དག་སླང་ལ་རབ་ཏ་གཅས་པའ་མད་ཞས་བྱ་བ notes.8

notes.8

8. See Tsong-kha-pa 2000, p. 405; Tohoku 1934, p. 58; and Steinkellner 1998, p. 65. Steinkellner, who gives Bhikṣupriya­sūtra, identifies Baron Schilling de Canstadt’s Index de Gandjour, published in 1831, as the source of the Sanskrit sūtra titles (ibid.). The Tohoku catalog, which also uses priya in the sūtra’s name, was published in 1934 and states that some Sanskrit titles were corrected by the compiler. Note that priya was never used by any Tibetan sources in the title of this sūtra. The Sanskrit term priya means “dear” or “beloved.” If we search the Kangyur and Tengyur for other instances of rab tu gces pas (“most dear”) where there is a surviving Sanskrit original, we find the Avadānakalpalatā by Kṣemendra (eleventh century, translation completed 1267–75), where it corresponds to priyataraṃ (“the most beloved”; -tara is the superlative suffix in Sanskrit). In his entry on gces pa (but not rab tu gces pa), Negi cites it as a translation of priya in another passage in the same text (Negi 1993, s.v.). On the other hand, the Mahāvyutpatti dictionary gives several translations for priya, as well as compounds including priya, and none of them are gces pa. Another point to note about priya is that it has a different number of syllables than prareju. If, for example, prareju were the result of a scribe miscopying the text at some point, we must ask why we do not find any versions with an incorrect title that has the same number of syllables or letters as the hypothetical “original” priya. That said, a final possibility (perhaps an explanation of last resort) is precisely that what we have is a scribal mistake that crept in early in the text’s transmission in Tibet, though a faulty back-translation into Sanskrit is probably more likely.