འཕགས་པ་ཡངས་པའ་གྲང་ཁྱར་ད་འཇག་པའ་མད་ཆན་པ intro.11

intro.11

Both the present, standalone mahāsūtra version and The Chapter on Medicines were translated into Tibetan in the imperial period, and both are mentioned in the two imperial text inventories dated to the early decades of the ninth century, the Denkarma and Phangthangma.¹¹ The translators of the mahāsūtra version¹² were Śīlendrabodhi and Yeshé Dé, while the Vinaya version was translated by Sarvajñādeva, Vidyākaraprabha, Dharmakāra, Palgyi Lhünpo, and Kawa Paltsek. Given that the wording of the two Tibetan versions is almost identical and that the translators in the two teams were active in the same period, we have to assume that there was some collaboration or borrowing between the teams with regard to this passage. Despite the close correspondence of the two versions, it nevertheless seems unlikely that the mahāsūtra version started life simply as an extract from The Chapter on Medicines, chosen as suitable material and presented as a separate text by the translators in Tibet. It was almost certainly based on a text that had existed on its own in Sanskrit, too—however closely that Sanskrit text might have been related to the wider Mūlasarvāstivādin corpus. Further evidence for its separate existence comes from the opening lines of the text and, in particular, its setting in a somewhat mysterious location not mentioned at all in The Chapter on Medicines,¹³ as well as from some significant if minor differences in the verse passages.