Vasubandhus Interpretation des Pratityasamutpada: Eine kritische Bearbeitung der Pratityasamutpadavyakhya.

• Author: Griffiths, Paul J.

This book is based, with only slight changes, on a dissertation completed at the University of Hamburg under the direction of Lambert Schmithausen in 1992. It contains a study of a commentary (vyakhya) attributed to Vasubandhu on a Buddhist sutra called Pratityasamutpadadivibhanganirdesa (The Sutra Explaining the Basis and the Divisions of [the Doctrine of] Dependent Co-Origination). This work, lost in the original, survives in Tibetan and Chinese versions. Vasubandhu's commentary is likewise lost in the original, except for a single fragmentary manuscript found in Nepal; it appears never to have been translated into Chinese, and the only Tibetan version was made during the period of the first dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet (roughly the first half of the ninth century A.D.). This means, as Muroji puts it succinctly, that the quality of the translation is not optimal (p. 3), since at that period those who translated Sanskrit materials into Tibetan had not yet formalized their methods and finalized their lexica.

Neither the sutra nor its commentary has had much work on it published in English. What little has been done is in German or Japanese (Muroji provides a list of partial translations of these works into those languages on pp. 21-22); and even in those languages there is no complete translation of the Vyakhya, and relatively little in the way of interpretive scholarship. What Muroji offers in this book breaks new ground, for the sections he deals with here have been neither translated nor given significant interpretive study elsewhere.

Muroji provides: (1) A critical edition of the Tibetan text of those sections of the Vyakhya treating the volitions (samskara) and consciousness (vijnana), which are the second and third items in the twelvefold version of the pratityasamutpada formula. This edition is accompanied by parallel texts, some verbatim and some close to verbatim, in Sanskrit and Tibetan, from other sources (the chief ones drawn upon here are the Nidanasamyukta, the Arthaviniscayasutranibandhana, the Karmasiddhiprakarana, and the Abhidharmakosabhasya). He also provides parallels from the Karmasiddhiprakarana, in order (in part) to show how a later (and better) Tibetan translation treats almost identical matter. (2) A German translation of the critically edited Vyakhya-text, together with extensive notes on the semantic and philosophical significance of the text and its parallels. (3) A detailed analytical table of contents of...