________________
सप्तमं परिशिष्टम् ।
lat
hgyur, it also contains a number of books on secular subjects-history, logic etc. It is thus not-only an important collection of Buddhist works, but indispensable if one wishes to study the cultural conditions prevailing in ancient and medieval India and its neighbouring countries.
3. Value of the Tibetan Tripitaka,
We have already seen that the Tibetans, for the purpose of adopting Buddhism, were obliged to create a classical or literary language of their own, in order to cope with the translation of Buddhist texts, enshrining as they do one of the world's most erudite system of thought. and written in a well-nigh perfect language, Sanskrit. Under the circumstances and in conside- 10 ration of time factor, there was no other alternative but to invent a purely artificial language, rather after the fashion of original Sanskrit.. Then in collaboration with Indian scholars, the Tibetan translators simply made a verbatim translation. This accounts for the fact that the translated texts are for the most part faithful copies of Sanskrit originals. It was quite otherwise 15 with the Chinese translations. China was, we must remember, already a highly civilised nation at the time Buddhism was introduced into the country, one with a long traditional culture of her own and possessed of one of the most highly developed and elaborate languages. It was, accordingly, possible to turn the Sanskrit expressions into pure Chinese without much difficulty. 20 There is a vast difference in value between the two translations. If one is justified in calling the Chinese Tripitaka a genuine translation, then the Tibetan is only a sham one. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the Tibetan Tripitaka has a scholarly value of its own, in as much as it is so similar to the Sanskrit text that one can, with a slight exercise of the imagination arrive at 25 the original wording, which helps in deducing the latter in cases where it is no longer extant. This undertaking is all the more important from the academic point of view, in that the number of original Sanskrit texts found in Nepal, the only Buddhist state in India, and of those discovered in the deserts of the North-Western Provinces and various other out-of-the-way places in 30 India is by no means great. Even where the Sanskrit text is extant, if one wishes to publish a revised edition of it with commentary, collation with the corresponding Tibetan text becomes indispensable. All these considerations give a peculiar value to the Tibetan Tripitaka.
Thanks to careful investigations made by Professor Sakai Shinten of 35 Koyasan University by contrasting the Sde-dge edition with the Chinese Tripitaka, it has been verified that the number of Sanskrit texts, rendered into Tibetan but not into Chinese is quite numerous. They are as follows.. Bkah-hgyur...Out of a total of 1,114 books, 444 are found in the Chinese Tripitaka and 670 are missing. Of the latter, 115 belong to the exoteric or
40
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
