The Mahavadanasutra: A New Edition Based on Manuscripts Discovered in Northern Turkestan.

• Author: Salomon, Richard
• Position: Book review

The Mahavadanasutra: A New Edition Based on Manuscripts Discovered in Northern Turkestan. Edited by TAKAMICHI FUKITA. Sanskrit-Worterbuch der buddhistischen Texte aus den Turfan-Funden, Beiheft 10. Gottingen: VANDENHOECK & RUPRECHT, 2003. Pp. xxi + 235.

The Mahavadana-sutra (MAV), like its Pali correspondent the Mahapadana-sutta, presents an account of the lives of seven Buddhas, all following a virtually identical course of events, as recounted by the last of the seven, namely the "historical Buddha" known as Gotama or Sakyamuni. This rigidly patterned biography of the Buddhas did not hold much appeal for previous generations of Buddhist scholars in the west. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, for example, in the introduction to their translation of the Pali version, described its contents as "legends of six forerunners of the historical Buddha, each constructed with wearisome iteration, in imitation of the then accepted beliefs as to the life of Gotama" (1910: 1). More recent scholarship, however, has tended to take a more balanced view; for instance, Frank Reynolds characterized the text as one in which "Gotama Buddha ... depicts himself as having a distinguished lineage of Great Beings whose life story and saving message were virtually identical to his own" (1997: 26).

In any case, it is certain that the Mahavadana/Mahapadana was considered by early Indian Buddhists to be a foundational text. This is proven, for example, by its inclusion, along with the Dasottara-, Arthavistara, Sangiti-, Catusparisat-, and Mahaparinirvana-sutras, in the anthology of six fundamental sutras from the Dirghagama known as the Satsutrakanipata, which is abundantly attested among the Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts from Central Asia (Hartmann 1994: 334). It was from such Central Asian Sanskrit manuscripts--the so-called "Turfan manuscripts"--that Ernst Waldschmidt published the editio princeps of the MAV in 1953 and 1956. In this edition he collated the fragmentary remains of the several manuscripts then available to him and presented, as far as possible, a reconstructed version of the text. Now, precisely fifty years after the publication of Waldschmidt's first volume, Takamichi Fukita has produced a new edition of the Sanskrit text on the basis of the same materials, supplemented by several other manuscript fragments that were not available to Waldschmidt at the time of his edition.

Like Waldschmidt's edition, Fukita's text is largely based on the best preserved manuscript (SHT no. 399) of the MAV, which is actually part of a Satsutraka anthology. This text is presented in the first part of his edition, entitled "Transcription of the Base Manuscript SHT 399" (pp. 1-24). The bulk of the volume is taken up by the "Restoration of the Mahavadanasutra" (pp. 25-169), in which the editor presents the reconstructed text on the basis of this "base manuscript" plus all other available fragments, including both those utilized by Waldschmidt and those not available to him. This latter category includes several manuscripts from the Turfan collections that had not yet been identified as belonging to the MAV at the time of Waldschmidt's edition, most notably the important manuscript SHT 685, which was published by Waldschmidt himself (1968: 40-56) some years after his Mahavadana edition. (1) Fukita's additional sources also include several fragments in London (the Hoernle collection in the British Library), Paris (the Pelliot collection in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France), and St. Petersburg (location not specified). However, Fukita rejects the testimony of several of the manuscripts that Waldschmidt used in his edition on the grounds either that they are "parallel passages of other texts mistakenly identified as MAV" (p. 180) (2) or belong to a "Recension II" of the MAV, distinct from the "Recension I" that he is reconstructing (pp. 180-81). All of this old and new material is conveniently summarized in the "List of All Known Manuscripts in Northern Turkestan" (pp. 171-81).

The restored text is presented in an ingenious scheme whereby the full text is presented on the left-hand pages, while the facing right-hand pages contain the readings of the...