Notes on the Tale of Bhadra

Extract

This article is a review of V. S. Vorob'ev-Desjatovskij and M. I. Vorob'eva-Desjatovskaja's Skazanie o Bxadre (novye listy sakskoj rukopisi E).¹ This recent publication of what is in large part a facsimile volume of Old Khotanese is greatly to be welcomed. We now have at last facsimiles of all the 192 folios (actually 191, see below) in Leningrad that constitute the major part of a Buddhist miscellany written in the oldest type of Khotanese. 173 of the Leningrad folios were seen by E. Leumann and described in detail in 1912.² 18 of these folios (33640, 34254), together with two (334, 335) from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, were edited and translated by E. Leumann in 1919.³ These formed all the extant part of what on Leumann's calculation was ch. 23 of the surviving portion of the MS, which he had christened E after the signature he allotted to the first folios he saw, 269 and 335 from Calcutta. All the folios known to Leumann were edited and translated by him in 19336 in Das nordarische {sakische) Lehrgedicht des Buddhismus. This included all the 173 Leningrad folios, of which he had taken photographs.Only a few of these were published in facsimile (256v, 257r, 258v, 259r, 303v, 304r, the right halves of 257v, 258r, and the left halves of 259v, 260r) by his son M. Leumann in a private publication, Sakische Handschriftproben, Zrich, 1934. These photographs are excellent, but the folios chosen were particularly favourable for reproduction, and nothing is lost except an insignificant amount of clarity in the facsimiles of the same folios in the present volume.