Der tibetische Text, vol. 3, Udanavarga.

• Author: Kuijp, Leonard W. van der

The Udanavarga, in Tibetan Ched du brjod pa'i tshoms, which Dharmatrata (Chos skyob) compiled not later than the fourth century A.C., consists of some thirty-two chapters with an uneven number of stanzas. Its subject matter is largely moralistic and prescriptive in tone but has several concrete theoretical underpinnings. The text was widely studied in Tibet, especially among members of the Bka' gdams pa school and by those who studied with them. In fact, possibly with Atisa's(1) recommendation, but undoubtedly with Spo to ba Rin chen gsal (1027/31-1105) and especially his disciple Sha ra ba Yon tan grags (1070-1141), it became one of the six basic texts (gzhung drug) to be studied, the other five being the Bodhisattvabhumi, Mahayanasutralamkara, the Jataka collections, Siksasamuccaya and the Bodhicaryavatara. While we have references to early Bka' gdams pa commentaries on these five works, no evidence of an exegesis of the Udanavarga has come down to us as yet. Its canonical status in Tibet is somewhat ambivalent. The early Bka' gdams pa evidently considered it to belong to the type of texts that were later included in that part of the canon known as the Tanjur. This, of course, means that they held it to be a sastra, which would account for its inclusion among this grouping of six texts, which are all sastras. For some still to be explained reason, the Undanavarga also wandered into the Kanjur, in which are included works that reflect the [Buddha-]word (bka'), whatever manifestation the Buddha might have taken on. In this connection, we find Bu ston Rin chen grub (1290-1364) observing in the catalogue appended to his chronicle of Buddhism (1322-26) that, whereas the earlier catalogues of collections of translated literature counted it as a sastra, "it is nowadays known as bka,."(2) It is for this reason that the Udanavarga is included in most, if not all, Kanjur and Tanjur canons. The precise background of this change in relative "canonicity" is a question that has yet to be clarified.

In 1911, H. Beckh was the first to publish an edition of the Tibetan text of the Udanavarga. This was followed by the publication of a critical edition of the Sanskrit text in F. Bernhard's fundamental study (F. Bernhard, Udanavarga, vol. 1 [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965!). Subsequently, in a long review of the latter, the uncannily perceptive eye of L. Schmithausen discerned that the late eighth- or early ninth-century Tibetan translation of the...