Sanskrit Manuscripts : Ratnamatipaddhati

Ratnamati, Ānandadatta

Sanskrit Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'> An almost complete copy of the <i>Ratnamatipaddhati</i> of Ānandadatta, a sub-commentary on the <i>Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā</i> of Ratnamati (see Dimitrov 2010a, 2014), in its turn a commentary on the <i>Cāndravyākaraṇa</i> of Candragomin with the <i>Vṛtti</i> attributed to Dharmadāsa. The manuscript contains the beginning and the end of the section covering chapter (<i>adhyāya</i>) 2, quarter (<i>pāda</i>) 1, of Candragomin's grammar. The title and the name of the author are given in the colophon of another fragmentary manuscript kept in the University Library, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01657-00002/1'>Add.1657.2</a>, containing the same section of the work. They also appear in the final rubric of another manuscript, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01691-00006/1'>Add.1691.6</a>, containing the portion of the <i>Ratnamatipaddhati</i> covering <i>Cāndravyākaraṇa</i> 1.3. The <i>Ratnamatipaddhati</i> is unpublished and nothing is known with certainty about its author. According to Dimitrov (2014), he may have been affiliated with one of the large Buddhist universities in eastern India, such as Vikramaśīla, Nālandā, or Vajrāsana. If the <i>Pañjikā</i> was composed in the first half of the 10th c. CE, as argued by Dimitrov (2014), Ānandadatta would have flourished some time between the second half of the 10th c. and 1199 CE, which is the date recorded in the colophon of <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01657-00002/1'>Add.1657.2</a>. In the present manuscript, the text stops abruptly after a sentence at the beginning of the commentary on the last <i>sūtra</i> of the <i>pāda</i>, 2.1.98, <i>āśiṣyā āyuṣyabhadrārthakuśalārthaiś ca</i>, recalled in abbreviated form with the initial word <i>āśiṣyā</i> on the last line of f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(65);return false;'>36r</a>, after which the scribe has left the lower portion of the folio blank. </p>