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

《瑜伽经》是印度大乘佛教两个主要流派之一的基本著作，《关于修行(瑜伽)的人的层次的论述》。它展示了这一学派的哲学基础，同时也是印度关于佛教冥想的最大文本。在这两个方面，它都对印度佛教产生了影响，并塑造了东亚佛教，尽管程度较小，但也塑造了藏传佛教。直到今天，它仍然是东亚佛教修行者信奉教条的主要印度著作之一。传统上认为它出自一位作者之手，但当今的学术界认为它是一部结合了不同时代的思想和学说发展的汇编。这就很难确定确切的日期，但很可能这部著作是在公元一千年左右编纂的。大约一半的文本被认为丢失在印度原文中，学者们想要研究该学说的发展或该学派的冥想实践时，不得不求助于中文和藏文翻译。相当出人意料的是，在过去的几年里，学者们了解到了梵文手稿中被认为丢失的几个部分的对开本。其中甚至还有一段不知名的评论，这可能是最大的惊喜。这些对开本分布在加德满都、拉萨和圣彼得堡的收藏品中。该项目旨在编辑和翻译这些对开本，因为原来的梵语措辞是必不可少的，当试图研究一个极端术语的工作，如《瑜伽卡拉布》；跟踪和理解在这种工作中描绘的理论和实践的发展往往变得杂乱无章，而没有诉诸梵文文本。

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.