Towards the end of last year I published a text and translation of the Artha-Viniścaya-Sūtram, The Discourse giving the Analysis of the Topics, which is a collection of lists of 27 Dharma teachings, often together with an explanation of factors listed, which belongs to the early period, but which is unknown to the Pāḷi tradition.
In a similar vein is the Dharma-Sangraha, which was first published in Devanāgarī script in 1885 by Prof. Max Müller from a text by his young Japanese student Kenjiu Kasawara; and was also published in 1961 by P. L. Vaidya, also in Devanāgarī script.
The language of this collection is in a more primitive form of Sanskritised Prakrit, and contains 140 lists and their factors, but without any explanations. Some of these lists are unique to this work, being unparalleled in the literature elsewhere.
Most of the headings from the work were translated in Müller’s publication, but the factors were mainly left untranslated, and this is the first complete translation of this work into English, or any western language, as far as I know.
Because the lists are sometimes unparalleled, and Edgerton’s BHS dictionary only quoted them, without attempting a translation, many of them are tentative and have been marked as such.
The work belongs to the Mahāyāna period of texts, though most of it is common to the early tradition, and there do appear to be interpolations, which was an easy thing to accomplish, given that the text is without any formal ordering principle.
I am currently working on a study of the text, which will show, as a case study, how Sanskritised Prakrit differs from Classical Sanskrit, and will announce that work in due course.
Meanwhile the present work is available in two versions, Text and Translation (html, pdf and flipbook), and an English only version, which also features a reading of the text (html, pdf, flip-book, epub, mobi and mp3 formats).
