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

Yogacarabhumi，“关于那些从事精神训练（瑜伽）的人的层次的论述”构成了印度大乘佛教两大主要流派之一的基础著作。它展示了这个学派的哲学基础；同时，它也是印度最大的佛教禅修文本。在这两个方面，它都对印度佛教产生了形成性的影响，并对东亚佛教和藏传佛教产生了影响，尽管影响程度较小。直到今天，它仍然是东亚佛教从业者的主要教义性印度论文之一。传统上认为它是一个单一的作者，但现在的学者认为它是一个汇编，结合了不同时代的思想和教义的发展。这使得很难确定一个精确的日期，但最有可能的是，这部作品是在第一个千年中期左右编写的。大约有一半的文本被认为在其印度原版中丢失了，当学者们希望研究该学派教义或冥想实践的发展时，他们不得不求助于汉语和藏语的翻译。出乎意料的是，在过去的几年里，学者们发现了一些被认为已经丢失的梵文手稿。其中甚至有一本来自未知评论的对开本，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。该项目的目的是编辑和翻译这些对开本，因为当试图研究像Yogacarabhumi这样的极端术语作品时，原始的梵语措辞是必不可少的；在没有梵文文本的情况下，追踪和理解这样一部著作中所描述的学说和实践的发展往往变得杂乱无章。

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.