འཕགས་པ་དགའ་བ་ཅན་གྱ་མད intro.3

intro.3

For a long time, the Sanskrit text of the Nandikasūtra was thought to be lost. However, two complete Sanskrit manuscripts of the sūtra in the dhārikā script were found in the Potala Palace archives in Lhasa. An edition of these, along with parallel Tibetan text and English translation, was published in 2010 by Bhikṣuṇī Vinītā.¹ As surmised by Jonathan Silk,² these Potala manuscripts may date to the thirteenth century. One of the manuscripts is part of a collection of twenty sūtras which have moral discipline and karmic cause and effect as their recurrent themes. This manuscript, called “Ms” by Vinītā (our Skt1), is often closer to the Tibetan translation than the independent manuscript called “S2” by Vinītā (our Skt2), which is somewhat longer.³ Another extant manuscript is a Sanskrit birch bark fragment of The Sūtra of Nandika found among the Gilgit Manuscripts, which comprises only the last part of the sūtra. The script used is the Proto-Śāradā (seventh century onwards), which was normally used for non-Mahāyāna texts. It is believed that the Gilgit manuscripts were written during the Palola Ṣāhi Dynasty (sixth to eighth centuries).⁴