142255 UE The Philology of Indian Buddhism (2025W)

This course aims to familiarise students with the principles of philology as applied to typical cases of Indian Buddhist textual transmission, while at the same time introducing key concepts and terminology of the relevant textual tradition.

This term we will focus on the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā, popularly known as the Diamond Sutra, one of the most celebrated Mahāyānasūtras. Edward Conze's edition, published in Rome in 1957, is the most widely used. However, as a revision of Max Müller's 1881 edition, it inherits the latter's bias towards late manuscripts from Japan, as well as a number of errors and editorial decisions that prove problematic. Older manuscripts have now become available from Gilgit and Central Asia. More recent manuscripts have also been found in Nepal. In addition, a copy of an older, 11th-century Pāla manuscript was identified in the library of the China Tibetology Research Centre in Beijing.

We will use the Pāla manuscript as an entry point into the Vajracchedikā, discussing the manuscript transmission of the sutra and subjecting selected passages together with commentaries to a close reading. In doing so, we will especially focus on the commentary by the Indian scholar-monk Kamalaśīla (740–795), which has survived only in Tibetan. This will raise fundamental questions about how to deal with the existence of several quite different versions of the sutra text, and what this means for the history of the text as well as for the production of an edition.