does not read Tibetan, and thus present him with an impression of a lost literary treasure of the Indian tradition. Since it is tempting to consider such translations into Sanskrit as the original and at the same time evident that such a conception can lead further on towards misinterpretation, one cannot caution too strongly against this kind of error. To be sure, from such re-translations we have to distinguish authentic reconstructions which are possible, however, only to that extent to which fragments of the original and Sanskrit-commentaries extant have transmitted the language-material of the text, which then can be checked and arranged by means of comparing them with the Tibetan translations.
JI
The following group of fragments from Jinendrabuddhi's Viśālāmalavatl (PST), the only real commentary on Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya and -vptti existing, is a small example of the often surprising possibilities we have in gathering these valuable textual remains.
