∵ A Brief Introduction to Recent Chinese Studies on Sanskrit and Khotanese (Chiefly Buddhist) Literature

The past decade has seen the appearance of a number of Chinese publications relevant to the readership of the Indo-Iranian Journal . This article briefly introduces some of those publications, dealing mostly with Buddhist sources, primarily in Sanskrit, Khotanese and Middle Indic.

1 Before the age of ubiquitous access to scans, moreover, even physical access to publications was very difficult, and only the rare library outside Japan had more than a very small selection of Japanese scholarship, all the more so when it dealt with Sanskrit. Libraries very understandably bought books about Japan with their Japan budgets, and the (always smaller) India budgets were rarely spent on Japanese books, a nearly perfect Catch 22. Note that while the Publications Received offered little information beyond author, title and source, de Jong's reviews were often detailed introductions and critiques, and as such were frequently cited and made use of. I should perhaps note here at the outset that by 'recent' in the title of this contribution I have arbitrarily picked the period of the last 10 years, and thus the earliest publications noted here appeared in 2011. I must, further, confess that alongside a close to non-existent knowledge of modern Chinese, my ignorance of the Khotanese language makes it inevitably that I am not able to do justice to publications in that field. I am grateful for advice and help offered by Rafal Felbur, Chen Ruixuan and Jiang Yixiu. 2 Were Japanese colleagues to share work with me, I would be equally happy to introduce it as well. For instance, I will soon publish in the iij a review of Hokazono Kōichi's edition of the remaining parts of the Lalitavistara not covered in his 1994 edition, this made possible by Prof. Hokazono's great kindness in sending his publications to me. 3 So far what little work has emerged from the almost inconceivable treasure house of Sanskrit materials held in Tibet has often appeared in collaboration with European or Japanese scholars, and thus has been more visible than some of the materials I introduce here. See n. 6, below. 4 Of course, I do not mean to imply that no attempts have been made to introduce such studies before, or that our Chinese colleagues themselves are unaware of a potential wider audience. Many of the books mentioned here have English Tables of Contents and/or summaries, and this goal in mind, works aimed primarily at a Chinese internal audience, such as translations of works already available in editions and translations in European languages, are not considered here.5 Likewise, work of Chinese scholars published in English, German or other languages, and chiefly abroad, is also not considered, although it is often substantial and important.6 Furthermore, of course, what is presented here is only, perforce, what is known to me, and for this reason I express the hope that Chinese colleagues will continue to share their work with me; it would be useful to be able to continue this sort of presentation in the future. I should, finally, stress that what follows is presented without any pretension of offering critical appraisals. This is, therefore, not a review but rather an introduction to some materials that might, I fear, have otherwise escaped the attention of potentially interested scholars.7 [3 folios] … and the Buddhapālita-mūlamadhyamaka-vr̥ tti [11 folios]." As the author notes, portions were also published earlier in English.8 Among the features of the book useful even to those who do not read Chinese are script tables (pp. 29-49), and an edition of portions of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (verses: 9.10-12; 10. 1-16; 11.1-8; 12.1-7; 17.29-33; 18.1-12; 19.1-6; 20.1-24; 21.1-21; 22.1-5). There follows an edition, bilingually in Sanskrit and Tibetan, of the Buddhapālita-mūlamadhyamaka-vr̥ tti on Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 2.5-16; the end of Chpt. 6 through 7.1-33, with some folios missing; 8.13bc-9.3; 10. 2-8; 13.7-14.2; 20.11cd-18. In all cases more or less of the manuscript is missing along the way, so we do not always have a coherent and complete text, but the comparison with the Tibetan translation is a tremendous help.9 A Sanskrit-Chinese-Tibetan word list is also given (pp. 157-168). After a short English text (pp. 199-202), the volume closes with black and white photos of the manuscripts edited therein. They are often somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to read (no doubt since they are based on old microfilms), and Ye must be congratulated for the wonderful effort he has made to bring these to light.
This, moreover, is not the only relevant monographic publication of the author, and he is involved with both publications so far appearing in another series, "Fanzanghan fodian congshu" 梵 藏 汉 佛 典 丛 书, which presents Sanskrit-Tibetan-Chinese editions. These volumes too are published in Shanghai by Zhongxi shuju. The first volume contains a revision of the core text presented in the volume just mentioned, namely Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: This presents nothing less than the most authoritative edition of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā yet published. It contains on facing pages the text in Sanskrit, Tibetan (where there are significant differences, more than one Tibetan translation is cited), and Chinese (of Kumārajīva), and Ye's modern Chinese rendering. Aside from variant readings and a few conjectures, there are also occasional notes, some of a philological nature, but they are not necessary in order to make good use of the editions. It is hard to imagine serious scholars referring to older editions for the Sanskrit (or Tibetan) text, now that this superb work exists.
Since the author has very generously made it freely available, accessibility is not an issue, and there is no reason it should not become the new standard.11 The second work in this trilingual series is again a text of Nāgārjuna, the Yuktiṣaṣṭikākārikā. the discovery of a single manuscript, but thanks to the collection of quotations, including from the Yuktiṣaṣṭikāvr̥ tti, the Munimatālaṁkāra, the Madhyamakāvatārabhāṣya and a commentary of the Madhyamakāloka. For those verses not yet recovered, the edition cites reconstructions of earlier scholars, but rather unsurprisingly, comparisons of those earlier suggestions with the verses which have now been located demonstrate just how useful these "reconstructions" might be (namely, something approaching zero). This too sets the current standard for philological presentation of the Yuktiṣaṣṭikākārikā, and like its companion volume, it too has been made freely available.13 For this the editors are to be profoundly thanked. The second volume in the series of 6, with which we began, is Fan Muyou's work on the tantric Advayasamatāvijaya. This includes the editio princeps of the Sanskrit Advayasamatāvijayamahākalparāja, understood as an explanatory (vyākhyā)14 tantra of the Guhyasamājatantra. Some relevant papers by the author had earlier appeared in English.15 Here the 22 chapters of the text are presented in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. The volume also contains (pp. 329-346) a Sanskrit-Tibetan word list (but it is not always very worthwhile; one wonders at the utility of citing atra = 'di ni, for instance), a couple of pages in English (pp. 353-355), and black and white photographs of the manuscript which, while small, are on the whole quite legible. One very remarkable thing is that, as Fan pointed out earlier,16 the Tibetan translation was demonstrably made from the very manuscript which she edits here. This is an extremely rare (even so far unique?) case in which we know with certainty exactly what Vorlage stood behind a given Tibetan translation, and as such, it is of the highest interest.17 13 This can also be downloaded as of this writing at https://pku.academia.edu/ShaoyongYe. 14 Fan herself writes ākhyāna, but this seems to be an incorrect form. 15

Li Xuezhu
See, "Some Remarks on the Relationship between a Sanskrit Manuscript of Advayasamatāvijaya from Tibet and its Tibetan Translation", aririab 11 (2008) Returning to the main publication series, its volume 3, the work of several contributors, contains editions of a number of (mostly extremely) fragmentary materials (all illustrated with lovely color photos), including those belonging to the Avadānaśataka (i.2.7-3.4; i.3.4-13), Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (just a few words), Pañcaviṁśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (a number of fragments), an otherwise unidentified Prajñāpāramitā (similar to the Sadāprarudita portion of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā), and Saddharmapuṇḍarīka (a number of small fragments, all the preceding due to Ye Shaoyong), Ratnaketuparivarta (quite a number of fragments, some rather substantial, edited by Saerji), Bhadrakalpika (one smallish fragment, edited by Duan Qing),22 followed by the Buddhanāmasūtra (a small portion of what was evidently a physically quite small manuscript), Suvarṇabhāsottama, Jñānolkā-dhāraṇī, and some unidentified fragments (all by Ye Shaoyong). The volume also contains several documents in Kharoṣṭhī script and Khotanese language, including legal documents. Three are studied in English. The volume also contains a glossary, and a useful table of the Kharoṣṭhī script. It finishes with a concordance of the materials presented, including information about previous publications of the relevant materials.
The 4th volume contains Khotanese materials including a protective amulet against 15 demons,23 a really tiny fragment of an unnamed Sanskrit text (not more than 5 identifiable words), the Jñānolkā-dhāraṇī, a text on the birth of the bodhisattva, two complete folios of the Suvarṇabhāsottama, nine tiny frag- ments of an unnamed text, two partial folios of the Adhyardhaśatikā Prajñāpāramitā, a fragment of the second chapter of the Book of Zambasta, two fragmentary folios of the Anantamukhanirhāra-dhāraṇī, two fragmentary folios of the Raśmivimalaviśuddhaprabhā-dhāraṇī, a number of unidentified fragments, some more substantial, others only a letter or two, and, on wood, a contract for selling a slave to a Buddhist monk, a failed case of collateral, and a further contract. The volume also contains several appendices, including in English a reprint of an early paper by the author on "Pledge, Collateral and Loan in Ancient Khotan" (pp. 125-143). Two Khotanese-Chinese glossaries follow (pp. 145-148; 149-162). Finally, there is appended a list of corrigenda to vol. iii in the series (Duan and Zhang 2013). The fifth volume contains Niya materials in Kharoṣṭhī script and Gāndhārī language. These manuscript fragments concern realia, and constitute several legal documents all concerning one Budhasena, accused of improper religious activities, an incident connected to alcohol trading, and finally a document referring to debt for misapproriated grain recompensed with horses. The volume includes several studies, including a discussion by the author of the power structure of the rulership in the Shanshan kingdom at the end of the 3rd c ce, alcohol and textiles.
The sixth and most recent volume, the work of Duan Qing alone, contains an edition and study of the Raśmivimalaviśuddhaprabhā-dhāraṇī, which in one of its Chinese translations-Wugou jingguang datuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀 羅尼經-is a very important text in the history of printing, being if not the oldest one of the oldest texts in the world to be printed.24 (This history is, of course, not relevant to its Khotanese version, which exists only in manuscript.) The volume contains clear black and white photos of the scroll in question, with lines numbered, a transcription of the text with a facing modern Chinese translation, a commentary (exclusively in Chinese), an edition of the Tibetan translation (based on the Derge and Peking Kanjurs), a modern Chinese trans- 24 Needless to say, not only is the claim itself contested, but since one of the major candidates is a work discovered in Korea, nationalism early on entered the debate, with some claiming that the text of the dhāraṇī was in fact printed in China. lation of the Tibetan (the work of Saerji and Duan Qing), and an extensive glossary. The study of dhāraṇī texts is an area of growing attention in Buddhist studies, and it is to be hoped that this publication will be taken into consideration by future scholarship.25

Other Publications Out of Series
As already noted, and as should be obvious, not all publications appear in series. The works below, like Duan Qing's Yutian Fojiao gujuan, are however almost entirely in Chinese, and thus significantly less accessible to a non-Chinese audience. But they are worth being aware of. An interesting book, which could very much profit from an English summary, is that published by Saerji 萨尔吉 (Tib. This book has been noticed recently by Chen and Loukota 2020,27 who remark that Saerji identifies an "older core" of the Mahāsaṁnipāta collection of sūtras, consisting of the Tathāgatamahākaruṇānirdeśa, the Mahāyānopadeśa, the Sāgaramatiparipr̥ cchā, the Gaganagañjaparipr̥ cchā, and the Akṣayamatinirdeśa. According to Chen and Loukota (2020: 210), "The Ratnaketuparivarta, argues Saerji, marks a turning point in the history of this collection, insofar as it extends the denotation of the term mahāsaṃnipāta to cover not only rounds of teachings centering on the Bodhisattva practice but also a great assemblage of various dhāraṇīs perpetuated by all Buddhas (sarvabuddhādhiṣṭhita)." This text, which was edited in Sanskrit and Tibetan already long ago by Kurumiya Yenshū,28 has recently been translated in full from Tibetan into English.29 The final two books we will turn to here are again by a professor of Peking University, this time Chen Ming 陈 明, relatively little of whose work has appeared in English,30 and who, moreover, in contrast to those whose work we have noted above, concentrates not on manuscript studies but more on examinations of content, so to speak, with a focus on how Indian cultural artifacts have been naturalized in China. His main fields of interest include, but are not limited to, Indian medicine and its sinicization.31 The first book to be noted here is a collection of studies on Indian Buddhist mythology: This volume begins with cosmogony, starting with the Saṁghabhedavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya (and see the next book, discussed below). It then turns to the so-called Three thousand Great Thousand Worlds, the "lineage of the gods" in the Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī, the translation into Chinese of the names of gods, the myth of "Drying up the ocean" in Indian Buddhism, Bālagraha and Grahamātr̥ kā, and further sections concern specific myths. The studies, while primarily textual, pay attention to visual evidence as well. The final volume to consider is: In this volume, the author focuses on the Chinese Vinaya translation of Yijing (義淨, 635-713). After exploring issues of translation equivalents, the author also briefly addresses issues of syntax. Although well informed especially about Chinese manuscript materials, which are extensively catalogued, it seems to me that there is a potential problem with the author's overall approach. This comes from what appears to be a naive trust in the printed editions of the Sanskrit texts to which he refers, including for instance not only notoriously unreliable Indian editions but also Gnoli's edition of the Saṁghabhedavastu. We know that Gnoli not infrequently regularized and smoothed the text; only careful reference to the manuscript evidence will reveal whether this has any impact on Prof. Chen's arguments. A further potential pitfall, and perhaps a more serious one, is that the author does not seem to take into account the 2013). An English outline of the book may be found at https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/ logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-buddhism&month=1303&week=e&msg=LwoHfLsvMglnRS4 7K2/GXQ&user=&pw=. 32 A short introduction was offered in English by Chi Mingzhou 池明宙 at https://harvard -yenching.org/features/indian-buddhist-mythology-its-writing-and-transmission.
hypothesis that the Sanskrit Vorlage from which Yijing translated differed, perhaps in some significant ways, from the text available to us from Gilgit. Yao Fumi observes, "Although Yijing's translation has been frequently assumed not to be exact, the newly found manuscript [studied in her paper] seems to make it increasingly clear that his translation faithfully conveys the contents of its original. To put it another way, the Sanskrit texts on which the Chinese and Tibetan translations were based seem to have differed from each other, and this suggests that there was much more variation (or much less standardization) in the textual traditions of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya than previously thought."33 This could potentially affect Chen's discussions of the relation between the Sanskrit original and its Chinese translation, an issue certainly not at all limited to the Vinaya. It is not without interest to contrast this with the situation encountered by Fan Muyou noted above, in which we appear to be in possession of precisely the manuscript which served as the basis for the, in this case, Tibetan translation. This brief introduction has had no intention beyond that of bringing the scholarly production of our Chinese colleagues to the attention of scholars who may not keep in touch with such developments. While the world these days can be a very strange place, there should be little argument that scholarly cooperation is a virtue unto itself, and we should all work together and share as much as possible. I hope that these few lines make a small contribution toward that ever-elusive goal. 33 Page 1134