W. Woodville Rockhill - Udanavarga

Trbners Oriental Series

UDNAVARGA

Trbners Oriental Series

BUDDHISM

In 16 Volumes

UDNAVARGA

A COLLECTION OF VERSES FROM THE BUDDHIST CANON

W WOODVILLE ROCKHILL

First published in 1892 by

Routledge, Trench, Trbner & Co Ltd

Reprinted in 2000 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1892 W Woodville Rockhill

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in Trbners Oriental Series. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

These reprints are taken from original copies of each book. In many cases the condition of these originals is not perfect. The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of these reprints, but wishes to point out that certain characteristics of the original copies will, of necessity, be apparent in reprints thereof.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Udnavarga

ISBN 0-415-24481-1

Buddhism: 16 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-24286-X

Trbners Oriental Series

ISBN 0-415-23188-4

UDNAVARGA:

A Collection of Verses from the Buddhist Canon.

COMPILED BY DHARMATRTA.

BEING THE

NORTHERN BUDDHIST VERSION OF DHAMMAPADA.

Translated from the Tibetan of the Bkah-hgyur.

WITH NOTES AND EXTRACTS FROM THE COMMENTARY OF PRADJNAVRMAN.

BY

W. WOODVILLE ROCKHILL

TO

WILLIAM D. WHITNEY, Ph.D.,

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT IN YALE COLLEGE, NEW HAVEN,

This Work

IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED,

AS A SLIGHT RECOGNITION OF HIS GREAT KINDNESS,

BY

THE TRANSLATOR.

THE text here translated is taken from vol. xxvi. of the stra section of the Bkah-hgyur, folios 329400. This version has been revised on that of vol. lxxi. of the Bstan-hgyur, folios 153, which, though generally very incorrect, reproducing nearly all the errors of the Bkah-hgyur (besides many others of its own), has enabled me to correct and complete my text in many places where it was so much effaced in the copy I made use of (that of the National Library at Paris) as to be nearly useless.

The work is divided into thirty-three chapters and four books, each of which contains about the same number of verses.

The title, Tched-du brjod-pai tsoms, is rendered in Sanskrit by Udnavarga, i.e., chapters of udnas, but the word udna must not be understood to imply joyous utterances, hymns of praise, but something nearly approaching gtha, verse, or stanza,2 although in some cases, where certain virtues are extolled; the word is employed with its habitual acceptation of hymn.

Such verses are very generally found at the end of the sermons or stras of Gautama, and were probably intended to convey to his hearers, in a few easily remembered lines, the essence of his teaching. It appears to me that the founder of Buddhism must have attached great importance to these verses, and that he advocated their use by all his disciples. Take, for example, the history of ariputras meeting with Avadjit shortly after the formers conversion, and we see at once what a single gtha was able to do in the eyes of early Buddhists, and what role these aphorisms undoubtedly played in the work of their missionaries. As a natural consequence of the importance attributed to these verses, it appeared desirable to the first successors of the Buddha to collect in separate works all such utterances of the Master as might prove especially instructive, and as best answering the purposes of their school. To this plan is undoubtedly due the fact that in both the Southern and Northern canons are numerous works which only contain the pith of more voluminous and older ones attributable to the Buddha. In the Northern canon we know of the Stra in 42 sections and the Udna-varga, besides several others in the extra-canonical collection (the Bstan-hgyur). The Southern canon offers us a much greater number of such works, the best known of which are the Dhammapada and the Sutta Nipta.

The Udnavarga contains 300 verses, which are nearly identical with verses of the Dhammapada; 150 more resemble verses of that work; twenty are to be found in the Sutta Nipta, and about the same number are very similar to parts of the same book. Thus more than half of the Udnavarga is found in works of the Southern canon, and it appears highly probable that if the Udna, the Theragth, Therigth, &c., had been examined, many more of the verses of the Tibetan work would have been found in them.