སངས་རྒྱས་ཕལ་པ་ཆ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཤན་ཏ་རྒྱས་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད notes.1.149

notes.1.149

149. There appears to be an early corruption in the Sanskrit, because the numbers here are steadily increasing in value, as in the Chinese. The Sanskrit has nayuta­śata­sahasrāṇi, “a hundred thousand nayuta,” the BHS version of niyuta, which usually means “a million.” In BHS it can mean “a hundred thousand million” and is normally translated into Tibetan as khrag khrig. Unusually, the Tibetan here is bye ba, which usually translates koṭi (“ten million”). Even if nayuta was a corruption of ayuta (“ten thousand,” normally translated into Tibetan as khri), the numbers would still not match. The Chinese, as evidenced by Cleary, has an orderly progression of “many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, and trillions.” Most likely the addition of śatasahasrāṇi after nayuta is the error, which caused the translation of the subsequent koṭi as khrag khrig instead of bye ba, or this was a revised Sanskrit version with the numbers substituted for each other in an attempt to eliminate the anomaly. It should therefore, as in the Chinese, have been simply nayuta with the classical value of “million.”