A passage of the Abhidharmakosavyakhya A passage of the Abhidharmakosavyakhya THE INDIAN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, VOL. II, NO. 2, JUNE, 1926. NARENDRA NATH LAW pp.418-419 . p.418 The following passage occurs in the Abhidharmako'savyaakhyaa, Bibliotheca Buddhica ed., p. 23, ll. 22 ff.: "luhyata iti loka iti. (1) asminn eva rohita vyaayaamamaatre kalevare loka.m praj~naapayaami lokasamudaya.m ceti suutram. (2) luhyate praluhyate tasmaa1 loka iti ca bhagavataivoktam. luhyate vina'syatiity artha.h. lujir iha g.rhiito na loki.h. nairuktena tu vidhaanena gakaarasya sthaane kakaara.h k.rta.h." There are here some mistakes which have escaped the notice of the editors, Professors L‚vi and Stcherbatsky. Professor Poussin, too, seems to have overlooked some of these mistakes as he has quoted the sentences, marked (1) and (2) in his French translation of the above work (part I, p. 14) with the same mistakes and without any remark thereon. One may, therefore, be allowed;to point them out in the following few lines. In our Visvabharati Library we have a transcription of the Abhidharmako'savyaakhyaa made from a Ms. in the Darbar Library, Nepal, which was secured through the kindness of the Mahaa- p.419 raajaadhiraajaa himself. The readings found herein are identical with those in the printed text except for one single instance which will be noted in its proper place. There are, however, a few corrections which are made only arbitrarily as will be shown presently. The first point to be noted is the words luhyate and praluhyate which occur over and over again. These are afterwards corrected to lukyate and pralukyarte respectively by, we do not know, whom without any authority in the transcription referred to. Now, how are they derived? And what do they mean? Certainly they are not from ˇÔluh--ˇÔruh originally ˇÔrudh 'to grow'; nor from ˇÔluh--ˇÔrudh 'to restrain,' v and dh becoming l and h respectively owing to Prakritism. The fact is that the original readings here are lujyate and pralujyate respectively, the words being derived from ˇÔluj--ˇÔruj 'to break' or to be utterly lost (vinaa'sa). It is perfectly clear from the words of Ya'somitra himself when h‚ says in that connection : luhyate (wrongly for lujyate) vina'syatiity artha.h lujir iha g.rhiito na loki.h (pp. 23-24). Luhyate (for lujyate) means 'one becomes destroyed'. Here is ˇÔluj and not ˇÔluk. This is supported also by the commentary (bhaa.sya) in Tibetan version giving the derivation of loka (Abhidharmako'sa with its bhaa.sya, Bib. Bud., p. 13, 1. 18):.hjig pas .hjig rten no. The original Sanskrit of this as preserved in the Vyaakhyaa cannot be other than lujyata iti loka.h. Tib..hjig= Skt. vinaa'sa, and Tib. rten = Skt. aadhaara or aa'sraya; therefore, that which is the rten or aa'sraya of.hjig or vinaa'sa is.hjig rten=vinaa'saa'sraya (a vanishing one). See Mahaavyutpatti, CLIV, 16 "lujyata iti loka.h." Thus there cannot be any doubt that the actual readings here are lujyate and pralujyate, as one would expect and as actually found in the A.s.tasohasrikaa Praj~naapaaramitaa (Bib. Ind., p, 256) quoted by Poussin himself. The Pali form lujjati in the same connection (Sa.myutta-Nikaaya, iv, 52: "lujjatiř tasmaa loko ti vuccati") leads to the same conclusion. In the last sentence of the passage quoted above from the Ab~idharmako'sa-vyaakhyaa, the word gakaarasya which is found also in our transcription must be corrected to jakaarasya as evident from the above discussion. In the sentence (I) vyaayaama is wrongly taken for vyaama 'fathom' as in our transcription and in the A^nguttara-Nikaaya, II, 48: vyaamamatte kalevare. The word vyaayaama has here no sense whatever. That the measure of one's kalevara (body) is one fathom is found, perhaps for the first time, in the 'Satapatha-Braahma.na, vii, I, I, 37: vyaamamaatro vai puru.sa.h.