Text Documents And Extracts Chiefly From Manuscripts in Bodleian Vol 01 Part 05

SR No.: 020820
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller, H Wenzel
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1885
Total Pages: 107
Language: English, Sanskrit
Classification: Book_English & Book_Devnagari
File Size: 8 MB

Page 9

PREFACE.
terms, which form one of the greatest difficulties to the students of Buddhism, I copied nearly the whole of it, and made frequent use of it in my lectures.
After a time Kenjiu Kasawara expressed a wish to copy the text for himself, and I then encouraged him to prepare a critical edition of it. Though a critical edition was, perhaps, hardly called for in the case of a text like the Dharma-samgraha, Kasawara copied the MS. of the India Office very carefully, and afterwards collated it with a MS, and with a fragment of another MS. at Cambridge. The MS. of the India Office, No. 2932, one of those presented by Mr. B. H. Hodgson, is most carelessly written, and in some parts quite illegible. The MSS. at Cambridge are better, but of little assistance in really difficult passages. If I say that a critical edition was, perhaps, hardly called for, I do not mean to undervalue the collation which we owe to Mr. Kasawara ; all
I mean is that in most cases we found that the correctness or incorrectness of the technical terms had to be settled by independent evidence rather than by the various readings of our MSS.
The collation having once been made, it was thought best to print it. Though neither I nor Dr. Wenzel can be responsible for its accuracy, I may say that whenever I was led to test it by reference to the India Office MS., which was lent to me through the kindness of Dr. Rost, the learned librarian of the India Office, I found Kasawara quite as dependable as most European editors. The collation becomes important whenever a question arises as to certain words or classes of words being included or excluded from our text. Thus our text knows of nine Angas only, like the Hinayana, not of twelve, like the Mahayana. The four Devis, the five Rakshås, the ten Krodhas, and the six Yoginis are unsupported by the Cambridge MS. and by the Chinese Version. Here the comparative list of the chapters contained in the Sanskrit MSS., and in the Chinese Version, will prove very instructive.
Mere blunders, which could be of no interest, have mostly been corrected without special remarks. Thus, though all the MSS. in sect. VII read katurlo kapâlâh, we have printed katvâro lokapâlâh, not because katurloka pâlâh is impossible (it might be, the guardians of the four worlds), but because it is against the character of the Dharma-samgraha, where the principal object throughout is to give the number of terms
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