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ŚRĀVAKABHŪMI
current century of the Christian Era. His predecessors in India were MM. Dr. Hara Prasad Shastri and Prof. Rajendra Lal Mitra of Bengal who first discovered the Buddhist texts from the manuscript-treasures of Nepal and edited them in the last quarter of the last and the first quarter of the present century.
This edition of the Srāvakabhūmi is based on the enlarged photo-prints of the single manuscript of this text brought from the Shā-lu monastery of Tibet by the late Mahāpaņdita, the photostat of which is preserved in the K. P. Jayaswal Research -Institute, Patna. So far as our information goes, this is the only manuscript of the Śrāvakabhūmi known to the scholarly world. Its SinoTibetan translations and Japanese versions are also known to modern scholarship. It is peculiar to note that the manuscript of the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra does, not contain its XIIIth and the XVth bhūmis. The SinoTibetan translations also omit these two bhūmis (i.e., the Srăvakabhumi and the Bodhisattvabhūmi) from the text of the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra. The apparent reason for this seems to be mainly the large bulk of these two bhūmis.
The enlarged photo-print of the palm-leaf MSS utilised by us is corrupt and defective in several respects. The earlier portions of the text comprising the discussions on the gotra, the avatāra and the naiskramya bhūmis (in parts), the Kalyāṇamitratā and several other portions are missing in the manuscript. Some of these
