VIII. An Early Text of the Saddharma-Puṇḍarīka

Extract

In the course of my registering and describing the collection of manuscripts of Sir Aurel Stein's second expedition in Eastern Turkestan, I have come across two sets of fragments which appear to me to preserve portions of an early recension of the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka; earlier, that is to say, than the ordinary recension published by Professor Kern in the .Bibliotheca Buddhica, x. They were discovered by Sir A. Stein in September, 1906, in the sand-buried ruins of Khadalik, as described by him in his Ruins of Desert Kathay, vol. i, pp. 239 ff.