본문 바로가기
  • Home

On Two Sanskrit Manuscripts of Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa's Commentary on the Abhisamayālaṅkāra

Youngjin LEE 1

1금강대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with two issues in Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa’s commentary on the Abhisamayālaṅkāra[kārikā], one being a corrupt sentence in Prakrit and the other relating to the title of the commentary by Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa. In this research, I have consulted two Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Nepal and Tibet, which are referred to as ms A and ms B by me as well as a newly identified manuscript, which is scattered into two sets in NGMPP. In the second chapter, I revised a corrupt Prakrit sentence into “tathāgato tti vattavvo ṇo tu vattavvo sammāsaṃbuddhaḥ” (He should be called tathāgata, but not saṃyaksambuddha, a perfectly enlightened one.) in both the manuscripts. This mistranslation was due to the scribes’s limited knowledge of Prakrit. I also tried to figure out why Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa quotes this Prakrit sentence, in which tathāgata is unusually differentiated from saṃyaksambuddha, especially when we consider that the quotation, presumably from the Mahāsāṃghikas, does not match the description of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, on which Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa is commenting. The third section mainly deals with confusion relating to the title of Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa’s commentary. In the colophons of ms A, the text, commonly called Abhisamayālaṃkāravṛtti, is titled, “Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikāryaprajñāpāramitopadeśam Abhisamayālaṃkāraśāstraṃ. This is the same title that the manuscript(s) of kārikās has. Moreover, there is a description, “Śrīpañcaviṃśtisāhasrikāyāḥ Prajñāpāyamitāyāḥ ․ ĀryaVimuktisenakṛteyaṃ ṭīkā sunirmalā” on the first recto of the newly identified manuscript of the kārikās. Both of these examples tell us that the kārikās and the commentary were composed by the same person, Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa. In conclusion of this chapter, I put forward reasons for the confusion and suggest that the title of Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa’s commentary is to be reconsided.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.