Many manuscripts of the Saddharmapundarika, which are among the most important manuscripts for the study of Buddhism, have been discovered in very different localities and are classified according to their place of discovery into the following three groups: Nepalese, Kashmirian, and Central Asian manuscripts. For the genealogical classification of these manuscripts, principal component analysis and cluster analysis, which describe the similarities between the verses of the different manuscripts, were applied to the data. As a result, we could successfully classify these manuscripts into two large groups and several smaller groups: one large group consists of ten paper manuscripts from Nepal and the other comprises nine palm‐leaf plus two paper manuscripts. The Kashmir and Central Asian manuscripts and a few of the Nepal manuscripts belong to the small groups.
目次
Introduction 193 Data Creation for Analysis 198 Principal Component Analysis 198 Cluster Analysis 202 Discussion 204
