Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden, part 7: Die Katalognummern 1066-1799.

AuthorSalomon, Richard

Edited by HEINZ BECHERT; described by KLAUS WILLE. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. X.7. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1995. Pp. ix + 518. DM 244.

This is the seventh of a projected ten volumes (see SWTF, I: xii, xxiii) of the Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden (SHT) containing the complete texts of otherwise unpublished Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts which were collected in the Turfan oasis region and in sites on the northern Tarim Basin route by the four German expeditions to Central Asia between 1902 and 1914. The ongoing project of study and publication of the manuscripts has been carried out since then under the leadership of Heinrich Luders, Ernst Waldschmidt, and, currently, Heinz Bechert. The first volume of SHT was published by Waldschmidt, with Walter Clawiter and Lore [Sander-]Holtzmann in 1965, while the first of a projected five volumes of the dictionary based on these texts, the SWTF, was completed in 1994.

The current volume of SHT presents fragments of two hundred manuscripts, for most of which preliminary transcriptions had been previously prepared by Else Luders and Dieter Schlingloff. On the whole, the texts are presented here with the same precision, accuracy, and scrupulous care that readers have come to expect in this series. Only about one quarter of the texts have been definitively identified, while the remainder are identified, if at all, in terms of preliminary genre classifications such as "Kavya," "Lehre (nichtkanonische)," or "Verse" (pp. viii and 307). In this respect, the materials in this volume differ from those of the first six volumes of SHT in which the proportion of positively identified texts was generally much higher. Due to financial limitations, no facsimiles of manuscripts, such as were provided in volumes 1 through 5, could be included in this volume.

The fragments presented here comprise a wide variety of materials, mostly in the range of canonical sutra and vinaya texts and non-canonical abhidharma texts. The sutras represented include several major ones such as the Dasottara, Mahaparinirvana, Sangiti, and Suvarnabhasottama, while abhidharma works are represented by important texts such as the Abhidharma-kosa (one fragment), the Abhidharma-kosa-bhasya (six fragments), and the Abhidharma-kosa-tika Laksananusarini (one fragment), as well as a relatively extensive set of fragments of the Abhidharma-dipa (no. 1705 + 1730, pp. 119-30). Other genres and specific texts in the collection include jatakas and avadanas, stotras (including works by Matrceta and Nilabhuti), the Udana-varga, the Satasahasrika Prajnaparamita, and even a fragment of the Astadhyayi. An interesting feature of this, as of previous volumes of SHT, is the inclusion of several specimens of "Sammelhandschriften," such as no. 1654 containing parts of the Arthavistaradharmaparyaya and Sangiti-sutra (presumably part of a satsutraka...

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