འཕགས་པ་ཚ་དང་ཡ་ཤས་དཔག་ཏ་མད་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.23

intro.23

The oldest known Indic version of the text may be one from east Turkestan in what came to be called “Khotanese,” the old Iranian dialect of that region during the later period of the time when Buddhism was prevalent there. It is written in the Upright Gupta script, and probably dates to the seventh or eighth century. The manuscript was discovered in the Mogao caves in Dunhuang by Sir Aurel Stein in 1907, and in 1912 Ernst Leumann made a short comparison of the Sanskrit of this sūtra’s opening sentences with a few fragments of the Khotanese text. In 1916, two Sanskrit editions saw the light independently. One, by Sten Konow, compared an edition of a Nepalese Sanskrit version with a complete edition of the Khotanese manuscript, along with the first English translation. The other, by Max Walleser, was based on a Nepalese manuscript and included a German translation. Walleser’s German translation has been translated into English by Richard K. Payne in his paper on this sūtra.¹⁴ Jonathan Silk has made an English translation from Walleser’s edition of the Sanskrit,¹⁵ and attests in his unpublished paper, “The Most Important Buddhist Scripture? The Aparimitāyur­jñāna and Medieval Buddhism,” to the relatively large number of extant Sanskrit manuscripts—well over one hundred—either in isolation or compilations, indicating how popular this sūtra was in Buddhist practice.