On the Exact Dates of Some Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in Old Bengali Script

Hori, Shin'ichiro (International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies, Tokyo, JPN)

There are some Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in old Bengali or Maithili script dated to the fifteenth century according to their colophons. These manuscripts are especially important in treating the history of Indian Buddhism after the destruction of major monasteries in Eastern India including Vikramaśīla by Turkic Muslims at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is first of all essential to establish and verify the exact dates of the manuscripts on the basis of calendrical elements found in the colophons. In addition to the dates, this presentation will deal with place names, personal names and their titles.

The Ajātaśatrukaukṛtyavinodana of the Mustang Group Kangyurs

Miyazaki, Tensho (Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford, USA)

In recent years, the Tibetan Manuscripts Project of the University of Vienna has discovered and published several Tibetan manuscript collections mainly from Indian Tibet, or Western Tibet. Among them, two kinds of Kangyurs from Ladakh, the Hemis and Basgo Kangyurs, are categorized as the Mustang group, since they possess a structure similar to that of the Early Mustang Kangyur catalogue, published by Helmut Eimer in 1999. As Lainé 2009 points out, however, we need to conduct further investigations of these newly discovered materials in order to affirm the above classification and to clarify the relation between them and the other Tibetan Kangyurs and collections.

This paper deals with a particular Mahāyāna scripture, the *Ajātaśatru­kaukṛtya­vinodana (AjKV), and seeks to shed light on the link of the two Kangyurs of the Mustang group with the other Tibetan Kangyurs and collections. I mainly examine three subjects through an analysis of variant readings of the AjKV: First, I verify that the above two Kangyurs, the Hemis and Basgo, constitute the Mustang group, which is independent of the two major Kangyur lineages: the Tshal pa and Them spangs ma. Second, I investigate the relationship between the Mustang group and the two other major Kangyur families. Third, I explore which of the “independent” Kangyurs and collections, such as the Phug brag Kangyur and the Gondhla proto-Kangyur, are connected or close to the Mustang group.

The above investigations reveal the following facts: First, we can confirm that the Hemis and Basgo Kangyurs are properly categorized as belonging to the Mustang group, which is separate from the Tshal pa und Them spangs ma families. They merit this attribution because we find many variant readings and some evident errors common only to these two Kangyurs and because they share no significant error with each of the two main families. Second, an obvious mistake and several variant readings exist between the Mustang group and the Gondhla collection. Therefore, it is probable that the Mustang family has some connection with the Gondhla proto-Kangyur.