The Gandhari Dharmapada

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The collection of Pali ethical verses entitled Dhammapada is one of the most widely known of early Buddhist texts. If, in contrast, the Dharma- pada in the Gandhari Prakrit has won scant attention, this is not altogether due to the adventitious authority of the Pali canon which over- shadowed this small remnant from the literature of another sect. There has indeed been a constantly increasing awareness of the importance of comparative studies of the Theravada texts with those of other schools. But the dislocated portions of the Gandhari Dharmapada hitherto published did not provide sufficient evidence to disclose the structure of the text as a whole; and further work was undoubtedly inhibited by the knowledge that, in addition to the 'Ms. Dutreuil de Rhins' published by Senart in 1898, another part of the same manuscript remained unpublished in Leningrad.

The opportunity of studying and editing this unpublished material was therefore most welcome; and I wish to thank the Academy of Sciences of the USSR for the co-operative spirit in which they permitted me the use of photographs of the part of the manuscript in their custodianship in Lenin- grad. In this matter I have an especial debt of gratitude to my colleague Professor D. S. Rice, who himself photographed the manuscript, and made for me enlargements of admirable quality.

It seemed then opportune to consider an edition which should unite in one volume the new materials and the parts of the text previously published. I am grateful to the authorities of the Bibliothèque Nationale who readily supplied impeccable photographs of the whole of the Paris portion of the manuscript, including the fragments not contained in Senart's facsimiles.

While the work was in progress I learnt, through the kindness of Dr. D. Schlingloff, that the Institute fur Orientforschung of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin possesses a set of photographs of the manuscript. I am grateful to have had the opportunity of examining these, especially since it had by then become clear that parts of the original manuscript were still missing, and it was therefore important to ensure that no available materials might be overlooked. In fact, however, the Berlin photo- graphs gave no additional information. They contain the same leaves which I had already obtained from Leningrad, together with reproductions from the facsimiles published by Senart in the Journal Asiatique.

It is a great pleasure to have this learned, scholarly work published in our Buddhist Tradition Series. Brough has gone to great lenghts to obtain every bit of available text of the Buddhist Sanskrit equivalent to the celebrated Pali text Dhammapada, which has multiple Western language translations.

For those who would like to study comparatively a Pali and Sanskrit version of these fundamental teachings would do well to use this work which has such a learned Introduction and helpful Commentary.

It is now more than sixty years since the first publication by Senart and Oldenburg of portions of this Prakrit recension of a Dharmapada. Since then the importance of this early manuscript has been widely recognized. Its contents are of great interest for the history of the older period of Buddhist literature, and in its form it provides invaluable material both for linguistic history and for palaeography. Its evidence has been frequently cited in all these branches of study, and important contributions have been made by many individual scholars towards the elucidation of its problems. But these contributions have been widely dispersed in learned journals, and it has been extremely difficult for anyone to obtain a clear view either of the structure of the text or of its language, unless he were prepared to consult a number of publications, for the most part accessible only in large libraries. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, prior to the edition by H. W. Bailey in 1945, the picture must inevitably have been more or less distorted, except for those who had for themselves done much of the preliminary research which would have been required for an edition. In 1945, however, only the facsimiles published by Senart and Oldenburg were available, and Bailey's edition was therefore confined to these portions of the text. It is most gratifying that it has now become possible for the first time to publish an edition and facsimiles of all those parts of the text which are known to be extant.

This ancient birch-bark manuscript enjoys the distinction of uniqueness in several different respects. It has generally been accepted to be the oldest manuscript now extant of any Indian text. It is the only literary text known which is written in the Kharoșthi script, in the north-western dialect of the Gandhāra region, the only Buddhist text (apart from a few minute fragments quoted in inscriptions and among the Niya documents) in this language- indeed, the only Buddhist text from the earlier period which has survived in any Indian language other than Pali and Sanskrit. It may well be the only remainder of a much more extensive Buddhist literature, possibly a complete canon, belonging to one of the numerous schools of the Lesser Vehicle whose names have come down to us. But it seems unlikely that it will be possible to identify the school, unless in the future some further portion of the same canon should be discovered which might perhaps contain some clue to its owners. Our regrettably unique text is thus in many respects tantalizing. There is still enough to show the extent to which our understanding of the development of early Buddhist literature might have been affected if only further texts of this and of other lost canons had survived in the original language.