Choix d’articles. By Gérard Fussman. Edited by Denis Matringe, Éric Ollivier, and Isabelle Szelagowski. École française d’Extrême-Orient, Réimpressions no. 14. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2014. Pp. 598. €40.

Studies of the form and textual history of various Buddhist texts show that they tend to undergo three types of developmental processes. First, some texts, especially verse compilations, are expanded by the insertion of pattern variants, sometimes at great length. Second, shorter texts such as sūtras are prone to be absorbed into larger compilations and thus lose their status as independent texts. Third, voluminous texts sometimes come to be represented in manuscripts in abbreviated forms, for example containing only the first (...) text unit, which are evidently considered to sufficiently represent the entirety of the text. These patterns are discussed with reference to texts such as the Udānavarga, Anavatapta-gāthā, and Mahāvastu, and on the basis of evidence from Sanskrit and Gāndhārī manuscripts. (shrink)

In a recent article in JAOS, Y. Bronner and L. McCrea presented cogent argu ments for the authenticity of the “nonbitextual” version of Śiśupāla’s speech in the fifteenth canto of Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha and concluded that the “bitextual” version of the passage, in which each verse could be read with a double meaning, was a later alteration. Whereas they discussed the issue on the basis of internal criteria, the present article approaches it by means of external comparison with its presumptive source (...) text in the Sabhā-parvan of the Mahābhārata. This analysis confirms Bronner and McCrea’s conclusion, while also raising some new issues and problems. Also discussed is the legacy of the popular, if unauthentic bitextual version in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa and its commentarial tradition. (shrink)

The Chhoti Sadri inscription of the Mānavāyaṇi king Gauri of Malwa is a most unusual specimen of a Sanskrit verse praśasti. Its remarkably poor Sanskrit has attracted the most attention, but its rhetorical structure is also quite abnormal. It is proposed here that such unusual features as the first person presentation and the fronting of subjects with demonstrative pronouns suggest a setting involving an actual, or perhaps only an imagined, presentation of a royal portrait gallery, such as are attested both (...) in Sanskrit literature and in Indian archaeology. (shrink)

Imitations of the works of Aśvaghoṣa, especially the Buddhacarita, are widely attested, both in the form of extra verses interpolated into the texts themselves and of entire texts in Sanskrit and Tocharian which are restructured versions of Aśvaghoṣa’s work. Such imitations and restructurings are here evaluated from the point of view of Sanskrit literary theorists, who describe similar techniques of refashioning pre-existing poems, showing that such works should not be considered as plagiarism but rather as tributes to the original author.