Sanskrit Manuscripts : Divyāvadāna

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Sanskrit Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'> A palm-leaf fragment from the <i>Divyāvadāna</i>, "Glorious Deeds", a collection of Buddhist tales very popular in Medieval and Early Modern Nepal. In the final stage of its redaction, this anonymous compilation consisted of 38 <i>avadāna</i>s. It has been edited by E.B. Cowell and R.A. Neil in 1884, mainly on the basis of modern Nepalese paper manuscripts (they give a collation of the variants in the present manuscript in Appendix B, see Cowell and Neil 1884: 660-663). However, many scholars have stressed the heterogeneous character of the stories included in the <i>Divyāvadāna</i>: for instance, 21 stories have a more or less literal parallel in the <i>Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya</i> (see Panglung 1981: XV), while the 38th tale in Cowell and Neil's edition, the <i>Maitrakanyakāvadāna</i>, is now attributed to Gopadatta (see Hahn: 1992, passim and Klaus 1983: 5 ff.). The 11 folios of this manuscript contains the last part of the <i>Pūrṇāvadāna</i> (corresponding to the second story in Cowell's and Neil's edition, from p. 42, line 9 to p. 54, line 17). </p>