A Contribution to Buddhist Philosophy: New Sanskrit Fragments of the Yogacarabhumi

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The Yogacarabhumi, "the Treatise on the Levels of Those Who Engage in Spiritual Training (yoga)" forms the fundamental work of one of the two main schools of Indian Mahayana-Buddhism. It presents the philosophical foundations of this school; at the same time it is the largest Indian text on Buddhist meditation. In both aspects it exercised a formative influence on Indian Buddhism and shaped East-Asian and, although to a lesser degree, Tibetan Buddhism. Up till today it serves as one of the main Indian treatises of dogmatic relevance for Buddhist practitioners in East Asia. Tradition ascribes it to a single author, but present-day scholarship considers it a compilation that combines ideas and doctrinal developments of different times. This makes it difficult to establish a precise date, but it is most likely that the work was compiled around the middle of the first millennium.About half of the text was considered lost in its Indian original, and scholars had to turn to the Chinese and Tibetan translations when they wished to study developments in the doctrine or the meditative practices of the school. Quite unexpectedly, during the last years several folios from Sanskrit manuscripts of sections of the text that were considered lost came to the knowledge of scholars. Among them there is even a folio from an unknown commentary, and this was probably the biggest surprise. The folios are distributed among collections in Kathmandu, Lhasa and St. Petersburg. The project aims at the edition and translation of these folios, since the original Sanskrit wording is simply indispensable when attempting to study an extremely terminological work like the Yogacarabhumi; tracing and understanding the developments in doctrine and practice delineated in such a work often become haphazard without recourse to the Sanskrit text.