United States or Saudi Arabia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thus we know something of the Sarvâstivâdin recension of the Abhidhamma. Like the Pali version it consists of seven books of which one, the Jñâna-prasthâna by Kâtyâyanîputra, is regarded as the principal, the rest being supplementary.
During these three years in Cambridge he refers occasionally to the 'collation' and 'castigation' of the New Testament, so that evidently he was engaged with the four Greek manuscripts, which, according to an introduction in his first edition, he had before him for his first recension.
All the books are attributed to human authors, and though some of these bear the names of the Buddha's immediate disciples, tradition connects Kâtyâyanîputra with Kanishka's council. This is not a very certain date, but still the inference is that about the time of the Christian era the contents of the Abhidhamma-Pitaka were not rigidly defined and a new recension was possible.
Equally forcible and surely resting on some tradition of the Buddha's own words is the solemn fervour which often marks the suttas of the Majjhima such as the descriptions of his struggle for truth, the admonitions to Râhula and the reproof administered to Sâti. As mentioned above, our Pali Canon is the recension of the Vibhajjavâdins.
He was likewise fond of literature and of reading, and we are told by Onesikritus that he was wont to call the Iliad a complete manual of the military art, and that he always carried with him Aristotle's recension of Homer's poems, which is called 'the casket copy, and placed it under his pillow together with his dagger.
The Martian finds that the terms used for these fabrications are "redaction" or "recension," but, in his understanding, he finds the word most descriptive of the process to be forgery.
Then he did the same with the B-words, picking out first all in Ba-, then Be-, Bi-, Bl-, Bo-, Br-, Bu-, By-; and so exhausting the B-words. Thus, at length, in this second recension, the Vocabulary stood, not yet completely alphabetical, but alphabetized as far as the second letter of each word.
Some works of minor importance may have had an uncertain position and subsequent revisions may have been made but the principal scriptures were already recognized and contained passages which occur in our versions. On the other hand this recension of the scriptures was not the only one in existence.
They cannot be treated as personal documents similar to the Koran or the Epistles of Paul. The works of middle antiquity such as the Epics, Puranas, and Mahayanist sutras were also not produced by one author. Many of them exist in more than one recension and they usually consist of a nucleus enveloped and sometimes itself affected by additions which may exceed the original matter in bulk.
Instead of a single manuscript, in places perhaps hopelessly entangled, and always at the mercy of another manuscript of equal or greater authority that might appear from the blue with different readings, the scholar received a text which represented a recension of, it may be, several manuscripts, and whose roughnesses had been smoothed out by the care of editors more or less competent.
Word Of The Day