Notes on the text of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā

Extract

Rajendralal Mitra was the first to edit the Sanskrit text of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā in 1888 in the Bibliotheca Indica No. 110, on the basis of six manuscripts, some of them going back to the llth century, In 1932–5 Unrai Wogihara reprinted the text in his edition of Haribhadra's Abhisamayālarikārālokā. On many occasions he, often tacitly, corrected the text from the manuscript readings, especially from ga, or from the commentary. Rather curiously, after chapter xx, p. 370, Wogihara has, for no apparent reason, omitted to indicate the variant readings of Mitra's manuscripts in his footnotes. When inserting them into my own copy of Wogihara, I was struck by Mitra's essential soundness, and by his fine instinct for Buddhist Sanskrit.