XVI. The Ahuna Vairya, with its Pahlavi and Sanskrit Translations

Extract

IX. A single additional word upon the Pahlavi, Sanskrit, and Persian Commentaries is needed here.

It has been sometimes carelessly supposed that all the commentaries upon the Avesta are those which appear in the secondary stage of the Avesta language, with their Sanskrit and Persian translation, but of this Ahnnaver we have at Yasna XIX an interesting discussion of a very representative character, and in the original Avesta language, though it is not impossibly, yet I think hardly probably, a retranslation from an extinct Pahlavi original. A translation of its Avesta text into English will be found in the thirty-first volume of the Sacred Books of the East at the place designated by the page number. This text itself is actually a commentary upon the Avesta Ahunaver, but it has also—as said above—in due course, its own separate and entire (?) Pahlavi translation-text in the body of the Pahlavi Yasna, which has been edited by the present writer with all the MSS. collated, and in its deciphered form, in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Band vi, a translation of it into English having followed in the JRAS.; and it—this Paldavi translation-text—has also its own Sanskrit translation in the course of Nēryōsangh's translation at the place, with its Persian translation, like those of the Gāθic Sections, which appear in my addition of the Gāthas. The treatment of their original, the Avesta-Ahuna, in both this Avesta Commentary upon the Avesta-Ahuna and in its—this Avesta Commentary's—translation into Pahlavi—always, of course, a necessary distinction—is somewhat artificial and erratic when regarded as a tentatively exact and exhaustive exposition; but it has, perhaps, all the more its own interest, in spite of that very necessary defect, if not in consequence of it, as being a fine specimen of the products of the later Sasanian schools; and, as may be seen above, it is unexpectedly important on account of some of its expressions, which have created much discussion in the matter of the history of the Christian Logos Doctrine.