Niddesa, Vol. 3
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~ali ~e~t $ociet£ NIDDESA II Cullaniddesa EDITED ilY W. STEDE, PH.D. jLOll~Oll PUBLISHED FOR THE PA Ll ~TEXT SOCIETY BY HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS \VAf{EHOUSE, AM EN CORNER, E.C. 1918 4F^ CONTENTS PAQB Preface - - - - - - vii Introduction. 1. Character of this Edition - - - ix 2. State of Sc - - - - - xi 3. Text of C.N. and Text of Sn. - - - xiii 4. C.N. MSS. and Sn. MSS. - - - xv 5. Phonology of C.N. MSS. - - - xvii - 6. Titles of Pucchas - - - xx 7. Character of the Niddesa _ - . xxii 8. Methodological and typographical remarks - xxiv Part I. Text-Matter op C.N. - 1. Vatthugatha of Parayanavagga - - 1 2. Puccha of Parayanavagga - - - 6 3. Khaggavisanasutta - - - - 56 Part II. Explanatory Matter of C.N. - - 75 Appendices. - - 1. Gathas and other Quotations - 289 2. Table of repeated Padas - - - 291 3. Concordance of S^ and S^ Archetype - - 293 r-p^' ; PREFACE The text of the Culla Niddesa (CN.), as edited here, is based on the following sources : S^ : Palm-leaf MS. in Singhalese character?, from Colombo, the property of Prof, Rhys Davids B'' : Palm-leaf MS. in Bmmese characters, in the Bernard Free Library, Rangoon. T : The C.N. in the printed Siamese Tipitaka, vol. xxvii. Of these sources the first one was accessible to me in its original form, having kindly been lent to me by Prof. Rhys Davids ; of the second I had a transcript made by Mrs. E. Powell-Brown of Rangoon, by which I was greatly aided in checking and correcting S^ ; and the dijB&culty of reading the third in the original was overcome by a full transcript sent to me, hke that of B^, by jVLts. Rhys Davids. Recognizing the great similarity between S^ and B^, I asked Mrs. Powell-Brown to discontinue her transcription after having done slightly more than half, but by some chance she continued up to leaf 63 (v. 1122 Sn.), covering thus the " sunnato "-passage, which, being in a very confused state in S<^ and somewhat disarranged in T, receives a great deal of elucidation from B^, so that I was glad after all to have the copy of B"^ up to the point mentioned. It is a pleasant duty to me to acknowledge the readiness of both Professor and Mrs, Rhys Davids to put this work viii Preface. into my hands as a " solamen misero " in these unfortunate times, and to give me what assistance they could. To Mrs. Rhys Davids I am also indebted for a good number of refer- ences concerning Gathas and " vuttam h' etam " quotations. My thanks are further due to Mrs. Powell-Brown for the careful and painstaking transliteration of B^, on which she has spent a good deal of her time, and which, considering the difficulties under which she worked, cannot be praised too highly. The Siamese transcript also was done in an excellent manner, which deserves full credit. I am glad to have been able to bring to an end a piece of work, the successful completion of which was threatened more than once ; and I hope that it will contribute its mite towards the advancement of Pali studies and of Buddhist literature and philosophy. As regards the manner of treating the text and the form of its arrangement, I have to say a few words of justification, which I trust will meet with the approval of my fellow-workers. W. STEDE. Glasgow, May, 1916. INTRODUCTION 1. Character of this Editiox. The form of this edition needs some explanation. It is only after a long and careful consideration of the advisability or otherwise of a modified arrangement in the editing of a Pali Text, that I have decided to depart from tradition. The purpose of a Niddesa or Exposition is better served the more categorically the analysis of the matter to be elu- cidated is carried out. Thus its character finds its true expression in an arrangement which suits our purposes. The form must be such as facilitates to best advantage the ex- position of the matter, and in want of any better, we have to take to the form of the dictionary, for in the end is not every dictionary a niddesa and every niddesa a dictionary ? It might at first seem as if the context as such would suffer from a treatment of the exposition which severs the connec- tive thread and dissolves it into its components. But on closer inspection it becomes clear that it is never, or only very seldom, the context as a whole which is explained, and that any thread in the pregnant sense of the word is only an apparent one. In reality the exposition is not an organic structure, but only an aggregate of disconnected pieces or atoms—each of them representing a stereotype phrase which serves for the word or words not only in this special setting, but in any setting. By virtue of this its stereotype and inorganic character, it does not make the shghtest difference whether the atoms of the exposition are left in this setting, or be put into another setting more appropriate to our pur- pose. And indeed, by laying bare the structure of the X Introduction, exposition, the really important, because individual and therefore vital parts, are all the more easily recognized and appreciated as such. It is this stereotypeness of all Commentary explanations which has led me to this arrangement of C.N. By this means we can hope to one day reduce the whole of our explanatory matter (and I daresay a good deal of our text-matter as well) to its simplest form, its nucleus, and trace it back to its common source. There can be no question as to the exist- ence of this common source. In view of this their character as stereotype explanations their value lies by no means in their " speciality," i.e., being an explanation of the passage to which they are appended, but rather in their " generality," as being a part of a greater Commentary-whole, bricks in a larger building, to the re- construction of which the new arrangement will help to contribute. Moreover, as the C.N. is traditionally considered to form only a continuation of the Maha Niddesa (M.N.), and as the same explanations are repeated in C.N. which are given suis locis in the printed edition of M.N., this arrangement of the C.N. matter will at the same time prove to be a sort of passage-index to M.N., and instead of repeating the same matter in the same way, it will shed new light on it by show- ing it in a different way under a different angle of incidence. An investigation of the relation between the MSS. of M.N. and those of C.N. would be of interest and importance. Their affinity is close, and to show their resemblance I have in a few cases added the M.N. reading to the vv. 11. of the C.N. passage (to the expositions of kama, parissaya, visattika, and sata). Thus its setting into the modern form is, I believe, in no way an impairment of its character ; it only exchanges its Eastern garb for a Western one, and gains in its value as analysis ("exposition") by a further improvement of it. A decided help derived from such a rearrangement is also that it facilitates the identification of the ' pe " passages; and its aid to the study of Buddhist philosophical termin- Introduction. xi ology cannot be underestimated by anyone who has ever undertaken such a study. The improved analysis must be welcomed by the student of Buddhist thought, for in all constructive science the analytical part has to precede the synthetical, and why should not the constitution of a Text prepare the way for synthesis as much as it can by analysis ? 2. The State of S^. 1. My main and only source for first-hand information was the Singhalese Palm-leaf MS. lent by Prof. Khys Davids. I have transcribed and analysed its 101 leaves and found it to be a source of very doubtful value. It must be the work of a scribe who was not even familiar with the language he was copying. Besides being extremely badly written in parts, it is full of insertions at the \\Tong places, of omissions of letters and words, and of repetitions which altogether escaped unnoticed. It was a laborious task in itself to restore the right sequence of leaves in their original form from this MS. All the more reliable—because done without a thought and therefore free from intentional changes—it proved for the reconstruction of the Original (*ScA, conjec- tured) from which the writer of S*^ copied. The clue to this reconstruction is furnished by various passages, which by their position in S^ point to a misplacement of the leaves in ^S'^A, and by several mistakes in leaf-turning, or when the back was copied before the face. An analysis of all these passages shows that *S*^A was, or is, a Palm-leaf MS. consist- ing of 126 leaves^, written like S*^ on both sides, but with seven or eight lines to each, whereas S^ has from eight to ten lines. The reconstruction of *S^A was a purely arith- metical process which in its result proved to be correct to the line (cp. App. 3, constructed for Par. V.). ^ 1-92^'^ The first and the last of it are half-leaves ; for Par. v., and 92«-i5-126'-8 for the Kh.S. If both were kept separate, there would be ninety whole and two half-leaves for Par.