BODHISATTVAS OF THE FOREST AND THE FORMATION OF THE MAHĀYĀNA: A STUDY AND TRANSLATION OF THE RĀSTRAPĀLAPARIPRCCHĀ-SŪTRA . By Daniel Boucher . Studies in Buddhist Traditions . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press , 2008 . Pp . xxiii + 287 . $54.00 .
摘要
Boucher's translation of the Mahāyāna inline imageSūtra, which is based on all surviving versions of the text in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, is impressive and markedly better than J. Ensink's translation of 1952. This by itself is a valuable contribution to the field. The most interesting parts of his study are his two chapters on the inline image textual history and the process involved in inline image late third‐ or early fourth‐century translation of the text into Chinese. The ideas that Boucher presents in his four chapters on early Mahāyāna are also interesting, although they are mainly restatements of ideas developed by other scholars, primarily G. Schopen, P. Harrison, and J. Nattier. Boucher presents the inline image as further evidence for the thesis that forest ascetics played a central role in the development of Mahāyāna, which has been the leading theory on early Mahāyāna in the West for the last fifteen years. This is a disappointingly cautious move, and a problematic one because it is now growing clear that this theory is incorrect. A basic problem with Boucher's argument is that inline image translation, the oldest evidence we have for the text, postdates the likely origin of Mahāyāna by three centuries or more, and there is no clear reason to take it as providing better evidence for early Mahāyāna than any of the more than a hundred other Mahāyāna sūtras translated into Chinese by inline imageand earlier translators, few of which show any orientation towards forest asceticism (e.g., the inline imagePrajñāpāramitā, larger Sukhāvat?vyūha, inline image, Vimalak?rtinirdeśa).
