དམ་པའ་ཆས་པད་མ་དཀར་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.5

intro.5

This sūtra’s references to South Indian musical instruments, and the case endings that are preserved in the language of its verses, are possible indications of a southwest Indian provenance, in common with some other Mahāyāna sūtras. When this sūtra appeared, the Mahāsāṃghika tradition—in which, it has been argued, Mahāyāna sūtras first made their appearance²—was prevalent in the northwest and southwest of India.³ The language of the earliest surviving examples of the sūtra, such as those in the Lüshun Museum (which date to the fifth or sixth century ce and come from Khotan),⁴ has specific characteristics that are found elsewhere only in the Mahāvastu and other texts belonging to the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravādin sub-school of the Mahāsāṃghika tradition.⁵ This was the first textual tradition to emphasize the transcendent nature of the Buddha, a theme particularly present in the Lotus Sūtra. The original language of the sūtra was a form of Middle Indic, but the prose passages in particular were subsequently Sanskritized, resulting in what is called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS). BHS contains words that are either not found in Classical Sanskrit, or have a different meaning. In this sūtra, some words are closer in meaning to their counterparts in Pali (which is itself a slightly Sanskritized Middle Indic) than to the same words in Classical Sanskrit. Also, different versions of this sūtra show instances of how the same Middle Indic word was rendered differently in BHS. Seishi Karashima has pointed out, for example, that the Middle Indic ajja was interpreted as adya (“today”) in the surviving central Asian manuscript fragments, while the Nepalese manuscripts have ārya. Although both adya and ārya could be correct, according to context, Karashima states that in this particular case in the Lotus Sūtra, adya would have been the correct choice.⁶