Subodhalankara (Porana-tika, Abhinava-tika).

• Author: Collins, Steven
• Position: Book Review

Edited by PADMANABH S. JAINI. Oxford: PALI TEXT SOCIETY, 2000. Pp. ix + 315.

In more than forty years of scholarly work, among his many achievements Padmanabh Jaini has made a series of invaluable editions of Pali texts, almost all previously unknown in Western scholarship. To mention only those in book form, there is a short commentary on the Milinda Panha, the Milinda-tika (PTS 1961); a collection of stories which has at least three recensions in Pali and vernaculars, and which was one of the most important sources of Buddhist narrative in mainland Southeast Asia, the Pannasa Jataka (1981, 1983), with translations by I. B. Horner and Jaini (Apocryphal Birth Stories 1985, 1986); and a prose subhasita-niti text incorporating a Jataka story, the Lokaneyyapakarana (1986). Now we have his long-awaited edition of a work on poetics, Subodhalankara. It is a collocation of three texts. The first, the Subodhalankara itself, was probably written in the late twelfth century in Sri Lanka by Sangharakkhita, a member of the monastic group headed by Sariputta under the patronage of Parakkamabahu I. The second is what seems to be an auto-commentary by Sangharakkhita, given the title "Old Commentary" (Porana-tika) by a Burmese monk Silacara in 1928, who also gave the title "New Commentary" (Abhinava-tika) to the third text presented here. This is ascribed to a fourteenth-century Burmese monk by Silacara and the editors of the Chatthasangayana edition in 1964, but, following Mabel Bode, Jaini suggests 1880 as another possible date. All three texts refer very often to Sanskrit literary and literary-critical works, most notably Dandin's Kavyadarsa, of which Sangharakkhita had detailed knowledge. The verses of the Subodhalankara have been published once before, by G. E. Fryer in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1875): 1-95. He gives a much more detailed account of the contents of the book than does Jaini, and so his work remains useful. As Jaini mentions, Fryer's edition was based on two Burmese manuscripts, from Moulmein and Rangoon, whose relation to Jaini's sources is not discussed. After having mentioned Fryer's work, with the exception of one footnote on the first page Jaini does not refer to his edition at all. This seems odd, because Fryer has three more verses than Jaini (370 in place of 367), and some different readings.

Sangharakkhita was a highly sophisticated scholar. Works of grammar and monastic law are attributed to him; his treatise on...