Seishi Karashima
Seishi Karashima has been a Professor of Sino-Indian Buddhist
Philology at The
International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology,
Soka University, Tokyo, since 1997, where he has been carrying out
philological research on early Mahāyāna scriptures and early Chinese
Buddhist translations. He has published twelve books and more than a
hundred articles on these themes, including: The
Study of the Chinese Versions of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra ––
in the light of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Versions; A Glossary of Dharmarakṣa’s Translation of the Lotus
Sutra;A Glossary of Kumārajiva's
Translation of the Lotus Sutra; A
Glossary of Lokakṣema’s Translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā
Prajñāpāramitā; A Critical Edition of
Lokakṣema’s Translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā
Prajñāpāramitā.
In the 1990s, he realised that the
old Sanskrit manuscripts and fragments from Central Asia were
indispensable sources for allowing scholars to draw nearer to the
original features of early Mahāyāna scriptures and therefore, since
then, he has been engaged in publishing photographs and
transliterations of those manuscripts and fragments, now preserved
at the British Library and Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St.
Petersburg. He has also been in the process of publishing a series
of Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The
British Library Sanskrit Fragments(BLSF) (2 vols. so
far) and that of The St. Petersburg Sanskrit
Fragments(StPSF) (in preparation) in collaboration with
K. Wille, M. I. Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya and other
scholars.
His chosen item is the Sanskrit manuscript IOL San 482.
Seishi Karashima writes:
The manuscript of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra (IOL San 482–515), or the Lotus Sutra,
was discovered by Aurel Stein in Farhād-Bēg-Yailaki, near
Khadalik, during his second expedition and is kept at present in
the British Library. 35 folios, written on paper, are preserved.
This incomplete manuscript, whose script is the Early Turkestan
Brāhmī, type b, probably dates back to the fifth or sixth
century AD. Both its language (Buddhist Sanskrit) and the
content (from the eleventh to the beginning of the fifteenth
chapter of the Lotus Sutra) also show its antiquity. Owing to
its particular importance to the study of the Lotus Sutra, a
black-and-white facsimile edition, though of very low quality,
was published as early as 1949 in Japan, from which the late
Prof. Hirofumi Toda made a transliteration.
When I saw the
actual manuscript with my own eyes at the British Library in
December 2004, I was struck by its beautiful calligraphy and its
absolute clearness, which unfortunately the facsimile edition
lacks. Thus, I decided to transliterate the manuscript anew by
using newly-taken coloured photographs and, at the same time,
persuaded our university to support IDP financially by
digitising the entire collection of the Sanskrit manuscript
fragments from Central Asia. I am happy to know that, now, this
ten-year digitisation project has been completed.
Link to original post on IDP blog.