Tathāgataguṇajnānācintyaviṣayāvatāra; Tathāgataguṇajnānācintyaviṣayāvatāra#Dvādaśadaṇḍakanāmāṣṭaśatavimalīkaraṇā; Śrīmahādevīvyākaraṇa; Gilgit Buddhist Manuscripts
摘要
Recently, a stack of Sanskrit birch-bark manuscripts was discovered allegedly from a certain place within ancient Greater Gāndhāra. They are written in “Gilgit-Bamiyan type I” and date to between 679–770 CE with a 95.4 percent probability, based on a C14 test on the birch-bark. Amongst the hundreds of fragments, I have been able to identify around thirty folios of several Mahāyāna scriptures, namely the Tathāgataguṇajnānācintyaviṣayāvatāra and the Dvādaśadaṇḍakanāmāṣṭaśatavimalīkaraṇā as well as those of the Saṃghāṭasūtra and the Larger Prajnāpāramitā. In order to display the importance of this discovery, I have decided to publish some preliminary results of my on-going study of this collection. In this paper, I deal with four folios of the Tathāgataguṇajnānācintyaviṣayāvatāra and Dvādaśadaṇḍakanāmāṣṭaśatavimalīkaraṇā. Up to present no Sanskrit manuscript of the Tathāgataguṇajnānācintyaviṣayāvatāra has been known. By comparing these newly-discovered fragments with the Sanskrit texts of the Śraddhābalādhānāvatāramudrāsūtra, which is only quoted fragmentarily in the Śikṣāsamuccaya by Śāntideva and the Sarvabuddhaviṣayāvatārajnānālokālaṃkāra, a complete manuscript of which was found in 1999 at the Potala Palace in Lhasa, I found that they shared similar expressions and so I came to the conclusion that these manuscripts belonged to the same group of scriptures. A Sanskrit manuscript of the Dvādaśadaṇḍakanāmāṣṭaśatavimalīkaraṇā amongst the “Gilgit manuscripts” was reproduced in a facsimile in Gilgit Buddhist Manuscripts (Facsimile Edition) and transcribed and edited by Dutt in Gilgit Manuscript vol. I, who mistakenly entitled this text as the Śrīmahādevīvyākaraṇa, apparently based on the Tibetan translation. In the light of these newly-discovered fragments of the scripture in question as well as the Tibetan and Chinese translations, the deficiency of Dutt’s edition of the Gilgit manuscript of this scripture is now evident.
