Kashmir, Tamilnadu, Panini, Abhinavagupta, etc.

[Petr Mares]

Dear Naga Ganesan
>   A point for your Lankavatara sUtra edition:
>   So, my take on your quote on Lankavatara sUtra Sanskrit
>   passage is that it is highly corrupt, and may be a translation
>   of the original, written possibly not even in Sanskrit.
>   (Ref.: B. Watson, The Lotus sutra, ColumbiaUP)
I do not know Sanskrit so I would greatly appreciate any comments
from Sanskrit scholar on the parts I have posted.
Is it not written in Sanskrit???
Could it in that case be that it was translated into Sanskrit or some
indian vernacular written in Devanagari or Nepali from Chinese??
That is what I always feel (but did not want to believe when reading
the first Chinese GUNABHADRA version from 420 A.D. it is an
INDIAN VERNACULAR WRITTEN IN CHINESE SCRIPT!!!! There
are many manuscripts of this version older than 1000 years very
well precserved from the Central Asian desert caves.

Are there any Sanskrit Buddhist manuscript in the India proper over
1000 years old? ( I do not mean Gandhara, Kashmir, Khotan Nepal
or Tibet)???

>   I understand that mahAyAna sUtras grow in size and complexity
>   over centuries. But fortunately for mahayana sutras,
>   we have early translations into Chinese, that are well fixed
>   in time.


The chinese translations are ussualy not same in the received
vesrion and in the old manuscripts. I f manuscripts are being
rewritten every 300 years or so in India there should be even more
differencies between the received vesrion and the version as it was
known 1800 years ago. If the Gandavyuha has been copied so
many times since 200 A.D I have no soubt it will be very differrent
now.
What is obscure on that??

>
>   GaNDavyUha, the last chapter of avatamsaka, is one such.
>   We have few translations of GaNDavyUha from third century onwards!
>   In Chinese, so GaNDavyUha, like Lotus sUtra, is old.

We have translation in the received version, but do we have
manuscripts, that is the QUESTION. I do not doubt the AGE but
the CONTENT in its DETAILS.
>
>   Regards,
>   N. Ganesan
>
>
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Petr Mares
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