pratītyasamutpāda; Vibhaṅga-sūtra; brick inscriptions from Nālandā; Nidānasaṃyukta; Saṃyuttanikāya
摘要
The Pratītyasamutpādavibhaṅga-sūtra, or Pratītyasamutpāda-sūtra as it called in several quotations, is contained in the Chinese Saṃyuktāgama as the sixteenth sūtra in chapter three. In the Za ahan jing itself and in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya it is just called Fenbie jing 分別經 or Vibhaṅga. A Sanskrit version of this sūtra is also contained in the Nidānasaṃyukta, which was published by Chandrabhāl Tripāṭhī in 1962 on the basis of manuscript remains found in Eastern Turkestan. In addition, this sūtra was also passed down independently in Tibetan and in Chinese with the names rTen ciṅ ’brel bar/par ’byuṅ ba daṅ po daṅ rnam par dbye ba bstan pa źes bya ba’i mdo and Yuanqi jing 緣起經, respectively. The last two versions of the Pratītyasamutpādasūtra, i.e. the rTen brel mdo and the Yuanqi jing, find their Sanskrit counterpart also in two brick inscriptions from Nālandā published by Niranjan P. Chakravarti in 1932. When seen from the perspective of the importance attached to this sūtra, the editions of the Sanskrit versions published previously are in need of improvement. This is true of both the one by Tripāṭhī in the Nidānasaṃyukta and the one on the basis of Chakravarti’s reading of the brick inscriptions from Nālandā. A new edition of the Pratītyasamutpāda-sūtra in the Nidānasaṃyukta is already in progress within the framework of a new edition of the whole Nidānasaṃyukta. In the present paper, the reader will find a new transliteration of the brick inscription B from Nālandā on the basis of a digital image of the original photo used in Chakravarti’s article and a reconstruction juxtaposed with the Tibetan and Chinese versions, taking all the parallels known so far into account.
