Abstract Recent years have seen increasing access to Sanskrit manuscripts which have lain unread for centuries in Tibet. The Austrian Academy of Sciences’ series, Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region ( STTAR ), has been slowly making some of these materials available. Here we consider the three most recent contributions to this series, dealing respectively with the Tattvārthā , Sthiramati’s Abhidharmakośa subcommentary; the Bodhisatvapiṭaka , a Mahāyāna sūtra; and the Pramāṇavārttikālaṅkāranibandha of Yamāri, a Pramāṇavārttika subcommentary. These publications are considered from various points of view, and some more general considerations offered on what it might mean to produce a “diplomatic edition.”
Abstract Japanese scholarship on Ancient India is largely focused on Indian Buddhism. Because, however, so much of it is published in the Japanese language, it is all too often and too easily overlooked by non-Japanese scholars. The present contribution introduces several recent publications on Indian Buddhism and related fields from Japan.
Abstract The incomplete bilingual manuscript Ch. ii.003, likely dating to the tenth century, preserves the Jīvakapustaka , an Āyurvedic medical treatise written in corrupted Sanskrit verses with accompanying Late Khotanese prose translation. The text presents considerable difficulties owing to its very late form of Khotanese and to its unorthodox and metrically irregular Sanskrit. Through close comparison with the twenty-nine prescriptions that correspond to known passages in Sanskrit Āyurvedic sources, this article identifies and classifies recurring orthographic and linguistic anomalies, distinguishing between scribal errors, phonological interference, and orthographic adaptation. The analysis shows that the Sanskrit portion of the Jīvakapustaka does not represent a hybrid variety of Sanskrit, but is instead the product of a Late Khotanese scribe who, lacking competence in Sanskrit, systematically reshaped the text according to the phonological and graphic conventions of his native language. By establishing a typology of errors and substitution patterns, the article provides a methodological framework for reconstructing the remaining unedited portions of the text and for advancing the study of linguistic interaction between Sanskrit and Khotanese in medieval Central Asia.
