མ་རྟག་པ་ཉད་ཀྱ་མད intro.5

intro.5

The second extant transmission of The Sūtra on Impermanence may be referred to as the “Nepalese Transmission.” This transmission consists of a number of manuscripts that have been uncovered in collections throughout the Kathmandu Valley and are now spread throughout collections in Nepal, Europe, and Japan. There are seven individual witnesses known to scholars: two witnesses in the National Archives of Nepal,³ one witness in a private collection in Lalitpur (Patan) in Nepal,⁴ one witness in the collection of the Société Asiatique in Paris,⁵ one witness in the collection of the Royal Asiatic Society in London,⁶ one witness in the collection of the Tōyō Bunko in Tokyo,⁷ and one witness in the collection of the Tokyo University Library.⁸ All of the known manuscript witnesses of The Sūtra on Impermanence in the Nepalese Transmission are rather late, dating from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century ce. All of the manuscripts we have examined were copied in variations of the so-called Nepalese akṣaras (Newari script, Pracalit, etc.) and this is doubtlessly also the case for the manuscripts that have not been checked. Without fail, each witness within the Nepalese Transmission is found as a component work within larger Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha manuscripts. The classification of The Sūtra on Impermanence as a component work of the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha appears to have been a Nepalese innovation, as the earlier Sanskrit witnesses from the Potala Transmission and the Tibetan and Chinese translations do not classify the sūtra as having any association with dhāraṇī. It may be that the repetition of the sūtra’s refrain or the verses were the factors that caused this text to be associated with dhāraṇī collections. However, it is perhaps more likely that The Sūtra on Impermanence became associated with the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha due in part to its short length. Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha collections are made up of shorter texts, and short sūtras are included as well as dhāraṇī texts. It should be noted that while The Sūtra on Impermanence only appears as a component work within Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha manuscripts, it is not included in all Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha manuscripts, the traditional contents of which appear to have been somewhat fluid.⁹ Of particular note within the Nepalese Transmission are the witnesses from the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and the Tokyo University Library (TUL). It is certain that these two manuscripts were produced by the same scribal tradition. The TUL witness was either copied from the RAS witness or, probably more likely, was copied from an intermediate witness that is no longer extant.¹⁰