A Study of Nagarjuna's Twenty Verses on the Great Vehicle (Mahayanavimsika) and His Verses on lie Heart of Dependent Origination (Pratityasamutpadahrdayakarika).

• Author: Tatz, Mark
• Position: Reviews of Books

A Study of Nagarjuna's Twenty Verses on the Great Vehicle (Mahayanavimsika) and His Verses on lie Heart of Dependent Origination (Pratityasamutpadahrdayakarika), with the Interpretation of the Heart of Dependent Origination (Pratityasamutpadahrdayavyakhyana). By R. C. JAMIESON. Toronto Studies in Religion, vol. 15. New York: PETER LANG, 2000. Pp. 183.

These two brief but important verse texts are "attributed to Nagarjuna." R. C. Jamieson, who is Keeper of Sanskrit Manuscripts at the University of Cambridge, does not take up the issue of attribution in any detail, but we may take the texts as definitively "Nagarjunian," as they are in no way inconsistent with the Mula-Madhyamaka-karikas.

Included are both Tibetan translations of the Twenty Verses, edited from three editions of the canon, the seven-verse Heart of Dependent Origination and its auto-commentary, likewise edited, and editions of Tun-huang manuscripts, from the Paris and London collections, of the Heart, its canonical commentary, and an otherwise unknown commentary. Several of the Ton-huang manuscripts have not been dealt with before; even without photographic plates, these are a useful contribution. Fragments from London and Paris have been combined to form a complete version of the Heart commentary. Sanskrit manuscripts and fragments have been consulted, but are not included in this volume; Chinese translations are noted but not utilized. Citations of verses in other works are generally ignored. The text-critical notes and discussions will be useful for further study, though their presentation in essay format is not ideal. Inconveniently, the verses are numbered in the Tibetan, but not the English.

Although this volume was published in the year 2000, the bibliography contains no item as late as 1990. Especially useful to the enterprise would have been the study of a related work by Nagarjuna, presented in the Salistamba Sutra and Its Indian Commentaries by Jeffrey D. Schoening, 1995 (reviewed in JAOS 118: 546-47), which is relevant for the treatment of Tibetan canonical editions and Tun-huang manuscripts. As it is, Schoening has demonstrated that three editions, as here, are not sufficient; besides, the Delhi photo-reprint used here is not a true facsimile of the Derge edition, because it was edited prior to publication. Japanese scholarship has been consulted, but few periodical articles in any language have been cited, aside from those bearing directly on these texts.

The...