Initiation pratique a l'etude du sanskrit bouddhique.

• Author: SALOMON, RICHARD
• Position: Review

Initiation pratique a l'etude du sanskrit bouddhique. By BORIS OGUIBENINE. Collection Connaissance des langues. Paris: PICARD EDITEUR, 1996. Pp. 274. FF 280.

This book is offered as a more comprehensive and up-to-date alternative to the only other textbook for the study of Buddhist Sanskrit, namely Franklin Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953). The preparation of a new text is justified on the grounds that, first, Edgerton's is "un peu vieilli" (p. 4), and second and more importantly, that the new book is intended to provide a wider sampling of the varieties of Buddhist Sanskrit than Edgerton's. In the author's own words, "le parti que nous avons pris est de presenter un tableau plus vaste de cette langue....Les extraits publies ici sont egalement tires des texts qui melent le sanskrit des gatha et le sanskrit plus conforme a la norme classique, de meme que des textes ou les singularites de la langue des gatha se manifestent moins massivement" (ibid.). In other words, this new volume is a textbook, not of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit like Edgerton's, but of Buddhist Sanskrit in the broad sense.

This is most needed and welcome, and the twenty-one text selections are well chosen to fill this function. For instance, the first three texts are differing versions of the Sahasra-varga/Peyala-varga as found in the Mahavastu, Patna Dharmapada, and Udanavarga. This selection is ideal, not only in that it provides a comparison of three versions of essentially the same text in three different varieties of hybrid and semi-standard Buddhist Sanskrit, but also in that the text is one whose complex patterns of formulaic variation and repetition are of particular interest for textual studies on a broader level.

These first three selections are followed by four excerpts from various vinaya texts, again providing interesting material for comparisons. Other texts and genres represented are further extracts from the Mahavastu, and selections from the Lalitavistara, the jataka and avadana literature, the Catusparisat-sutra, and various Mahayana texts (Ratnagunasamcayagatha; Saddharmapundarika-sutra, Karunapundarika, Kasyapaparivarta, Samadhiraja-sutra, Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita). All in all, it is a broad and representative sampling of the relevant literature.

The text selections are preceded by an interesting introduction (pp. 6-25) presenting the major issues and controversies surrounding Buddhist Sanskrit and Buddhist Hybrid...