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Prajnaparamita -Sutra CHAPTER THREE THE HISTORY OF BUDDHIST SANSKRIT LITERATURE AND THE A$!TASAHASR]KA- PRAJNAPARAMITA -SUTRA Buddhism rose in India and it is used to decline in India; nevertheless, the zeal of the early Buddhist missionaries spread the faith far beyond the boundaries of its native land. There is no lack of authentic histories of Buddhism; however, no systematic history of the Buddhist literature in Sanskrit has appeared up to now. Buddhism has had an immense literature. The religion had early branched into several sects and each of them had a sacred tongue of its own. Therefore, there is not one sacred language of Buddhism. However, the literary productions of the Buddhists fall into two divisions. It is yet a moot question what the original language of Buddhism was and whether we have any fragments of the tongue employed by the Buddha himself. Whatever that original language was; it is now certain that Pali has no claim to that distinction. Strictly speaking, there are only two sacred languages of the Buddhists, Pali and Sanskrit. Pali is the hieratic language of the Buddhists of Ceylon, Siam and Burma who observe a prosaic and more ancient form of Buddhism. In Tibet, China and Japan, the sacred language of Buddhism is Sanskrit and although very few books on Buddhism written"in Sanskrit have ever been discovered there, it is unquestionable that at one time there was an immense Buddhist literature, a vast amount of which was translated into Tibetan and Chinese and latter scholars have succeeded in 65 recovering a portion of the Sanskrit canon which was believed to have perished beyond recall. Pali Buddhist literature has the merit of being compact and has been studied more or less vigorously by various Western as well as Asian scholars while the Sanskrit has had the disadvantage of being looked upon with suspicion. It was believed to be a later production. Very few scholars are now skeptical regarding some of the texts which this Sanskrit Buddhist literature embodies and which date from an antiquity as respectable as any of the Pali texts. ni.l History of Buddhist Sanskrit Literature and the Origin of the Astasabasiika-PrajSaparamita -Sutra in. 1.1 The origin and development of Buddhist Sanskrit literature Extraordinarily rich and extensive Pali literature of India, Ceylon and Burma represents only the literature of one sect of Buddhism, namely Theravadd^^. Alongside of it in India itself and apart from the other countries where Buddhism is the dominant religion, several sects have developed their own literary productions, the language of which is partly Sanskrit and partly a dialect''^ which we may call the mid-Indian and which IS given the designation of "mixed Sanskrit" by Senart. In the North and North-West of India, there were great centers of learning, such as the universities of Nalanda and Takkasila (Taxila) where for hundreds of years not only all branches of secular knowledge, "" Maurice Wintemitz, A History of Indian Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999), 217. '" According to Vinitadeva (8th century (A.D.) the Sarvastivadins used Sanskrit, the Mahasanghikas Prakrit. Cf. Ryukan Kimura, "A Historical Study oftlie Terms Hmayana and Mahayana and the origin of Mahayana Buddl\isnf\ Calcutta, 1927, p. 7 "^ Previously it was usually called "Gatha dialect" (see Maurice Wintemitz, "/4 History of Indian Literature'' (Vol. I, p.41) which is all the more inappropriate as it is also widespread in inscriptions 66 especially medicine, but also the philosophical and theological literature of the Buddhists were cultivated with great zeal. Indian scholars went thence to Tibet and China, learned Tibetan and Chinese, and translated Sanskrit works into these languages. Chinese pilgrims like Hsuan-Tsang learnt Sanskrit at Nalanda, and translated Buddhist texts into Chinese. Of this Sanskrit literature there remains many voluminous books and fragments of several others while many are known to us only through Tibetan and Chinese translations. The major portion of this literature, in pure and mixed Sanskrit, which we for brevity's sake call Buddhist Sanskrit literature, belongs to or or has been influenced by the school known as that of the Mahayana. The most ancient Buddhist school, the doctrine of which coincides with that of the Theravada, as perpetuated in Pali tradition, sees in salvation or nirvana, the supreme bliss and in the conception of arhatship, which is already in this life a foretaste of the coming nirvana^ the end and goal of all strivings,—a goal which is attainable only by a few with knowledge acquired only in ascetic life. This original objective of early Buddhism has not been rejected by the adherents of the later or Mahayana school, it has been recognized as originating with the Buddha himself. It is characterized, as the HTnayana or the "inferior vehicle" which does not suffice to conduct all beings to cessation of sorrow. What the later doctrine teaches is the Mahayana or the "great vehicle" is calculated to transport a larger number of people, the whole community of humanity, over and beyond the sorrow of existence. This new doctrine, as is claimed by its followers, rests upon a profounder understanding of the ancient texts or upon later mystical revelation of the Buddha himself and it replaces the ideal of the arhat by that of the bodhisattva. Not only the monk but every human being- can place before himself the goal to be reborn as a 67 bodhisattva, which means an enlightened being or one who may receive 11 ^ supreme illumination and bring salvation to all mankind. If this goal is to be made attainable by many there must be more efficient means for making it accessible to all. Therefore, according to the doctrine of the Mahayana, even the father of a family occupied with worldly life, the merchant, the craftsman, the sovereign, even the laborer and the pariah can attain salvation on the one hand, by the practice of commiseration and goodwill for all creatures, by extraordinary generosity and self-abnegation, and on the other, by means of a believing surrender to and veneration of the Buddha, other Buddhas and the bodhisattvas. In the Pali canon, the Buddha is already sometimes shown as a superman, but he becomes such only because of his attainment to supreme illumination which enables him to perform miracles and finally to enter nirvana. What has remained for us as an object of veneration after his passing away is only his doctrine or at any rate his relics. In the Mahayana, on the other hand, the Buddhas fi"om the first are nothing but divine beings and their peregrinations on the earth and their entry into nirvana are no more than a fi-eak or thoughtless play. And if in the HTnayana there is the mention of a number of Buddhas, predecessors of Shakyamuni in earlier eons, the Maiiayana counts its Buddhas by the thousands, or by the millions. Moreover, innumerable millions of bodhisattvas are worshipped as divine beings by the Mahayana Buddhists. These bodhisattvas who are provided with perfections iparamita) and with illumination, out of compassion for the world, renounce their claim to nirvana. The ancient Buddhism had explained the origin of suffering by the pratitya-samutpada (psXv.paticcasamuppada), i.e. the formula in which it is shown that all the elements of beings originate only in mutual inter- "^ Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism: The doctrinal foundation {London: Routledge,2003), 21. 68 dependence. The Hinayana derives from this formula the doctrine of anatta (Sanskrit/awatoa/?), of the 'non-self i.e. the doctrine that there are corporeal and physical phenomena which change every moment. The Mahayana derives from this same formula the doctrine of simyata i.e. the doctrine that "all is void" {sarvam, simyata) meaning "devoid of independent reality". The Prajhaparamitahrdaya Sutra runs: '"''sarvadhatmah sunyatalaksana anutpanna aniruddha amala na vimala nona na paripurnaH\{All phenomena are empty, that is, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not stainless, undiminished, unfiUedf^'^. However, the Buddhistic Sanskrit literature is by no means exclusively Mahayanic. There are also a number of important Hinayana texts, which are written exclusively in pure and mixed Sanskrit. There is no complete copy of this Sanskrit to be found. We know it only from larger or smaller fragments of its Udana-varga, Dharmapada, Ekottaragama and Madhyamagama which have been discovered from the xylographs and manuscripts recovered from Eastern Turkistan by Stein, Grunwedel and Le Coq, as well as from quotations in other Buddhist Sanskrit texts like the Mahavastu, Divyavadana and Lalitavistara and finally from Chinese and Tibetan translations. The main texts of the canon of the Mulasarvastivadins were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing in the years 700-712. There are, however, Chinese translations of single texts dating from the middle of the 2nd century onwards, and there were adherents of the Sarvastivada in India as early as the 2nd century B.C. In wording and in the arrangement of the texts, the Sanskrit Canon has great similarity to the Pali Canon, but on the other hand, there are many points of difference too. A feasible explanation of this is that both canons had a common source, probably the lost MagadhTCanon, from which ''" Donald S.Lopez,Jr., The Heart Sutra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990), 19. 69 first the Pali Canon branched off in one part of India, and then, later on, the Sanskrit Canon in another district. Fragments of the Pratitnoksa-Sutra of the Sarvastivadins as well as other texts of the Vinayapitaka of the Sanskrit Canon, have been found in Central Asia (Eastern Turkestan) , and a few in Nepal too. It is also possible to reconstruct the Pratimoksa-Sutra from Chinese and Tibetan translations.
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