The History of the *Kasyapaparivarta in Chinese Translations and Its Connection with the Maharatnakuta (Da Baoji jing [phrase omitted] ) Collection.

• Author: Silk, Jonathan A.

Mahayana Buddhism in India produced a vast number of scriptures, classified primarily into sutra and tantra. How much of this production has been lost to the vagaries of time is impossible to know, but even of the extant sutra literature--the vast majority of which is so far known not in its original Indic forms but only through Chinese and Tibetan translations--it is fair to say that most remains unstudied. Among the exceptions are a number of works that for one reason or another drew the attention of modern scholars. Some of these, such as the Saddharmapundarlka (Lotus Sutra) or the Larger and Smaller Sukhavativyuha (Pure Land Sutras), drew attention primarily because, in their Chinese guises, they came to hold a central position in East Asian, and particularly Japanese, Buddhism, although the position of these texts within Indian Buddhism was peripheral. Other sutras, however, garnered attention for other reasons, some of them seemingly random, such as a scholar's chance encounter with a manuscript. Of these, the *Kasyapaparivarta may be one of the most significant, if by "significant" we understand, for instance, the frequency with which the scripture was quoted by later authors and the authority it was apparently granted within the Indian tradition itself. It is another question--considered below--how we should understand the current location of the Kasyapaparivarta in the Chinese (and thence Tibetan) Maharatnakuta collection, an anthology of forty-nine sutras, most likely compiled on Chinese soil, and thus not necessarily relevant for the status of the text in its Indian homeland.

Alexander von Stael-Holstein (1877-1937) prepared his editio princeps of the Kasyapaparivarta (below, KP), published in 1926, centrally on the basis of a Sanskrit manuscript found in Central Asia, which he was able to access first in the Imperial Academy in St. Petersberg (see below). In addition to Sanskrit and Tibetan editions, however, Stael-Holstein also presented four Chinese translations of the text. If we include the substantially complete version contained in quotations in the Chinese translation of the commentary on the sutra, likewise published by Stael-Holstein only a few years later in 1933, five Chinese versions of the text have been available to scholars in modern editions for almost a century. However, there also exist two additional Chinese translations, one partial, the other complete, which have remained largely unknown. Thus, even if for no other reason, a reconsideration of available materials is timely. These hitherto often overlooked Chinese sources are not, in fact, newly discovered: the first, an extract of a small section of the sutra, was discussed already by Ono Hodo [phrase omitted] (1883-1985) in the same year that Stael-Holstein published the commentary, and positively identified two years later, (1) and the second, containing the complete sutra, was again first noticed by Ono; this discovery was published some twenty years further on. (2) Unaware of Ono's remarks, this otherwise unnoticed translation was "rediscovered" almost simultaneously (and independently of each other) by Nagao Gadjin [phrase omitted] (1907-2005) and Takasaki Jikido [phrase omitted] (1926-2013) another twenty years later. (3) As a result of this scholarship, there are now known to be seven Chinese translations of the KP (six of which are complete, or almost so), in addition to the materials in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and several other languages.

1. THE VERSIONS OF THE KP

   A nearly complete Sanskrit version of the sutra exists, primarily reliant on a manuscript recovered from the Central Asian site of Khotan and purchased by Nikolaj Fedorovic Petrovskij (1837-1908), who deposited it in the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in 1895 (catalogued now as SI P/2). It was later studied there and in China (from photographs, the manuscript itself remaining in what became Leningrad) by Stael-Holstein. (4) This manuscript is missing about eight leaves, many leaves are partially damaged, and it contains, as do all manuscripts, a number of mistakes. In 1926, utilizing only this Sanskrit manuscript and his own ingenuity and that of his collaborators, perhaps chiefly Friedrich Weller (1889-1980), Stael-Holstein published the Sanskrit text, together with a version of the Tibetan translation found in the Kanjurs, and four Chinese translations. The edition, largely following the logical segments of the sutra itself, divides the text into one paragraph of preamble ([section]0) and 166 paragraphs of text. (Below we adopt the standard form of reference to Stael-Holstein's paragraphs, referring to [section]1 for the first true paragraph of the text, and so on.) Later, in 1933, Stael-Holstein published the commentary in an interlinear edition containing its Tibetan ('Od srungs kyi le'u rgya cher 'grel pa) and Chinese {Da Baoji jinglun [phrase omitted] ) translations. Subsequently a number of scholars studied the sutra, among whom special attention must be drawn to Friedrich Weller, who published complete Tibetan and Sanskrit indices (1933, 1935), (5) translated the Sanskrit text into German (supplementing it from Tibetan when the Sanskrit was missing, 1965) and individually all of the four thenknown Chinese translations (see below), and who did not fail even to study the Mongolian translation in detail (e.g., 1962).

   The Tibetan translation of the Mahdratnakuta collection of forty-nine sutras (below, MRK), within which the translation of KP is to be found, was investigated as a whole by Marcelle Lalou (1890-1967) in 1927 and Sakurabe Bunkyo [phrase omitted] (1898-1982) in 1930, and although some other individual texts included in the collection have received scholarly attention, little work had been done on what we now must recognize as the Tibetan versions of the KP for almost ninety years, until James Apple identified and published large portions of a recension recovered from a number of separately catalogued Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts. (6) Nothing is known of its translators because the latter portion of the text is lost, although in fact such Dunhuang manuscripts often do not, in any case, contain colophons. As for the other translation, catalogues and colophons assert that the KP preserved in the Kanjurs was translated into Tibetan by Jinamitra, Silendrabodhi, and Ye shes sde. The Tibetan text of the sutra quoted in the commentary, the names of the translators of which are not recorded, agrees in the main with the sutra version, with a few exceptions that show readings different from, and sometimes better than, the readings of the latter. As the Tibetan translations require their own treatment, they are henceforth left aside here.

   The four Chinese translations usually referred to by modern scholarship, and included in Stael-Holstein's edition, are as follows, listed in chronological order, as indicated by the reigns under which they were translated, with the titles as usually cited:

   1) (Foshuo) Yiri monibao jing ( [phrase omitted] . Attributed to Lokaksema (Zhi Loujiachen [phrase omitted] of the Later Han [phrase omitted] dated 179 CE. T. 350. (Hereafter H.) (7)

   2) (Foshuo) Moheyan baoyan jing ( [phrase omitted] Attributed to an unknown translator of the [Western] Jin [phrase omitted] dynasty, 291-299 CE. T. 351. (Hereafter J.) (8)

   3) Da Baoji jing Fuming pusa hui [phrase omitted] Attributed to an unknown translator of the [Western] Qin [phrase omitted] dynasty, 384-431 CE. T. 310(43) (XI) 631cl4-638c4. (Hereafter Q.) (9)

   4) (Foshuo) Dajiashe wen da baoji zhengfa jing [phrase omitted] Attributed to Shihu [phrase omitted] (*Danapala?) of the Song [phrase omitted] dynasty, end of the tenth century. T. 352. (Hereafter S.) (10)

   The Han Translation

   Catalogues tell us that the first translation is dated to the Guanghe [phrase omitted] reign period (178-184), which establishes that the KP already existed by the second half of the second century CE. We will turn to these catalogues in a moment, but first we must clarify the title of this translation. What is cited above--Foshuo Yiri monibao jing [phrase omitted] --is the form in which the text is nearly always cited in modern scholarship. But, as has been known since the time of Stael-Holstein, this reading of the title is based on several early mistakes or omissions, a fact often, even almost always, overlooked by subsequent scholars. (11) In the first place we must note the obvious fact that the characters ri [phrase omitted] and yue [phrase omitted] are in many styles of writing virtually indistinguishable. (12) Further, the term yiri [phrase omitted] I in the title (taking it provisionally in this form) occurs in the sutra itself ([section]52) more fully as yiriluo [phrase omitted] However, Wogihara Unrai [phrase omitted] (1869-1937) already suggested to Stael-Holstein while the latter was preparing his editio princeps that this is probably an error for [phrase omitted] "an imperfect transliteration of [the Sanskrit term] vipula or of vaipulya." (13) Furthermore, the character [phrase omitted] must be read wei, rather than yi. Stael-Holstein agreed, and thus it is clear that the solution was already known at the time Stael-Holstein published his edition in 1926. It should thus have been clear from early on that the characters [phrase omitted] are most likely to be understood as what we would now write in Pinyin as weiyueluo, to be reconstructed following the Late Han reconstructions in Schuessler 2009 as wi-wat-la. While Pelliot apparently saw this as a phonetic rendering of Prakritic *vivula = vipula, the -t final in the second element of the string seems to signal a gemination. (14) If the first vowel can render also an Indie -e-, we might more comfortably have to imagine a Middle Indie equivalent of vaipulya than vipula.

   There is other evidence for vaipulya in this period. As Tsukinowa noticed already in 1935, the Han translation of the Astasahasrika...