Saddharma-Puṇḍarīka-Sūtra (Kashgar Manuscript) by Lokesh Chandra; Note on the KashgarManuscript of the Saddharma-puṇḍarīkasūtra by Hirofumi TodaReview by: D. Seyfort RueggJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1979), pp. 343-345Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602683 .

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Reviews of Books 343

inclusion of these texts, which run to 72 pages, is to avoid the inevitably frequent repetition of excerpts in the exegetic or second part, it being expected that the reader will have familiarized himself with the myths before proceeding to the exegesis. The translations are carefully done and perfectly readable, showing that the author has labored long and hard over the problems they contain, which, whenever they seem still to persist, he brings to the reader's attention in footnotes. These footnotes, however, are by no means limited to matters of a problematical or text-critical character, but contain much information likely to be of use and interest especially to the more general reader.

The second portion of the book, which bears the title Myth and Metamyth, is the heart of the whole work, being devoted to a minute examination of all aspects of the Bhargava myths, their themes and motifs, interrelations, origins and, in some cases, their purpose. Though not ponderously written, this portion of the work is not always easy to read, if one will do so with the intention of following to the full the many elusive and complex threads of the discussion. One may feel that there is an unnecessary current of verbosity here and there, which tends to obscure matters otherwise sufficiently apparent. But this criticism should not be overly stressed so as to detract from the intrinsic worth of this study: the subject is obviously difficult and does not lend itself to simple and transparent narrative exposition.

The notes to the Introduction and the various chapters that constitute Part 2 are gathered together into a separate section, their enumeration starting afresh with each chapter. These notes are extremely valuable, though their nature is such that they are likely to be pursued only by the specialist, and they illustrate perhaps more than anything else in the volume the depth to which the author has studied not only the myths themselves, but also many tangential matters. The Bibliography, which follows the Notes, seems overly wide-ranging in some of its entries, but ultimately is an additional attestation of the extent to which the author went in order to gather his material.

The Index, which minutely reflects the complex contents of the whole work, is certainly admirable, making it easy for the reader to find his way back to some forgotten point or to determine whether some detail of particular interest to him is dealt with anywhere. Rarely is even a work of high scholarship provided with so excellent an index.

Finally, there are a few typographic trivialities which might be passingly noticed: it seems impossible to discover any principle behind the use of italics or roman letters, Sanskrit words appearing indiscriminately in the one or the other guise. There are also a few scattered omissions of diacritical marks, mostly in the Notes and Index.

Professor Goldman is to be commended on the

scholarship that has gone into the conception and production of this book, which may in various ways serve as a model for others who would venture upon the tricky and devious path of the genesis and development of Indian myths.

WALTER H. MAURER

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

* V. S. Sukthankar, "The Bhrgus and the Bharata: A

Text-historical Study," in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 18, pp. 1-76.

Saddharma-Pundarika-Sfutra (Kashgar Manuscript) .Ed- ited by Prof. Dr. LOKESH CHANDRA with a Foreword by Prof. Dr. HEINZ BECHERT. ii + 9 columns, and 435 pages of photographic plates. Tokyo: THE REIYUKAI.

1977. Note on the Kashgar AManuscript of the Saddharma-

pundarikasutra. By HIROFUMI TODA Bibliographia Philologica Buddhica, Series Minor, ii. Pp. 38. Tokyo: THE REIYUKAI LIBRARY. 1977.

The Saddharmapundarlka (SDhP) or 'Lotus Sutra', one of the most important scriptures of the Mahayana, expounds the doctrine of the single Vehicle (ekayona)-and hence the theory of universal Awakening (bodhi) and, implicitly, the Buddha-nature. As one of the so-called Nine Dharmas (of Nepal) and one of the relatively few Mahayanist Sitras extant in Sanskrit, it was the subject of study from an early period in the history of western scholarship on Buddhism. Already in the middle of the 19th century there appeared the pioneering French translation by Eugene Burnouf (Le lotus de la Bonne Loi, Paris, 1852; reprinted in 1925); and some three decades later Hendrik Kern's English translation appeared in the Sacred Books of the East (vol. xxi, Oxford, 1884). Reflecting this Sutra's fundamental importance in Chinese and Japanese Bud- dhism, there also exist English translations of Kumarajiva's Chinese version, e.g., by W. E. Soothill (The Lotus of the Wonderful Law, Oxford, 1930) and L. Hurvitz (The Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma, New York, 1976). The Tibetan translation of Chapter IV was edited and rendered into French in the middle of the 19th century also by Ph. -Ed. Foucaux (La parabole de Penfant egare, Paris, 1854).

Despite this interest in the Sutra the Sanskrit text still awaits a good critical edition, a fact that is to be explained by the problems posed by the complexity of the

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344 Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.2 (1979)

transmission of the text. A Sanskrit text was published for the first time, on the basis chiefly of the Nepalese manuscripts, only at the beginning of the present century by H. Kern and B. Nanjio (Bibliotheca Buddhica x, St. Petersburg, 1908-12). Kern-Nanjio also knew of, and incorporated here and there in their critical apparatus and in the text of their edition readings from, some manuscripts discovered in Central Asia, and in particular the manuscript acquired in 1903 by N. F. Petrovskij in Kashgar and now generally referred to as the Kashgar Manuscript (cf. N. D. Mironov, Buddhist Miscellanea, JRAS 1927, pp. 252-74). The next edition of the SDhP published by U. Wogihara and C. Tsuchida (Tokyo, 1934-35) was also based mainly on Nepalese manuscripts (including one that had been reproduced in facsimile in Tokyo in 1926), with use being made of the Chinese and Tibetan translations. Nalinaksha Dutt's text published in the Bibliotheca Indica series (Calcutta, 1953) similarly depends on this same manuscript tradition, although Dutt added readings drawn from manuscripts discovered more recently in Gilgit' and also appended transcriptions of Central Asian materials (mostly from the now lost Otani collection) made by N. D. Mironov and kept in the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. These two later editions, as well as P. L. Vaidya's (Darbhanga, 1960), however did not remedy the basic deficiencies of Kern-Nanjio's edition which not only was doubtful as to its philological accuracy but is known to have arbitrarily conflated different textual traditions and pro- duced a composite eclectic version reflecting no known recension of the Satra. The defects of Kern-Nanjio's editio princeps as well as many of the philological problems attaching to the critical edition of the Sutra were already realized in the 1930s by W. Baruch, who set out to prepare a critical edition of it using the materials available to him (mainly the Nepalese and Gilgit manuscript); but as a consequence of the war Baruch was unable to publish his edition, and all we have of his meticulous textual studies are the prolegomena (Beitrage zum Saddharmapundarrkasutra, Leiden, 1938).

Thanks to the studies especially of Baruch and a few other scholars it is now recognized that the SDhP has been transmitted basically in two distinct recensions generally known as the 'Nepalese-Kashmiri' (or 'Nepalese-Gilgit') one (because, in the case of this Satra, the manuscripts from Nepal as well as those discovered in Gilgit belong ultimately to the same recension even if the Gilgit materials represent an older stage in its development than do the Nepalese) and the 'Central Asian' recension (since, although undoubtedly of Indian origin, it is now known to us in Sanskrit only in manuscripts discovered in Central Asia).2 These Central Asian materials-from Khadalik (the probable find-spot in the Khotan area of the 'Kashgar

Manuscript'), Shngim, Farhad-Beg, etc.-belong to an evidently earlier stage in the history of the text, while the 'Nepalese-Kashmiri' recension is believed to be a revised and Sanskritized one (in his foreword to Lokesh Chandra's facsimile edition H. Bechert writes, pp. 6-8, of the latter having been produced in the wake of the "Sanskrit Renaissance," while he describes the former recension as typical of a provincial and colonized borderland). The Central Asian materials do not, however, represent one single stage in the textual history of the SDhP but rather, as far as is now known, two different ones at least.3 As for the 'Nepalese-Kashmiri' recension, it had already appeared by the end of the 4th century since Kumarajiva's translation of 406 (Taisho Shinsha Daizokyo no. 262) follows it rather than the 'Central Asian' one which underlies Dharmaraksa's Chinese translation of 286 (Taisho no. 263). The Tibetan versions from Tun-huang as well as the bKa)-gyur correspond to the 'Nepalese-Kashmiri' recension.

It has to be emphasized that the differences between the two recensions go beyond variant readings, and that they sometimes amount to parallel versions in which similar contents are expressed in quite different texts, not to speak of the addition of new materials. This fact-the religious and philosophical significance of which still remains to be explored in detail-is clearly of the greatest importance for our understanding not only of the history of the particular text in question but also, more generally, for our understanding of the development of the Mahayana and the process of formation of its great scriptures.

Our most extensive Central Asian manuscript is the Kashgar Manuscript written in 'Calligraphic Upright Gupta' script, i.e., according to L. Sander's classification Script-type VII of South Turkestan Brahmi, tentatively dated to the 6th-9th century. The greater part of this manuscript is preserved in the Petrovskij collection of the Leningrad Section of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. It was published for the first time in facsimile from the microfilm received in 1956 by the International Academy of Indian Culture in New Delhi by Professor Lokesh Chandra in his Satapitaka Series (vol. ccxxix, New Delhi, 1976); and it is this publication that has now been reissued in the volume under review by the Reiyukai Institute in Tokyo. Further portions of this manuscript were acquired by other explorers in Turkestan; and they are now kept in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Trinkler collection), in London (Indian Office Library [Hoernle MSSJ and British Library), and in the (now lost) Otani collection (a transcription of the relevant materials from which were made by N. D. Mironov).4 On pp. 11-15 of his publication Lokesh Chandra has given a useful conspectus in facsimile of single ak~aras and ligatures from the Kashgar manuscript. This manuscript (as

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Reviews of Books 345

well as a Nepalese one) contains at the beginning the hymn in praise of the SDhP by Rahulabhadra; he appears to be the early master quoted for instance in the Ta-chih-tu-lun who is identified sometimes as a teacher of Nagarjuna and sometimes (more probably, in this reviewer's opinion) as his successor. Rahulabhadra brought together the ekayana (and tathagatagarbha) theory with the Madhyamaka and the Prajfiaparamita tradition (he also wrote a Prajfiapara- mitastotra).5

It is to the publication of this Kashgar Manuscript in romanized transliteration that Professor H. Toda of Tokushima University has devoted a series of recent works. So far this reviewer has seen Chapters ii-iii (1978), iv-vii (1977), viii-xix (1977), and xx-xxi (1978), published in the Tokushima Daigaku Kyoyobu Rinri Gakka Kiy6 (Pro- ceedings of the Department of Ethics, Faculty of Liberal Arts, University of Tokushima, i-ii, 1977-78). And in his Note on the Kashgar Manuscript of the Saddharma- pundarikasutra, Toda has provided a concordance between Lokesh Chandra's volume (in which 'a number of fragmentary folios are placed in the wrong order', p. 3) and his own numbering used in his above-mentioned publication (Table I, pp. 3-6); a concordance between the Kashgar Manuscript and the Kern-Nanjio edition (Table II, pp. 7- 36); and a list of references indicating where Kern-Nanjio's readings marked 'O' are to be found in the Kashgar Manuscript (in fact not all readings so marked are actually to be found in it, so that it is clear that Kern-Nanjio's siglum 'O' refers to material from the Petrovskij collection other than the Kashgar Manuscript) (Table III, p. 37).

It may finally be noted that in the series Studia Philologica Buddhica, Occasional Paper Series, ii (Tokyo, The Reiyukai Library, 1977) A. Yuyama and H. Toda have published a photographic reproduction and transliteration of the Huntington Fragment F of the Kashgar Manuscript kept in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven. Another portion of this folio is in the British Library; and together these two fragments make up the portion of fol. 282 of the Kashgar Manuscripts missing from the Petrovskij collection. For comparison, corresponding texts from both the Farhad-Beg fragment6 (fol. 26a, in the Indian Office Library) and a Gilgit Manuscript (Group C, fol.- 120b, which is not included in Watanabe's above- mentioned publication)7 have been appended in romanized transliteration.

In addition to the learned scholars who have worked over the years on the SDhP, we are now indebted to the Reiyukai Institute in Tokyo which has undertaken the task of publishing and distributing editions and studies relating to the Lotus Sutra.

D. SEYFORT RUEGG UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

I Cf. S. Levi, JA 1932, pp. 25, 45. The Gilgit materials relating to the SDhP (apparently two MSS, tentatively dated to the 5th-6th century) have been published by S. Watanabe, Saddharmapundarrka Manuscripts found in Gilgit, 2 volumes (photographic reproduction and roman- ized text with critical annotations), Tokyo 1972-75 (distributed also by the Reiyukai). See also below, note 7.

2 For the MS sources of the SDhP see A. Yuyama, A Bibliography of the Sanskrit Texts of the Saddharma- pundartkascitra, Canberra, 1970. On the subject of a palm- leaf MS corresponding to Dharmaraksa's ("Central Asian") recension and a MS in Kudean script of the ("Nepalese- Kashmiri") recension reflected in Kumarajiva's translation, see H. Bechert, Uber die "Marburger Fragmente" des Saddharmapundarrka, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen (I. Philologisch-Historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1972, Nr. 1), p. 16.

3 Thus, whereas the Farhad-Bed fragment does not contain the Devadattaparivarta (or Brahmacari ?) it is to be found as a separate chapter in the "Marburg" fragments and in Dharmaraksa's Chinese translation, and as part of the Stuipasamdarganaparivarta (Chapter xi) in the Nepalese- Kashmiri recension. See H. Bechert, op. cit., p. 15.

4 N. D. Mironov, A List of Fragments of Brahmi MSS belonging to Count Ohtani (Shanghai, 1923). -On the Central Asian materials see A. Yuyama, IIJ 9 (1965-66), pp. 85-112; H. Bechert, op. cit., pp. 22-27. Bechert has published, op. cit., pp. 30-57, fragments from the Trinkler collection of the Kashgar MS together with the cor- responding Nepalese-Kashmiri recension on facing pages. -On the Huntington fragment see below.

5 On the links between the SDhP's ekayana doctrine and the theory of universal bodhi and the tathagatagarbha or Buddha-nature, see this reviewer's La theorie du tatha- gatagarbha et du gotra (Paris, 1969), p. 177 ff.

6 Cf. L. de La Vallee Poussin, Documents sanscrits de la seconde collection M. A. Stein, JRAS 1911, p. 1067 ff.

7 See Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra, Gilgit Buddhist Manuscripts (Facsimile Edition), Part x (Satapitaka Series x/10, New Delhi, 1974), nos. 3181-82.

Nayadhammakahao. Das sechste Anga des Jaina Sid- dhanta. Einfuhrung, kritische Nacherzdhlung mit Aus- gabe der wichtigeren Textpartien, Kommentar und Glossar von WALTHER SCHUBRING. Aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben von J. DELEU. Pp. 79. Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. Mainz. Abhandlungen der Geistes und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse. Jahr- gang 1978. Nr. 6. Wiesbaden: FRANZ STEINER. DM 26,-.

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