『諸法無行経』梵本の第1群の偈頌の第1偈の特に第1詩句について

抄録

The Sanskrit text of the Sarvadharmāpravṛttinirdeśa-sūtra had for long time not been known till its manuscript, though not complete, was some twenty years ago found in the “Schøyen Collection” and studied and published by Prof. Braarvig, Norway. In the Sūtra, verses are found in three places separately, each group containing decades of them. Verses of the first group are almost complete; the second, fragmental; and the third, all lost.

Recently, I investigated the Sūtra, and specifically its verses, and found that there remain several important and serious problems unsolved, or rather, even unquestioned. In this paper, therefore, I would like to take up some problems in the first verse of the first group, especially its pāda a. The most important problem is actually that concerning its metre.

Pāda a of the first verse is as follows (with the other three pādas, as well):

nirātma nirjīva niṣpudgala dharmā deśehi nāyaka anaṃtayaśāḥ |

śāntaḥ praśānta upaśāṃta satā ayam īdṛśa parṣa agravarā || 1 ||

As is seen, the metre of both pāda b and c is the same, i.e. utthāpanī; and that of pāda d could be ascribed to pramitākṣarā, which is substantially the same as the utthāpanī metre (if the first long syllable of utthāpanī resolved into two shorts, its name changes and becomes pramitākṣarā). Contrastively, the metre of pāda a is neither the same as that of those three pādas, nor easy to identify. Why? My answer is that probably the third word of pāda a, i.e. niṣpudgala, is not original but changed most likely from something like niṣpoṣa which appears as a synonym of nirātman, or nirjīva, and even niṣpudgala itself in the Vajracchedikā and elsewhere.