A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s6.t1.1

v2.c19.s6.t1.1

In the first place the Sarvāstivāda school² of the Hīnayāna, which had its adherents more especially in Kashmir and Gandhāra, and spread thence to Central Asia, Tibet and China, had a Sanskrit Canon of its own. Though no complete copy of this canon has come down to us, we know it firstly, from many fragments, large and small, which have been discovered among the manuscripts and block-prints brought from Eastern Turkestan by M.A. (Sir Aurel) Stein, A. Grünwedel, A. von Le Coq, P. Pelliot, and others; ¹ secondly, from quotations in other Buddhist Sanskrit works, such as Mahāvastu, Divyāvadāna and Lalita-Vistara, and lastly, from Chinese and Tibetan translations.² The principal texts of the Mūla-Sarvāstivāda Canon were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by the Chinese pilgrim *I-tsing* in the years 700-712.³ There are, however, Chinese translation of single texts dating from the middle of the 2nd century onwards, and there were adherents of the Sarvāstivāda in India as early as the 2nd century B.C.⁴ In wording and in the arrangement of the texts, the Sanskrit Canon evinces great similarity to the Pāli Canon, but on the other hand, there are many points of difference too. A feasible explanation of this is that both canons had a common source, probably the lost Māgadhī Canon, from which first the Pāli Canon branched off in one part of India, and then, later on, the Sanskrit Canon in another district.