The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.118 No.4
Oct 1998
Pp.471-473
Copyright by American Oriental Society
I. THE GANDHARI HYPOTHESIS
It has for some time now been assumed that many if not most of the
early Chinese Buddhist translations derive from originals written in
Northwest Middle Indic. A number of scholars have attempted to show
that the reconstructed pronunciation of many of the Chinese
transcriptions of Indian proper names and Buddhist technical terms
in these translations reflect a Prakrit source text that has much in
common with, and perhaps is even identical to, a language now widely
known as Gandhari.
While there can be little doubt that the Chinese translators often
heard recitations of Indic texts that were heavily Prakritized,
containing a number of features that coincide with what we know of
the Gandhari language, it is not as certain that they saw such
texts. This is to say, what has not been sufficiently taken into
consideration is the fundamentally oral/aural nature of the
translation process in China. This paper is an attempt to take such
a process into account and to raise some caveats with regard to our
understanding of the underlying Indian language of these
translations.
Until quite recently, there were few thorough examinations of the
early Chinese Buddhist translations. With the exception of a few
brave Japanese souls, scholars of both Indian and Chinese Buddhism
have generally been put off by the difficult if not at times
impenetrable language of these texts. Moreover, there has been
little to attract scholars to these abstruse texts. While the
translations of the first few centuries of the Common Era had
considerable impact on the gentry Buddhism that emerged after the
collapse of the Han dynasty, they were subsequently eclipsed by the
translations of Kumarajiva and his successors. It was these later
translations that had a greater impact on the development of the
indigenous schools of Chinese Buddhism.
From the other side of the Himalayas, Indologists have generally
questioned - with good reason - the reliability of these first
attempted translations as documents for the study of Indian
Buddhism. The majority of our historical data - prefaces, colophons,
early bibliographies, etc.-paint a rather dismal picture of the
earliest translation teams in China. The Indian or Central Asian
missionary is frequently described as having little or no skill in
Chinese; it is virtually certain that practically no Chinese of this
early period commanded any Indian literary language; and it is not
at all clear how these texts were copied, transmitted, or preserved.
As a result, it has been universally accepted that the translations
of later Indian-trained specialists such as Xuanzang, as well as the
very literal renderings in Tibetan, are far more trustworthy in
absence of an Indic original.
Be that as it may, the early translations are currently enjoying an
upsurge of scholarly attention. This newfound interest has come from
two camps. Sinologists, led in the West by Erik Zurcher, have sought
to mine these texts as repositories of early Chinese vernacular
language. The fundamentally oral/aural nature of the translation
process in China - a process that will be discussed in detail below
- has left remnants of what appears to be the spoken idiom of
Luoyang during the first few centuries C.E.(1) Indologists, on the
other hand, have been drawn to these texts as early representatives
of Mahayana Buddhist sutras drafted at a time thought to be rather
close, by Indian standards, to that of their composition. In fact,
these early translations predate our oldest Sanskrit manuscripts by
as many as four or five centuries and may well reveal an earlier
redaction of the Indian textual tradition. In addition, it is also
believed that these early translations may contain clues concerning
the Indic language of transmission. Given the fact that almost all
of our extant Indic language materials date from a period when
Sanskritization had already profoundly reshaped their idiom, these
early Chinese sources may be one of our few windows into their
earlier Middle Indic stage.
Already in 1914 Paul Pelliot had surveyed the transcriptions of
proper names in the Chinese translations of the Milindapahha in
order to reconstruct their underlying Indic forms? While Pelliot had
noted similarities between some of the names in the Chinese texts
and forms originating in Northwest India, as well as the possibility
of Iranian influence, this was, in his own words, "une etude
provisoire."
In the early 1930s Friedrich Weller and Ernst Waldschmidt turned
their attention to the early fifth-century Chinese translation of
the Dirghagama.(3) Weller examined thirty-six transcriptions from
the fifteenth sutra of the Dirghagama, noting that their
reconstructed pronunciation showed many features closer to Prakrit
than to Sanskrit, though he hesitated to label the specific idiom.
Waldschmidt investigated an even larger body of transcriptions from
the nineteenth sutra (the Mahasamajasutra).(4) He was perhaps the
first to notice similarities between the reconstructed language of
these Chinese transcriptions and the language of the Dutreuil de
Rhins manuscript of the Dharmapada that had been discovered in the
late nineteenth century.(5) Nevertheless, there were unresolved
problems that kept Waldschmidt from drawing firm conclusions
concerning the nature of the underlying Prakrit.
The first attempt to identify and describe the features of the
Middle Indic idiom that appears in some of these early Chinese
transcriptions as well as in a number of Central Asian languages is
the groundbreaking article by H. W. Bailey entitled "Gandhari," by
which name scholars have continued to identify this Northwest
Prakrit.(6) For Bailey, this Middle Indic language encompassed the
Asokan kharosthi edicts from Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra,(7) the
various donative inscriptions from northwest India,(8) the
Dharmapada found near Khotan (the Dutreuil de Rhins manuscript),(9)
the documents from the ancient Shanshan kingdom found at Niya and
Loulan,(10) and the miscellaneous traces preserved in Central Asian
and Chinese sources.
Since the publication of Bailey's article, attention paid to this
language has steadily increased. In 1962 John Brough published a
masterful study of the Gandhari Dharmapada which thoroughly
discussed all aspects of the discovery, publication, and language of
the manuscript as well as its relationship to other versions of the
text. In discussing the broader role of Gandhari Prakrit in the
transmission of Buddhist texts, Brough also advanced the growing
consensus that some early Chinese translations may have been
translated from originals written in Gandhari.(11) Brough was
prudently cautious in his remarks, recognizing that very few texts
had been systematically studied with this problem in mind. However,
within three years - and with no further studies undertaken to my
knowledge - he was able to state: "Sufficient evidence, however, has
now accumulated to establish that the originals of these early
Chinese translations were mostly, even if not exclusively, texts
written in the Northwestern (Gandhari) Prakrit."(12) While Brough's
newfound certainty is indeed curious, it is noteworthy that his
conclusions concerning the role of Gandhari Prakrit have been
regularly repeated by subsequent scholars, generating what I call
the "Gandhari hypothesis."
Franz Bernhard, in an oft-cited article published in 1970,
reiterated the now firmly established Gandhari hypothesis:
Phonetic transcriptions in early Chinese translations of Buddhist
texts make it clear that Gandhari was the medium in which Buddhism
was first propagated in Central Asia, the medium through which
Indian culture was transmitted from the northwest across Central
Asia to China.(13)
Bernhard describes Gandhari as "the Buddhist missionary dialect par
excellence," a kind of lingua franca comparable to ecclesiastical
Latin of the European Middle Ages.
It is difficult to know what would constitute evidence for a lingua
franca in Central Asia on the basis of the rather scant extant
records.(14) There can be no doubt that Gandhari had a noticeable
impact on other languages it encountered in Central Asia,(15) and
most scholars have assumed that it had been most widely influential
during the height of the Kushan empire in the first few centuries of
the Common Era.(16) Whether this impact can be described as the
impact of a lingua franca, a common language shared by speakers of
diverse language groups for the purposes of commerce,
administration, or religious intercourse, is far more uncertain.(17)
Bernhard would like to see the Dharmaguptaka school as primarily
responsible for this spread of Gandhari in Central Asia.(18) Some of
Bernhard's evidence indicating such a role for the Dharmaguptakas,
however, has recently been shown to be problematic.(19) Furthermore,
it is well known that the Sarvastivadins had the most substantial
presence in Central Asia, at least as discernible from the preserved
remains of Buddhist literature in this region and from the reports
of Chinese pilgrims passing through. And, not insignificantly, the
Sarvastivadins are specifically connected with the Sanskritization
of canonical literature.(20) Nevertheless, some connection with the
Dharmaguptakas is not entirely without basis. The Chinese
translation of the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya refers to the recitation of
the arapacana formulary(21) and this formulary has now been
convincingly shown to be the syllabic order of Gandhari Prakrit in
kharosthi script.(22) Moreover, as mentioned above, the Chinese
translation of the Dirghagama, widely believed to belong to the
Dharmaguptaka school, has been repeatedly cited as derived from a
Gandhari original.(23)
Since Bernhard's article, the Gandhari hypothesis has been repeated,
more or less intact, by Indologists(24) and Sinologists(25) alike,
usually without any substantial increase of data. Sinologists have
generally sought to use the transcriptional data to aid in the
reconstruction of Ancient Chinese. Indologists have, conversely,
used the reconstructed pronunciation of Chinese to determine the
underlying Indian language of the translation. The circularity of
this process becomes immediately evident and has not gone unnoticed
by some of the principal investigators:
Since a good deal is known about the sound systems of various Middle
Indic dialects and the ways they differed from that of Sanskrit, the
Chinese forms sometimes allow us to guess whether the original
language of a particular text had a certain feature in common with
Sanskrit or was more similar to one or more of the Prakrits. When
care is taken to avoid circularity, information obtained in this way
can, I believe, be safely used in the reconstruction of BTD
[Buddhist Transcriptional Dialect(s)].(26)
This brief overview of the development of the "Gandhari hypothesis"
should make clear that the evidence marshalled to date concerning
the role of this Northwest Middle Indic language in the transmission
of Buddhism to China is rather meager. It has in general been
founded upon a small body of transcriptions, principally from a few
sutras in the Dirghagama only. And the conjectures concerning the
underlying Indic language of these transcriptions have been repeated
sufficiently to qualify now as "facts."
But there are other problems. From the Indian side, this hypothesis
has gained so much credibility as to inhibit the consideration of
other Prakrits or mixtures of Prakrits as possible source languages.
It is, of course, possible, perhaps even probable, that texts
composed in Central Indian Prakrits were funneled through the
Northwest language on route to China. Such a transmission could have
imprinted upon these texts a number of orthographic and dialectical
features of the Gandhari language. But at the very least this would
have resulted in texts that were linguistically mixed in some very
complicated and difficult-to-discern ways. I will return to this
issue again at the end of this paper.
On the Chinese side, scholars have typically assumed that the
transcriptional evidence accurately reflects the Indian source
language. This takes for granted that the Chinese scribes - and it
was almost always Chinese scribes who took down the final text -
were able accurately and consistently to distinguish the Indian
phonemes and find suitable equivalents for them with sinographs -
all with no real knowledge of Sanskrit or Prakrit. Some of the
evidence gathered below will call this into question, at least with
regard to one of the early translation teams. More importantly,
however, even if the Chinese did for the most part accurately record
the sound of an Indic word, that does not demonstrate that the word
was written in the Indian manuscript as they heard it. This problem
has been summarized by Heinz Bechert:
[W]e can only view with the greatest scepticism any attempts to come
to conclusions about pronunciation on the basis of orthography,
since we must never lose sight of the broad spectrum of possible
divergences between orthography and pronunciation that we are
familiar with from our knowledge of the development of other
languages and from examination of later stages in the evolution of
the Indic languages themselves.(27)
Thus on the Chinese side we have to consider the problem in reverse:
evidence for a particular pronunciation of an Indic locution does
not ipso facto indicate the language in which that text was written.
It is this problem that I will attempt to explore in more detail in
this paper.
II. AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
In light of the problems discussed above, I shall attempt a somewhat
different approach to examining the influence of Middle Indic -
particularly Gandhari - on the early Chinese Buddhist translations.
I will, first of all, restrict this investigation to one text. We
know all too well that Indian Buddhist texts were not transmitted to
China in a single installment. They were brought over a period of
several centuries by an ethnically diverse group of missionaries(28)
who themselves hailed from a variety of Indian and Central Asian
locales. In this way I hope to avoid generic statements about "the"
linguistic medium of transmission.
Furthermore, rather than focusing upon the Chinese transcriptions of
Indian names and terms, which, as I have suggested, raise a number
of problems not all of which can be controlled, we shall look
instead at mistakes in translation that were due in all probability
to phonological confusions caused by a Prakritic or Central Asian
pronunciation of the text. It is my contention-to be fleshed out
below - that the fundamentally oral/aural nature of the translation
process in China led to a number of problems of interpretation for
Chinese assistants on these teams who had limited skills in Indian
languages.
For this purpose we are very fortunate to have the recent and
brilliant study by Seishi Karashima,(29) whose work has broken
entirely new ground in the study of these early translations. He has
meticulously combed through the earliest Chinese translation of the
Saddharmapundarikasutra - that of Dharmaraksa,(30) whose translation
is dated to 286 C.E. - and has provided a point-by-point analysis of
the agreements and disagreements of Dharmaraksa's translation with
all of the extant Sanskrit manuscript remains as well as with the
fifth-century version of Kumarajiva. In so doing he has also offered
ingenious explanations of some of the discrepancies between
Dharmaraksa's text and those of the various Sanskrit manuscripts
which may stem from confusions caused by a more Prakritic - and, as
I will argue, oral/aural - transmission of the text.
The advantages of concentrating our attention on the
Saddharmapundarikasutra (hereafter SP) then are manifold. We possess
extensive manuscript finds with considerable divergences among them
that often allow us to differentiate translation mistakes from
redactional variations, something that can seldom be done with most
Indian Buddhist texts.(31) Nevertheless, despite this quantity of
manuscript material, it cannot be assumed that we can always proceed
with full knowledge of the Indic "original" underlying Dharmaraksa's
translation. We will return to this problem throughout the paper.
The fact that the earliest translation of the SP is by Dharmaraksa
is also helpful for this examination. Besides the fact that he was
one of the most prolific of the early translators during the
formative period of Buddhism in China, we have a fair amount of
information concerning his life and translation procedures that will
bear upon our consideration of the range of forces operating in this
translation. He is, for example, one of the first of the foreign
translators who is reported by Chinese biographers to have been
fluent in both Sanskrit and Chinese as well as the full range of
Central Asian languages. Our evidence for mistakes in the
translation, then, will provoke us to reexamine these reports from
the native hagiographies as well as provide clues concerning the
actual dynamic among the participants on the translation teams.
In the evidence amassed below, I have in general followed
Karashima's lead in the analysis of the philological problems
presented by Dharmaraksa's translation. Nevertheless, there are a
number of places where I cannot accept Karashima's readings - places
where I believe he may have pushed the Prakritic explanation further
than is warranted. I have, therefore, despite Karashima's huge body
of evidence, cited only what I view to be valid examples of
confusions based upon a more heavily Prakritic transmission of the
text. Then, having looked at such phonological problems, I will turn
to an examination of two colophons to the translation that reveal
much about the process by which it was rendered into Chinese as well
as some of its early life in China. I will follow this with a look
at other kinds of evidence from the translation that expose in
different ways the complexity of the data for evaluating the
underlying Indic language. It is hoped that such a problematizing of
an early Chinese translation will provide some important caveats for
the use of these texts by both Sinologists and Indologists.
Evidence for Gandhari Prakrit Underlying Dharmaraksa's Translation
of the SP
In this section I will draw upon Karashima's study in order to
highlight specific mistakes in Dharmaraksa's translation that may
have been due to the misinterpretation of words or phrases whose
forms, though distinct in Sanskrit, would have coalesced in Prakrit,
making them more difficult to distinguish for the translation team.
I will begin by giving examples that could be construed as providing
evidence for a transmission of this text specifically in Gandhari
Prakrit.(32)
Confusions Related to Vowels
Dharmaraksa's translation exhibits frequent confusions between long
and short vowels. This would be especially understandable if his
Indic text were written in kharosthi script, which does not
ordinarily mark vowel length.(33)
a/a
KN 13.8: balan sahayan parivarjayitva aryesu samsargaratan samahitan
having avoided foolish company, they take pleasure in association
among the Aryans
Dh 65a.10: in the company of strong and close friends (Krsh, 32)
Dharmaraksa has confused bala (childish, foolish) for bala (strong);
other examples include KN 48.7: balah; Dh 70c.18: (Krsh, 53); KN
99.4: balana etadrsa bhonti (they are fit for fools); Dh 79c.26:
(intent upon the faculties and powers) (Krsh, 81).(34) This
confusion occurs in the opposite direction as well:
KN 54.12: karunya mahyam balavantu tesu I have great compassion for
them
Dh 72a.29-b.1: I manifest great compassion and take pity on these
fools (Krsh, 59)(35)
i/i
KN 120.5: pratipatti darsenti bahuprakaram sattvana [the Buddha]
teaches good conduct to beings in multifarious ways
Dh 83a.24: thus the brilliance of a great lamp illuminates the
innumerable masses (Krsh, 91)(36)
Karashima has proposed a confusion between pratipa(tti) (good
conduct) and pradipa (lamp). Note also the confusion between voiced
and unvoiced intervocalic stops, a widespread Prakritic phenomenon.
u/u
KN 54.6: samharsayami vividhair upayaih I gladden through various
means
Dh 72a.20-21: what [sentient beings] love in their hearts has many
forms.
Karashima has proposed that Dharmaraksa incorrectly divided these
two words, causing a confusion between -dhair upa- and rupa (Krsh,
58). This proposal is not certain since Dharmaraksa's rendering
could be an attempt to translate vividhair upayaih with sexiang,
though this would be an extremely unusual rendering for upaya in his
corpus of translations.(37)
KN 3.5: Aniksiptadhurena (name of a bodhisattva: "whose burden is
not abandoned")
Dh 63a.28: "not put down far away" (Krsh, 27).
There appears to be a confusion here between -dhura (burden) and
-dura (long distance); note also the confusion between aspirate and
non-aspirate consonants which will be discussed below. We should
also mention that this rendering of this bodhisattva's name occurs
in the works of previous translators, for example, Zhi Qian's early
third-century translation of the Vimalakirtinirdesasutra (Taisho
474, vol. 14, 519b.15). Thus we must always allow for the
possibility that such a name could have been drawn from an
established lexicon of translation equivalents and would not
therefore represent evidence for the underlying language of this
Indic original.(38)
Besides these there are also a number of other vocalic confusions,
but many are confusions of quality rather than length and are either
common in many Prakrits or represent problems of a different nature.
Thus they cannot be used to indicate a Gandhari source.
Confusions Related to Consonants
There are quite a number of mistakes in Dharmaraksa's translation
that appear to be due to confusions between aspirated and
unaspirated voiced consonants in both initial and intervocalic
position. Weakness of aspiration - discerned from occasional
interchange of aspirated and unaspirated stops in Gandhari texts and
inscriptions - is frequently cited as a defining feature of Gandhari
among the Prakrits and is especially common among the consonants
g/gh and d/dh (Burrow 1937, [sections] 24-27; Brough 1962, [section]
49; Fussman 1989, [section] 35).
g/gh
KN 15.1: ghantasamuhai with multitudes of bells(39)
Dh 65b. 12: there being a large quantity of incense (Krsh, 34)
Here a confusion appears to occur between ghanta (bell) and gandha
(incense); there is also the interchange of voiced and unvoiced
stops as well as dental and retroflex consonants.
d/dh
KN 56.8: aham pi samksobhi imasmi darune utpanna sattvana
kasayamadhye
I too have arisen in this dreadful commotion [i.e. the world], in
the midst of the impurities of beings(40)
Dh 72c.3: At that time I was a bhiksu,(41) and I too came forth
among the masses of men in order to uphold this dharma. (Krsh, 60)
The relationship between the Sanskrit and the Chinese is not
entirely clear. It may be that Dharmaraksa confused darune
(dreadful) with dharana (preserve, uphold) or perhaps even with
dharma. The word daruna seems to have given Dharmaraksa particular
problems as he often made mistakes in its interpretation:
KN 253.11: sudarune extremely creel
Dh 104c.15: able to receive ( dhrama or drama (with concomitant
confusion of u and a); or that druma was pronounced with an
epenthetic -a- [daruma] in which the unaccented -u- was heard only
weakly, thereby making its pronunciation nearly indistinguishable
from that of dharma. We should also note that the following kimnara
king in the list presented here is Mahadharma, accurately rendered
by Dharmaraksa as [Chinese Text Omitted]. It is telling that two
completely different Indic words in such close proximity could be
translated with the same sinographs. Unable to hear a difference
between druma and dharma, Dharmaraksa's translation assistants may
have logically assumed that Dharma- would precede Mahadharma-.
b/bh and -t-/-(d)dh-
The following groups of examples illustrate several different
problems that occurred simultaneously. Therefore I will discuss them
together while also attempting to distinguish the various
phonological developments at work. To begin with, there are many
examples of a confusion between a form of the verb [-square root of
bhu] (to be, become) and bodhi (enlightenment).
bhoti/bodhi
KN 283.6: sukhasthito bhoti sada vicaksanah the wise one is always
at ease
Dh 108b.27: the wise always dwell at ease in enlightenment (Krsh,
167)
KN 57.15: loke utpadu bhoti purusarsabhanam there is the appearance
in the world of the bulls of men, i.e. the buddhas
Dh 72c.26-27: there is a buddha in the world, a great saint and
sage, who manifests noble enlightenment (Krsh, 60)
Dharmaraksa has confused bh- and b- as well as -t- and -dh- in these
examples. We might expect that the latter confusion was heard as no
more of a difference than that between -t- and -d-, which are
interchanged in other contexts as well.(43) While weakness of
aspiration in Gandhari could be cited in both cases, it is
nevertheless astounding that the translator(s) would have produced a
text that so completely departs from the Indic version.(44)
bhonti/bodhi
KN 45.9: ye bhonti hinabhirata those who are engaged in lowly
pursuits
Dh 70a.23: those who do not delight in full enlightenment (Krsh, 50)
KN 99.4: balana etadrsa bhonti gocaras such [worldly books] are the
domain of fools
Dh79c.26: and they practice toward enlightenment focusing upon the
faculties and powers (Krsh, 80)
In these examples Dharmaraksa's translation also ignores the nasal
present in the third person plural form; mistakes regarding nasals
will be discussed in more detail below. In the latter example, he
has also interpreted gocaras from its etymological root [-square
root of] car rather than in its more standard Buddhist sense of
"range, sphere, domain, association."
KN 336.5: bodhisattvas ca ye bhonti caritah kalpa-kotiyah and which
bodhisattvas who have practiced for kotis of aeons
Dh 116c.12: if bodhisattvas seek enlightenment, they [should]
practice for kotis of aeons (Krsh, 191)
Karshima records an important Sanskrit variant here: bodhi caritva
(instead of bhonti caritah). This variant comes from a Central Asian
fragment in the Otani Collection that was transcribed by N. D.
Mironov and whose readings are preserved in the notes to N. Dutt's
1953 edition of the SP. Since Dharmaraksa, as we have seen, has a
propensity to confuse bho(n)ti with bodhi,(45) it is difficult to
draw conclusions about his conformity to one or another manuscript
tradition in this example. In fact, this is a very good illustration
of a problem one is regularly faced with in these early Chinese
testimonies to Indian redactional histories.
bhuta/buddha
There are instances in which bhuta appears to have been confused for
buddha:
KN 45.14: vadami yeneha ca bhutaniscayam by which I will speak here
about true resolve
Dh 70b.1: for which reason [I] can speak on what the Buddha has
decided (Krsh, 50)
KN 200.3: bahubhis ca bhutair gunair abhistuto lauded for his many
genuine qualities
Dh 95c.1: brilliantly glorified and praised the virtues of the
buddhas (Krsh, 124)
There also seem to be instances in which Dharmaraksa's translation
team misinterpreted -(d)dh- as having been derived from -t-:
Kash 47a.4-5: . . . evaham saradvatiputra
buddhajnana-(darsana)samdarsaka it is I, Saradvatiputra, who display
the exhibition of buddha-knowledge(46)
Dh 69c.8: [I] manifest the knowledge of truth (Krsh, 47)
KN 330.13: maharsina prakasayanten'ima buddha-bhumim by the great
seer who reveals this buddhahood
Dh 116a.4: the great saint . . . makes a detailed revelation and
establishes this true stage (Krsh, 190)
In these two examples, Dharmaraksa took buddha- in the beginning of
compounds as bhuta-. Since the normal Prakritic development is
clearly from unvoiced to voiced stops, we might speculate that
Dharmaraksa's translation assistants, hearing an intervocalic voiced
dental stop, perhaps pronounced with considerable friction, deduced
it to be derived from an unvoiced stop, despite the fact that such a
reading could not have been represented in writing in the underlying
Indic text.(47) However, we are ahead of ourselves here and should
continue with an examination of the linguistic data before setting
forth hypotheses about how this translation acquired its current
form.
-th-/-d-
Sanskrit -th- and -dh- are both generally represented by -dh- in
Gandhari, as well as occasionally by -d- (e.g., yada v is a widespread Prakritic phenomenon (cf.
Pischel 1955, [section]199; von Hinuber 1986, [section]181).
Kash 121a.3: bahuprakaram pravadanti dharmam they declare the dharma
in many ways(50)
Dh 83a.28: they bring about decline to the manifold dharma (Krsh,
91)
Karashima has suggested that pravadanti was misconstrued as
prapatanti (lit., they fall down), though we might expect the verb
here to have been understood as a causative (prapatenti). Thus both
-v- and -d- were taken as derived from unvoiced originals (-p- and
-t-).
KN 398.4: adavati (a word within a dharanimantrapada)
Dh 130b.3: ("a sentence for wealth") (Krsh, 237)
Ada is confused with adhya (wealthy, rich, opulent); we would assume
a derivation from addha through assimilation of the consonant
conjunct along with weakened aspiration. -vati appears to have been
confused with -pada; an original -p- would have been assumed for the
-v- and the -t- may have been voiced. In both of the cases cited
here, as well as others cited elsewhere, an existing -v- was
interpreted incorrectly as deriving from -p-, despite the fact that
it is unlikely to have been so represented in writing.
-m-/-v-
The alternation of -m- and -v- is quite common in the Prakrits
(Pischel 1955, [sections] 248, 250) "but is rare in Gandhari sources
other than the Dharmapada" (Brough 1962, [section]36). The most
probable explanation is that -m- serves as a notation for an
allophone of /v/ in nasalized contexts (see Pischel 1955,
[sections]251, 261; Brough 1962, [section]36; von Hinuber 1986
[sections]209-11). Thus we find words in the Gandhari Dharmapada
such as bhamana'i (
abha-loka-svara: -v- > [[Beta]] > -bh-) or being devoiced as in
Tokharian (e.g., durgandhi understood as durgati: -(n)dh- > -t-). It
should be clear by now that the oral/aural nature of the translation
process must be treated with as much consideration as the linguistic
data itself. Furthermore, there is a considerable body of other
kinds of evidence that may provide even more details about the
underlying language of the Indic text and the roles of the
translation participants.
IV. ADDITIONAL DATA
Double Translations
One of the most unusual features of Dharmaraksa's translation idiom
and one to which I have alluded already is the occurrence of what I
call double translations. These are cases in which an Indic term is
rendered twice in close proximity, presumably because two different
words had collapsed together in pronunciation, at least as recited
by Dharmaraksa.(84) His translation assistants, unable to decide
between two or more possible options, offered both possibilities
despite the fact that such a rendering almost always resulted in
nonsense. We will look at several examples of this phenomenon below.
KN 162.5: lokavidu one who understands the world (epithet of a
buddha)
Dh 89b.13: sagely father of the world (Krsh, 108-9)
KN 193.1: yatha vayam lokavidu bhavema just as we will become
knowers of the world
Dh 93b.23-24: we will become wise fathers of the world (Krsh, 119)
Dharmaraksa appears to have rendered both -vidu (wise) and -pitu
(father). While there are a number of instances of an interchange
between p and v in kharosthi documents and inscriptions - if that
were the script of Dharmaraksa's manuscript - it is obvious that
both words could not have been represented in the same place. Such a
mistake suggests that the pronunciation of these two words (-vidu
and -pitu) had coalesced, and therefore, Dharmaraksa's translation
assistants, unable to determine the proper reading, deduced that two
voiced consonants here (-v-, -d-) could have been derived from two
unvoiced consonants (-p-, -t-). It is also possible, as I have
mentioned several times now, that Dharmaraksa's pronunciation habits
were influenced by a Tokharian idiom in which -v- and -d- were
devoiced, which would also account for the uncertainty of
interpretation.
KN 301.6: svakaras caiva te sattvah and these beings of good
disposition
Dh 111a.6: beings who have good causes/rooms (Krsh, 176)
It appears here that Dharmaraksa and/or his assistants understood
both akara (ground, reason, cause, disposition; cf. BHSD, 86) and
agara (dwelling, house, room). Of course we have already seen
several examples of confusions between voiced and unvoiced
intervocalic consonants.(85) What is astounding here though is that
a decision was not made between the two possibilities, resulting in
an incoherent translation.
KN 231.3-4: tathagatapaniparimarjitamurdhanas ca te bhavisyanti they
will have their heads stroked by the hand of the tathagata
Dh 101b.16: to seek the water of the tathagata and aspire to be in
the Buddha's palm - this is the result of the practice of former
vows (Krsh, 140)
Clearly Dharmaraksa did not adequately convey this line to his
assistant, if he even understood it himself. It appears that there
was a confusion between -pani-(hand) and pani(ya) (lit.,
"drinkable," hence "water"), exhibiting the interchange between n/n
that we discussed above. As one can plainly see, by not adequately
differentiating the possibilities presented by the recitation of the
text, Dharmaraksa's translation assistants produced an utterly
nonsensical rendering of the passage. Even if Dharmaraksa himself
were responsible for some of the confusions, for example, by having
indicated alternative "possibilities" of interpretation, it is clear
that he could not have fully understood and accepted such a
rendering in Chinese. In fact, data such as these make it especially
difficult to believe that a single person with adequate knowledge of
both Indic languages and Chinese could have left such translations
intact. Much of our evidence suggests to the contrary that
Dharmaraksa's recitation of the Indic text was mediated by someone
with a modest command of Sanskrit/Prakrit vocabulary and a rather
poor grasp of Sanskrit grammar. This points to the semibilingual
intermediaries that our colophons speak of and in the case of the
SP, Nie Chengyuan, in particular.
pratyaya/pratyeka-buddha
It has been known for some time that there are two widely occurring
versions of the title of the buddha of the "second vehicle":
pratyaya-buddha (awakened from [external?] causes) and
pratyeka-buddha (awakened on one's own). The alternation of these
two terms has led to a number of folk etymologies in Buddhist
literature, as well as in modern scholarship.(86) The best
discussion of the philological problems related to this figure is by
K. R. Norman.(87) Norman convincingly demonstrates that the
available Pali, Prakrit, and Sanskrit evidence in Buddhist and Jain
texts and inscriptions points to pratyaya-buddha as the original
form of the word, and that pratyeka-buddha represents an incorrect
back-formation (as would the Jain patteya-buddha).
Translations reflecting one or the other form of the term occur
throughout the Chinese Buddhist canon, including those of
Dharmaraksa as well. Yet there are also instances in which
Dharmaraksa (or perhaps his assistants) was unable to decide between
the two:
KN 10.4: pratyekayanam ca vadanti tesam they speak to them about the
solitary vehicle
Dh 64b.4: furthermore they are able to obtain the vehicle of the
conditioned-solitary buddhas
Dharmaraksa's rendering reflects an underlying
pratyaya-eka-[buddha-]yana, clearly nonsensical in any context, but
cognizant, interestingly, of the two possible words that could have
collapsed in Prakritic pronunciation. We should also note that this
particular double translation predates Dharmaraksa. In his
translation of the Vimalakirtinirdesasutra, Zhi Qian (ca. 220-52)
has the following: [Chinese Text Omitted] (furthermore [I] will
establish others in the practice of the sravakas and of the
pratyaya-eka-buddhas) (Taisho 474, vol. 14, 522a.26). Thus, as in
previous examples, we must consider the possibility that Dharmaraksa
and his team borrowed well-known locutions from previous
translations.
yana/jnana
Besides a number of alternations between these two words - cases
where Dharmaraksa reads yana when one or more of the Sanskrit
manuscripts reads jnana and vice versa - there are several instances
in which a Chinese rendering of both terms was provided for one or
the other Indic word.(88)
KN 49.2: ekam idam yana(89) dvitiya nasti this is the only vehicle;
there is no second
Dh 71a.2: as for wisdom/vehicle, there is one, never two (Krsh 1993,
139)
KN 49.7-8: sarve ca te darsayi ekayanam ekam ca yanam avatarayanti
ekasmi yane paripacayanti acintiya prani-sahasrakotiyah
All [buddhas] have manifested but a single vehicle, and they
introduce one vehicle only. With this one vehicle they bring to
maturation inconceivably numerous thousands of kotis of living
beings
Dh71a.8-10: For the sake of beings everywhere, [the buddhas]
manifest one vehicle; therefore they teach this path to liberate the
unliberated. They always teach for the sake of men the equanimous
path/knowledge, converting hundreds of thousands of millions of
kotis of beings (Krsh 1993, 143)
Note that besides the double translation here (daohui), this verse
also clearly establishes the semantic equivalence of sheng (vehicle)
and dao (path).
KN 189.1-2: ma khalv ima ekam eva buddhajnanam(90) srutva dravenaiva
pratinivartayeyur naivo-pasamkrameyuh
bahupariklesam idam buddhajnanam(91) samudanayitavyam iti
These [beings], having heard this one and only buddha-knowledge,
should not casually turn back and not go all the way [thinking]: "To
acquire this buddha-knowledge is fraught with too many
difficulties."
Dh 92c.14-15: Furthermore, the Buddha taught from the beginning that
there is one vehicle; having heard the Buddha teach the dharma,
[these beings] do not accept the path/knowledge (Krsh 1993, 140)
What is especially striking about this example is that in both lines
of this verse we have buddhajnanam (or in the case of the Kashgar
MS, buddhayanam) represented in the Sanskrit, but two different
renderings in the Chinese, the latter a double translation. While
Dharmaraksa's strict adherence to four-character prosody certainly
motivated the use of a two-character equivalent here, this example
would suggest either a certain amount of indecision on the part of
the scribe, or perhaps an intentional attempt to indicate the
ambiguity of a Prakritic locution.
jhana/dhyana
There are several instances in which jnana is rendered as dhyana and
vice versa in Dharmaraksa's translation. Such an interchange
presumably would have taken place, as Karashima rightly suggests,
through a Prakritic development jhana > jana (or jana) jj > j and dhy >
jh with loss of perceived aspiration). This is further confirmed by
the fact that jnana is also confused with jana (people):
Kash 31a.2-3: samadapeti bahu bodhisatva(m) acintika kotisahasra
jnane(93) [the buddha] inspires inconceivably many thousands of
kotis of bodhisattvas toward knowledge
Dh 66c.2-3: [the buddha] will encourage and develop innumerable
bodhisattvas and inconceivable hundreds of thousands of kotis of men
(Krsh 1993, 148)(94)
To complicate matters further, there are also instances in which
Dharmaraksa confused dhyana with dana (giving):
KN 13.10: dhyanena te prasthita agrabodhim they set out for highest
enlightenment through meditation
Dh 65a.13: setting their thoughts on giving, they seek the noble
enlightenment (Krsh, 32)(95)
KN 24.13: sarvasvadanani parityajantah forsaking donations of their
whole property
Dh 67a.3-4: no meditation gives rise to causes [sic!] (Krsh, 40)(96)
These examples would appear to represent a confusion between dry and
d. We should expect the assimilation of dental stops with y
conjuncts to palatal stops, though there are exceptions among the
Prakrits (cf. Pischel 1955, [section]281). Moreover, we can never
rule out the possibility of redactional differences playing a role
in the disparity between the Sanskrit and Chinese versions. To give
one relevant example, KN 14.4 reads: desenti te pranasahasrakotinam
jnanena te prasthita agrabodhim (they [the buddhas] teach thousands
of kotis of beings, and these (beings) set out for highest
enlightenment by means of knowledge). As Karashima points out (Krsh,
33), the Central Asian MS fragment from the Stein Collection (H3
Kha. i 24, fol. 4a.8; Toda 1981, 265) also reads jnanena here. But
the Kashgar MS (Kash 20a.6) and the Gilgit MS(97) both read danena.
Dharmaraksa appears to follow the latter.
The examples we have examined in this section provide us with some
information concerning Dharmaraksa's pronunciation of his Indic
text. Confusions between jnana and jana suggest that the jn-
conjunct had been assimilated to j- ( jana), pronounced in Northwest fashion as [z], would have
been confusable with [[Delta]].(98)
But even if this hypothesis be accepted - and it is certainly not
clear that it should be - the underlying language of the text is
still not determined. As Edgerton has convincingly demonstrated,
Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit orthography can be quite misleading as an
index of actual pronunciation.(99) It is clear from an examination
of the verse portions of BHS texts that these sutras were originally
pronounced with far more Prakritic features than are now preserved
in the manuscripts. For example, the most widely occurring meter in
the SP is the tristubhjagati, which requires that the third, sixth,
seventh, and ninth syllables be light. Thus a consonant conjunct
occurring initially in a following syllable would have to be
pronounced as assimilated even if it were not resolved
orthographically. In one of the examples just cited, acintika
kotisahasra jnane, the ninth syllable, -sra must be metrically
light, though orthographically it is heavy by position, being
followed by the conjunct jn - which must therefore have been
assimilated in actual pronunciation.
What is not as clear from the Indic texts, however, is exactly how
such conjuncts would have been assimilated. In the case of jn- there
are a number of possibilities: j ( v. We would also have to presume the insertion of
an epenthetic -u-, here under the influence of the labial semivowel,
again a fairly common Prakritic development (cf. von Hinuber 1986,
[section]155). While this explanation may seem to stretch
credibility, it is difficult to discern an alternative. In addition,
the syntax of Dharmaraksa's translation, generously strained in my
own rendering, suggests that he did not perceive both kotisahasran
bahavah and sadabhijnan as referring to mahabhagan (literally,
"those possessed of a great share," thus the highly fortunate,
illustrious, and in religious contexts, the virtuous and holy).(103)
This verse then provides yet another piece of evidence for the
erratic - to put it charitably - knowledge of Sanskrit grammar of
Dharmaraksa's translation team.
Mistaken Division of Words
We have already noted several examples above in which Dharmaraksa or
his assistants misconstrued a passage by dividing the words in the
sentence improperly. In one case, for example, Dharmaraksa took
vividhair upa-yaih as vividhai rupa(yaih). I will note two other
apparent cases of such a mistake.
KN 120.3-4: anuvartamanas tatha nityakalam nimitta-carina braviti
dharmam dharmesvaro isvaru sarvaloke mahesvaro lokavinayakendrah
The lord of the dharma, lord over the whole world, great lord, chief
of the leaders of the world, always preaches the dharma in
conformity with those who follow [mere] appearances.
Dh 83a.21-23: In consoling and urging on [others] always at just the
right time, he has never engaged in acts out of hope for merit; in
the whole world he is the venerable of the dharma, and is considered
by all as the great lord, the supreme tathagata. (Krsh, 91)
While there are several interesting problems in this verse, the one
that principally concerns us here is the fact that Dharmaraksa or a
member of his translation team has mistakenly interpreted the first
line in the negative, presumably by taking the -na of the gen. pl.
nimittacarina as the negative marker na.(104) We have already noted
above that the Gandhari sources differ in their treatment of these
two nasals. Obviously such a mistake plays havoc with the
understanding of the verse and cannot be attributed merely to
phonological confusions.
KN 27.12: pujam ca tesam vipulam akarsit he performed extensive
homage to them
Two Nepalese MSS (one [K[prime]] brought from Tibet by E. Kawaguchi
and preserved in the Toyo Bunko in Tokyo(105) and MS no. 3/672
[?678] preserved in the National Archives of Kathmandu, Nepal) read
vipulam aharsit (
y (Pischel 1955, [section] 236), then we could
speculate that he misread the kharosthi y as s - two of the most
graphically similar aksaras in this script - and understood asiti
("eighty"). What is curious in this case is that this name was read
correctly, both in transcription (cf. note 101) and in translation,
several times in nearby passages. But here Dharmaraksa not only
misread the text, but produced a translation that is transparently
incoherent. Thus, when the colophon states that this translation was
proofread by a Kuchean layman and an Indian sramana, such mistakes
remind us to take such information cum grano salis.
Moreover, there is no reason to assume that Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit
manuscripts were not transmitted in kharosthi script. Among the
kharosthi documents discovered at Niya are two that are written in
Sanskrit: document no. 511 is composed in a mixed Buddhist Sanskrit
with a number of Prakritisms and document no. 523 is in pure
classical Sanskrit, replete with long vowels, visarga, virama, and
proper sandhi.(118) These documents were certainly composed by
someone conversant with the brahmi script as indicated by the fact
that the verses are numbered in both documents with brahmi numerals.
In all probability, the modifications to the kharosthi script that
made correct Sanskrit possible would have occurred under a brahmi
influence.(119)
In addition to mistakes based upon phonological confusions, we have
also found evidence for grammatical misunderstandings, mistaken
division of words, and connotative misrenderings - all of which
again point to a translator with limited skill in Indic languages.
We discovered that context seems to have played a significant role
in Dharmaraksa's or his translation assistant's arriving at an
accurate rendering of certain lexical items.(120) Of course, we
cannot presume that all of these mistakes are the result of Nie
Chengyuan's misunderstandings. It is likely that Dharmaraksa himself
would have sometimes misread his Indian manuscript, which could have
itself been fraught with scribal errors of indeterminable types.
Furthermore, Dharmaraksa may have provided glosses to his assistants
that would have been misleading. Nevertheless, the predominance of
correctly translated items in much of the text (e.g., lokavid when
it occurs within the standard list of epithets) side-by-side with
occasional mistakes, even when context demanded a narrower reading,
suggests a rendering by someone whose understanding of the Indic
text was imperfectly mediated. Unless the Indic text contained
unusually irregular variants of the same words, or Dharmaraksa's
understanding and recitation of the text fluctuated in erratic ways,
the most probable explanation, it seems, rests with the middlemen:
the Chinese assistants who were responsible for receiving the Indian
text with a severely limited arsenal of linguistic tools and who
transformed their understanding of it into a semi-literary Chinese
translation.(121)
Lastly, we have taken notice of an interpolation in Dharmaraksa's
translation that perhaps more than any other piece of data points to
the strong likelihood of a native Chinese source. In this passage we
observed two locutions that were doubtless derived from the
contemporary Chinese literary vocabulary, reflecting an attempt by
the Chinese members of the translation committee to narrow the gulf
between the Indian and Chinese religious worlds.
In short, what this rather sizable mass of data would seem to
indicate is that the evidence for the underlying Indic text of this
translation is in fact evidence for the Chinese reception of the
Indic text. And this reception, as we have seen, suffered at times
from rather severe limitations in expertise.(122) Thus the attempt
to see Gandhari Prakrit specifically beneath our extant Chinese
translation must take into account the complex interaction between
an orthographically indeterminable Indic text, its recitation by a
Yuezhi monk trained by an Indian master at Dunhuang, and its
transmission to a linguistically underprepared Chinese upasaka.
In addition, the linguistic complexity of the underlying Indic text
cannot be underestimated. Even if we want to suppose the existence
of a considerable number of Buddhist texts written in the Gandhari
language, most canonical texts used in the northwest would have
originated from central Indian Prakrits. And the process of turning
such Prakrits into Gandhari would have decidedly shaped and perhaps
significantly altered the final text. K. R. Norman, for example, has
argued: "It cannot be emphasized too much that all the versions of
canonical Hinayana Buddhist texts which we possess are translations,
and even the earliest we possess are translations of some still
earlier version, now lost."(123) Heinz Bechert, on the other hand,
has suggested that translation - a linguistic transfer between
mutually unintelligible languages or dialects - is too strong a
characterization of this process:
Some scholars believed that this transformation was a real
"translation" of texts which at that time already existed as written
literary texts. Others think - and I agree with them - that the
transposition was no formalized translation. It was another kind of
transformation from one dialect into another dialect, that took
place in the course of a tradition, which was still an oral
tradition, but had already entered the process of being formalized
linguistically . . . .(124)
However, these positions are not necessarily as sharply opposed as
they might first appear. Norman has shown that these "translations"
were often carried out by scribes who applied certain phonetic rules
mechanically.(125) Nevertheless, some of these transpositions led to
hypercorrections and mistaken interpretations, suggesting that the
movement between these dialects was not always clear even to learned
scribes.(126) This problem was especially acute in Gandhari, as
Gerard Fussman has recently indicated:
Il ne faut pas surestimer la gene qu'apporte h l'usager l'existence
d'une orthographe vieillie assez eloignee de la prononciation
reelle. . . . Dans ces conditions les textes bouddhiques gandh.
s'ecartaient tellement de la norme parlee qu'ils n'etaient parfois
plus comprehensibles, meme a leur redacteur.(127)
For our purposes then it is important to realize that before an
Indian sutra arrived in China, it may have undergone one or more
stages of transference between Middle Indic languages. This process
almost certainly would have resulted in a very mixed and layered
text.(128)
Moreover, it is precisely this predicament, Fussman suggests, that
led Buddhists in the northwest to adopt the use of Sanskrit as their
linguistic norm:
Surtout il n'existait a ma connaissance aucun texte gandh. dont le
prestige fut tel qu'il put servir de norme: on sait bien que le
bouddhisme n'est pas originaire de Gandhara et les grands sutra
bouddhiques, s'ils existaient en gandh., n'y existaient qu'an
traduction faite ou refondue sur un original en m-i gangetique. La
seule norme possible etait le skt., dont le prestige est bien
atteste aux environs de n.e. . . .(129)
We would expect then that the Indic text of the SP was shaped by the
burgeoning role of Sanskrit in north India beginning from
approximately the first century B.C.E.(130) Edgerton has in fact
already shown that the idiom he called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit "was
not a pure Prakrit but a hybrid dialect, based on a Prakrit, but
partially Sanskritized from the start."(131) Though the Indic text
underlying Dharmaraksa's translation would have certainly contained
many more Prakritic forms that were increasingly disguised with an
orthographically Sanskritic veneer, there can be little doubt that
the original composition was already in the hybrid language. And
this language, as Edgerton repeatedly emphasized, was an artificial
language, in no way identical to any living vernacular or otherwise
literary Prakrit. Given the debate that has surrounded the
linguistic status of BHS since Edgerton's monumental study, as well
as the continued uncertainty as to the location(s) of the early
Mahayana, these philological discussions are likely to have
ramifications beyond any particular text.
It must be emphasized at this point that I have not proven - nor
have I attempted to prove - that Dharmaraksa's underlying Indic
manuscript was not written under the influence of Gandhari Prakrit.
If, despite some qualifications, there is sufficient evidence that
points to this manuscript as having been written in kharosthi
script, we would expect a fair number of Gandhari features to be
represented even in a Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit text.(132) But what I
have attempted to show is that these early Chinese translations are
imperfect testimonies to the Indian source texts. There is much that
is not well understood about these early translations and much of
this will have to be solved within sinology. As should be abundantly
clear by now, the Chinese-ness of these texts intrudes throughout
and must be taken seriously in any assessment of the source
language.
The gist of this long digression is that any proposal that a Chinese
Buddhist translation derives from Gandhari must also take into
account the complex history of Indian Buddhist texts, generally, and
the process of their translation into Chinese, specifically. Given
the importance of such philological discussions for Buddhist textual
history, we obviously must proceed carefully.(133)
Despite ali the uncertainties, I hope to have shown that these early
Chinese translations hold tremendous potential for advancing our
knowledge about the language of the Buddhist texts transmitted from
India in the first half of the first millennium. Above all else it
should be evident that we need fewer generic statements that merely
repeat the scholarly assumptions of our predecessors and more
focused studies - one text at a time - that unpack the philological
clues contained in these mongrel documents. Karashima's study is but
the first serious attempt in this regard. Obviously we are in need
of many more.
I have been fortunate to receive the kind advice and suggestions of
several scholars who read an earlier version of this paper. I would
like at this point to extend my profound gratitude to Victor H. Mair
and Seishi Karashima for comments on things Chinese; to Klaus Wille
and Jens-Uwe Hartmann on various Indian matters; to Richard Salomon
and Gerard Fussman for very useful suggestions on Gandhari matters;
and to Jan Nattier and Paul Harrsion for miscellaneous suggestions
throughout. All of these scholars contributed greatly in helping me
to avoid a number of mistakes; those that remain are where I strayed
alone.
1 See Zurcher 1977 and 1991.
2 Pelliot 1914.
3 Weller 1930 and Waldschmidt 1932, esp. pp. 226-49.
4 A revised edition of this text and a discussion of its language in
light of fifty more years of research can be found in Waldschmidt
1980.
5 Waldschmidt 1932, esp. pp. 231 ff.
6 Bailey 1946.
7 Prior to Bailey's article, the language of the Asokan edicts had
received extensive analysis by such scholars as Johansson, Senart,
Buhler, and Woolner. For a systematic description of the language of
the kharosthi edicts, see Hultzsch 1925, lxxxiv-xcix. The corpus of
Asokan studies that has since accumulated is now quite large,
constituting something of a sub-field in its own right.
8 On the language of these inscriptions, see Konow 1929, xcv-cxv.
Many important contributions have since been made toward clarifying
some of the problems posed by these epigraphs, particularly by H. W.
Bailey, Gerard Fussman, and Richard Salomon; see the bibliography in
Fussman 1989, 488-98.
9 For a list of the early studies on the linguistic problems of this
text, see Brough 1962, viii-x.
10 Boyer et al. 1920-29 and Burrow 1937. See also the rather
comprehensive list of kharosthi text/Gandhari Prakrit related
publications focusing on finds from Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang) in
Lin 1996.
11 Brough 1962, 50-54.
12 Brough 1965, 587.
13 Bernhard 1970, 57.
14 On the problem of categories of language in Central Asia, see
Nattier 1990.
15 Bailey 1946 discussed this influence on Khotanese and Tokharian
among other Central Asian languages; for a survey of the impact of
Gandhari on Parthian and Sogdian, see Sims-Williams 1983.
16 Douglas Hitch has attempted to pinpoint this influence more
precisely (Hitch 1988). He argues that Kushan control of the
southern silk route and the northwest Tarim Basin coincided with the
rise of Kaniska - taking his ascension as the traditional 78 C.E. On
the basis of Chinese historical accounts and numismatic evidence,
Hitch hypothesized that this domination probably lasted only until
midway through the reign of Huviska, or approximately thirty-five
years, when Chinese campaigns reasserted themselves in the western
regions (Hitch 1988, 185-86). Hitch's thesis, however, depends upon
the often repeated but never substantiated supposition that Kushan
expansion beyond the Pamirs could only have occurred under Kaniska.
Moreover, the evidence of Kushan control of the Tarim Basin has
consisted of little hard data: "The paucity of Kushan coins in the
area and the absense of other substantial evidence, literary or
archeological, make it likely that Kushan interests were strategic
or commercial and that they did not rule directly over much of the
region for any considerable time" (Rosenfield 1967, 43).
17 The only clear case to draw from on this issue is the corpus of
texts from the ancient kingdom of Shanshan. While these
administrative documents are written in a kind of Gandhari Prakrit,
it is also clear from internal linguistic evidence that the local
spoken language of this region was a Tokharian dialect, albeit one
that differs from that of either Agni or Kucha; see Burrow 1935. In
addition, we know that Chinese became used at least for business
purposes from the time of Emperor Wu's conquest of Kroraina (Chin.
Loulan) in 263. Like much of Central Asia, Shanshan was clearly a
multilingual society. For a recent description of what these
documents reveal about social, political, and religious life in this
region, see Atwood 1991.
18 Bernhard 1970, 59-61.
19 For example, Bernhard claimed that an early Chinese translation
of the Karmavacana belongs to the Dharmaguptaka school. However, as
Hisashi Matsumura has recently pointed out, the text in question is
a mere extract from the Dharmaguptakavinaya: "Once it has become
clear that the extant two Chinese Karmavacana texts of the
Dharmaguptakas were compiled in China, it is entirely meaningless to
discuss what the original language of the Karmavacana of this school
was" (Matsumura 1990, 69).
20 On the problem of school affiliation in relation to the preserved
Sanskrit remains from Central Asia, see von Simson 1985, esp. pp.
84-85 on the evidence of the Dharmaguptakas. As von Simson points
out, the only extant vinaya fragment of the Dharmaguptakas is in
hybrid Sanskrit and a sutra fragment attributed to this sect is in
pure Sanskrit. Dr. Klaus Wille has informed me (personal
communication, June 1995) that there may be some additional
fragments of the Dharmaguptakavinaya in the Pelliot Sanskrit
collection; they too are written in Sanskrit.
21 Levi 1915, 440.
22 Salomon 1990.
23 Weller and Waldschmidt examined only a relatively small portion
of the entire text in their early studies. The underlying language
of the Chinese Dirghagama will now have to be reconsidered in light
of the thorough study by Karashima (1994). Karashima makes it clear
that the situation is more complicated than generally stated: "As we
have seen above, the original language of the Chang ahan jing is not
something that can be simply decided upon as Gandhari. When one
looks at the particulars, complex aspects emerge in which elements
of Sanskritization, Prakrits, and local dialects were harmonized in
addition to specific features of the Northwest dialect. We may still
be able to call this dialect Gandhari in a broad sense, with the
necessary proviso that it differs considerably from the Gandhari
language as reflected in the Northwest inscriptions" (Karashima
1994, 51-52).
24 See, among others, von Hinuber 1982, esp. p. 250: "If there has
been a Gandhari text of the Upaligathas, it does not seem to be too
far fetched an assumption that the whole text of the Madhyamagama
passed through a stage of development when it was written in this
language once widely used in Central Asia" (von Hinuber follows this
remark by citing Brough 1965). See also von Hinuber 1983 and
Nishimura 1987.
25 See Pulleyblank 1983. Pulleyblank's adherence to the Gandhari
hypothesis is clear: "The hypothesis that the texts brought by the
first Buddhist missionaries to China were written in Gandhari . . .
seems to make good sense in terms of the historical situation and
has been supported by linguistic arguments by Bailey and Brough"
(Pulleyblank 1983, 84).
26 Coblin 1983, 34-35. Coblin's study does in fact add a
considerable amount of data to the transcriptional corpus from some
of the earliest translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese, though