Jnanagarbha's Commentary on Just the Maitreya Chapter from the Samdhinirmocanasutra: Study, Translation, and Tibetan Text.

• Author: Wedemeyer, Christian K.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Jnanagarbha's Commentary on Just the Maitreya Chapter from the Samdhinirmocanasutra: Study, Translation, and Tibetan Text. By JOHN POWERS. New Delhi: INDIAN COUNCIL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH, 1998. Pp. xii + 156.

Over roughly the last fifteen years, John Powers has devoted a significant part of his scholarly attention to translating and analyzing the contents of the Samdhinirmocanasutra. The chief results of this work so far have been his doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of the Ultimate (Don Dam Pa, Paramartha) in the Samdhinirmocana-Sutra" (University of Virginia, 1991), a work on Hermeneutics and Tradition in the Samdhinirmocanasutra (Brill, 1993), another entitled Two Commentaries on the Samdhinirmocana-sutra (Edwin Mellen, 1992), a translation (with unedited Tibetan text) of the sutra itself (Wisdom of the Buddha [Dharma, 1995]), and a pair of journal articles on ancillary topics. The work under review is the latest installment in this oeuvre.

As the title makes clear, the subject of this book is the 'Phags-pa dgongs pa nges par 'grel pa'i mdo las 'phags pa byams pa'i le'u nyi tshe'i bshad pa (Arya-samdhinirmocana-sutra-aryamaitreyakevalaparivarta-bhasya), a work attributed to Jnanagarbha which can be found in Tibetan translation in the bsTan-'gyur, and which comments exclusively on the eighth chapter of the sutra, in which the chief interlocutor is Maitreya. Powers has undertaken to edit the Tibetan translation, translate the work into English, and explore its importance in an introductory study.

Turning first to the Tibetan text that Powers provides (pp. 73-143), one discovers an abundance of problems. While at one point he refers to the text provided as a "critical edition" (p. 10), nowhere does he address the principles by which his editing is guided. This would seem to be especially called for in an edition of a translation. In addition to this methodological unclarity, few exemplars seem to have been haphazard--consisting only of the two facsimile editions most readily available in Western libraries (i.e., the Otani University Peking and the University of Tokyo sDe-dge).

There are, furthermore, many errors in the text presented--several of them quite elementary. At the beginning, for instance--in the very title of the work (p. 75)--one reads 'phags pa byams pa'i le'u'i bshad pa bshugs so. The correct reading is, of course, bzhugs so. Such an error (presumably a typo) can be put down to nothing but extreme carelessness on the part of the author and the publisher. In addition, there are several tsheg-s missing throughout the text. Some of these have semantic relevance: for example, on page 96 (line 5), one reads las for la sa. Other textual errors appear elsewhere, such as snar instead of sngar (p. 80, line 8).

The apparatus, furthermore, contains readings that are not particularly relevant. For instance, it notes variant readings such as gnyis ga'i for gnyis ka'i and gyi for kyi (after a sa yang 'jug). These are mere orthographical idiosyncrasies and might have been...