Abstract

This book reflects an extraordinary linguistic and philosophical capacity resulting in a faultless piece of scholarship. Representing the first Western language translation of a major Buddhist scripture, it is comprised of a fifty page textual and philosophical reconstruction, with the remainder of the book consisting of a translation made from Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese renditions, and Sanskrit fragments of a Mahayana text. The original text is attributed to a Mahasanghika school of Buddhism from the Andhra region of South India in the third century A.D. The text, which was to have great popularity in early Indian Buddhism and in the entire development of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, gave inspiration to such classics as the Lankavatara Sutra and The Awakening of Faith.