stock phrase about women?

Stephen Hodge s.hodge at PADMACHOLING.FREESERVE.CO.UK
Fri Mar 12 00:05:46 UTC 2004


Martin Delhey wrote:

> However, vraNabhagGa is, in my opinion, clearly confirmed by
> the Tibetan translation rma 'byed pa, by Tibetan rma
> 'dral ba in another citation of this sermon in the
> yogAcArabhUmi (unfortunately a section which is not
> preserved in Sanskrit)
Whereabouts does the "rma 'dral-ba" occur ?  I cannot turn up anything and
there is nothing listed under that in Yokoyama's Index.

> Xuanzang's Chinese translation, however, has jiu li
> and cheng li as equivalents ("to perform the rites"?).
> Stephen Hodge's suggestion to interpret this in the
> sense of vandana is interesting, although I did not
> know that jiu li etc. can be understood in this way. I
> will think about this.
Yokoyama's Index gives a number of examples where it forms part of compounds
equivalent to "vandana"

> But in my opinion it is hardly
> possible that Xuanzang had a Sanskrit text of the
> yogAcArabhUmi corrupted in two different places to
> something like *vandana instead of vraNa (or
> vraNabhaGga.
Having translated from Chinese / Tibetan the Paryaya-samgrahani, the
Vivarana-samgrahani and now in process of the Vastu-samgrahani, I have
concluded that either the scribal quality of Xuanzang's YBS left something
to be desired -- there are many misreadings which can be attributed to
scibal confusion or the limited abilties of Xuanzang's team to read Indic
script.  There are also many cases were the translators have completely
misunderstood the meaning and syntax of the underlying Sanskrit as can be
established by the Tibetan text (not so hot either in terms of translation
quality) and canonical Pali / Sanskrit parallels.  I do not know if this
applies to the earlier portions of the YBS as I have not yet scrutinized
them in fine detail.

> vraNa may simply be a wrong Sanskritization of Middle
> Indic *vaNa = Skt. and pAli vana. This would, of
> course, indeed imply that the correct understanding of
> the whole word has been lost quite early in the text
> transmission (of the mUlasarvAstivAdin).
Whatever the original term may have been, I think you must be right about
the loss of understanding.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge





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