མ་རྟག་པ་ཉད་ཀྱ་མད intro.4

intro.4

A number of Sanskrit witnesses of The Sūtra on Impermanence survive. These extant manuscripts might be classified into at least two separate transmissions. The first is what we may call the “Potala Transmission,” which consists of two Indic manuscripts copied in Dhārikā script. These were both collected into the Sanskrit manuscript library at the Potala Palace in Lhasa and are still housed there to this day. While these two manuscripts are unavailable for inspection, photostats have been made that are held by the China Tibetology Research Center (CTRC) in Beijing.² To call this a transmission itself is somewhat debatable. The two manuscripts, while sharing the same script, were copied by different hands and often show divergences from one another. However, they do share similarities that are not seen in the other witnesses, which suggests the possibility of a shared transmission. Nonetheless, it is unclear when each manuscript came into the possession of the Potala or from where they were produced. Additionally, because of the extensive use of the Dhārikā script over a number of centuries, it is not possible to provide a satisfactory estimate for the dates of these two manuscripts. Both witnesses appear as component works in larger multitext sūtra manuscripts, but the exact nature of these two distinct multitext manuscripts remains unclear. They are without known titles and are not known to have circulated in South Asia or beyond, apart from the witnesses within the Potala Palace Collection.