Bajar el precio de la comida sana: fruta y ensaladas. 11 personas

Sanskrit literature has been composed for over three thousand years and, at the peak of its popularity, had spread across most of Central, South and Southeast Asia. Early Sanskrit compositions were not initially transmitted by handwritten manuscripts, but were rather preserved by oral means. For example, vedic texts were orally composed and, for many centuries, handed down orally from one generation to the next (Olivelle 1998a: 8–10). When these early compositions were eventually committed to writing, on occasion the tradition of oral transmission continued alongside the textual transmission (e.g. Graham 1987: 72). In some early instances, it appears that manuscripts were not used as a vehicle for textual transmission, but instead as a support for the recitation of an orally transmitted composition. For example, an early Buddhist Sanskrit manuscript found in Turkmenistan contains abbreviated stories which appear to have been used as memory aids to support the recitation of a fuller, and presumably orally transmitted, version (Lenz 2003: 92–98).9 _{With the exception of the still undeciphered script of} the Indus Valley civilisation, there is no clear evidence for the existence of writing in India prior to the middle of the third century BCE (Salomon 1998: 10–14). After this time, the technology of writing was gradually adopted for the purpose of preserving Sanskrit literature. One of the earliest extant Sanskrit manuscripts, which contains a fragment of Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda, has been dated to the

9 _{The existence of similar manuscripts written in Gāndhārī (Lenz 2003, 2010) demonstrates that this}

second or third century CE (Hartmann 1988). Sanskrit texts have been copied onto a variety of different materials, including palm leaf, birch bark and paper. Many scripts throughout Central, South and Southeast Asia have been used to record Sanskrit literature, including, for example, Bengali, Burmese, Devanāgarī, Grantha, Malayalam, Newari, Oriya, Śāradā, Sinhala and Telugu scripts. Gombrich (1978: 24) estimated that there “may be as many as two million [Sanskrit] manuscripts extant, though they are perishing fast”.

Some Sanskrit texts have been edited using the stemmatic approach. For example, in an edition of the Vyavahāracintāmaṇi, Rocher (1956) created a stemma for the seven witnesses available to him and reconstructed its archetype. However, the extant witnesses of a large number of Sanskrit texts resist a full stemmatic analysis. Highly popular Sanskrit texts were copied frequently, which increased the chance that multiple copies would be available to those who wished to read them. When a manuscript was read alongside another copy of the same text, its reader often made “corrections” to it, thus introducing contamination to the text’s transmission.10 _{For such texts, therefore, a high proportion of the extant witnesses is} contaminated and mapping individual genealogies is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Instead, an adaption of the stemmatic approach has often been used for editing such texts. Described as “one of the most significant events in Indology in the 20th century” (Brockington 1998: 57), a critical edition of the Mahābhārata was published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute between 1927 and 1966 in nineteen volumes. In total, 1259 manuscripts were consulted and 734 of these were used to construct the edition, with an average of forty-one manuscripts used per parvan, “section”. In the detailed prolegomena of the first volume, Sukthankar (1933: lxxxii) commented that “the genetic method (operating with an archetype and a stemma codicum) cannot strictly be applied to fluid texts and conflated [i.e. contaminated] manuscripts; for, in their case, it is extremely difficult, if not utterly

10 _{In his edition of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, Olivelle (2005: 370n2) noted, “Most, if not all, of our}

[ninety-one] mss. [i.e. manuscripts] have above-line or marginal corrections made by subsequent readers... If these mss. were later copied, then it is likely that the marginal and above-line corrections would have been incorporated in the copies, creating hybrid mss.”.

impossible, to disentangle completely, by means of purely objective criteria, their intricate mutual relationships”. Instead, Sukthankar grouped the manuscripts into families, primarily on the basis of script type,11 _{and illustrated the hypothesized} relationships between these families in the form of a simplified stemma. In general, the readings which were represented by the largest number of independent branches of transmission (according to the stemma) were adopted into the base text.

The approach developed by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahābhārata has exerted a strong influence upon many subsequent Sanskrit publications.12 _{An obvious example is the critical edition of the Rāmāyaṇa} published by the Oriental Institute of the M. S. University of Baroda between 1960 and 1975 in seven volumes. In the introduction to the first volume, Bhatt (1960: xxxiv) stated, “The principles enunciated by Dr. V. S. Sukthankar have been declared as very sound and recommended even for the Critical Edition of the R[āmāyaṇa]... I have tried to follow in general the principles of Dr. Suthankar [sic]”. Recently published editions of the Mānavadharmaśāstra (Olivelle 2005) and Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra (Olivelle 2009) also follow the model set by Sukthankar, in that each text has been constructed with reference to a stemma of manuscript families, rather than individual manuscripts.

The stemmatic approach was developed for the analysis of handwritten textual transmissions. It might therefore be inappropriate to apply this approach to a

11 _{Sukthankar (1933: vii) believed, “The reason for this concomitance between script and version}

appears to be that the scribes, being as a rule not conversant with any script but that of their own particular province, could copy only manuscripts written in their special provincial scripts, exception being made only in favour of the Devanāgarī, which was a sort of a ‘vulgar’ script, widely used and understood in India”. However, if this “rule” can be said to apply to the transmission of Sanskrit literature in general, there have been many exceptions, as is evidenced by the very numerous occasions in which Sanskrit texts have been transliterated throughout Central, South and Southeast Asia.

12 _{The prolegomena of Sukthankar 1933 also heavily influenced one of the few major works on}

textual criticism for Sanskrit literature, Introduction to Indian Textual Criticism (Katre 1954). Indeed, Katre (1954: ix) stated that it was “Sukthankar who was solely responsible for my undertaking the task of writing the Introduction [to Indian Textual Criticism]”.

period of oral transmission. Editors of the critical edition of the Mahābhārata divided their witnesses into two principal groups: a northern recension and a southern recension. Sukthankar (1933: lxxviii, italics in original) stated that, “the frequent differences in sequence, especially when no material gain is perceptible in either arrangement, rather support the explanation suggested above that both recensions are, in final analysis, independent copies of an orally transmitted text”. According to this position, it follows that the extant manuscripts of the Mahābhārata derive from two written archetypes instead of one and that therefore, if using (a variant of) the stemmatic approach, two separate editions ought to have been prepared instead of one.13 _{Furthermore, if Sukthankar’s statement is correct,} the editors of the critical edition of the Mahābhārata have used (a variant of) the stemmatic approach to attempt to reach beyond the text’s written transmission in order to reconstruct an oral archetype. The nature of oral transmission is very different to the nature of written transmission, and analysing a period of recitation and memorisation as though it were a succession of handwritten copies is rather problematic.

3.6. Textual criticism of Pāli texts