Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Reader (An Old And Rare Book)

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IT IS HOPED that this Reader will facilitate the practical use of my Grammar and Dictionary by scholars and students who may wish to acquaint themselves with the language, and by teachers who may wish to conduct courses in it. The most important texts are largely out of print and hard to find, except in large libraries, and even there, as a rule, only a single copy of each text will be found. Furthermore, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that not one of the texts has been, in my opinion, sausfactorily edited. The selections here printed have been edited according to the principles which I think should be adopted for Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS), so far as this is made possible by the variant readings furnished in the critical notes the printed editions. The editors of the Mahavastu, Mahaparinirvanasutra, Udanavarga, and Lalitavistara, especially the first three, seem to have been careful and cons- cientious in reporting the exact readings of the mss. they used. Those of the Saddharmapundarika (SP) were far less so; it has been proved (see my §1.74) that they were very careless; their critical notes often report readings of their mss. wrongly, and far oftener fail to report at all differences of reading which are found in some or even most of the mss. they used. They also obviously attempted to change the sandhi of the prose of SP to standard Sanskrit Samdhi, while only rarely reporting the samdhi of the mss. For these reasons the SP selections printed here cannot claim to be very close to a real critical edition, and in particular look far more like standard Sanskrit than such an edition would look.

It is unnecessary to repeat here what has been said in the first chapter of the Grammar (see especially §§1.33-56; 1.69.77) on the BHS tradition and the way to deal with it. Luders' principle (§1.40) should be universally applied: any non- Sanskritic form presented in the mss. must, in general, be regarded as closer to the original form of the text than a 'correct' Sanskrit variant. Most editors, even down to the present, have proceeded on the opposite principle. Indeed, many have gone farther, and 'corrected' into Sanskrit non-Sanskrit readings found in all their mss. The plain fact is that BHS is not Sanskrit. Copyists and late redactors did much to Sanskritize it, but never fully succeeded, and modern editors are wrong in carrying the process further. Every Middle Indic or semi-Middle Indic form found in any stream of tradition of any BHS work should, as a rule, be welcomed and adopted in the text, even if Sanskritized substitutes are recorded in the same sentence. All BHS texts, even the Mahavastu, have been subjected to a good deal of Sanskritization, some of it very likely going back to the original composition of the work, but much of it, in the case of most if not all BHS works, introduced by copyists and redactors in the course of the tradition. The Middle-Indicisms, or hybrid forms, which escaped this process should be put into the texts, as a general principle; they constitute precious evidence of an earlier time when the texts were (as most of them certainly were) much less Sanskritized than they seem in our mss. (Such relic forms, by the way, are considerably more numerous, in the prose of such texts as SP, Lalita Vistara (LV), and Divyavadana, than is often supposed.) Instead, many editors try to suppress them, reporting them in notes if they are conscientious, but too often (like the SP editors) failing to do even that. The principles here set forth, like most sound general principles, are not to be applied mechanically; the context, as well as variant ms. readings, will vary from case to case, and each must be separately studied.