I have a reasonable dought about what happened to the original manuscripts of Tripitaka. ? Please explain. Thank you. That image shows a Library found in Tibet with 84,000 untouchable scrolls and books in 2003
Let them be in those countries. But it is better if we can take a copy.
@athulakumara4050 Жыл бұрын
👍
@punchipoint84573 жыл бұрын
George Turnour was another British colonial government civil servant turned scholar. Sometimes manuscripts in their hands went missing. One manuscript which we know went missing after Turnover acquired it, is the Sinhalese Daladavamsa. Turnour mentions in his translation of the Mahavamsa that he had found the original Sinhalese Daladavamsa, but some years later it was nowhere to be found. He too died unexpectedly, so he might have kept it somewhere safe. The Sinhalese Daladavamsa was written somewhere shortly after the tooth relic arrived here in 310 A.D, which makes it the oldest extant Sinhalese text in the 19th century, besides the Sinhala Brahmi inscriptions. Many later scholars like Prof. Malalasekera and B. C. Law tried to find this manuscript, but couldn't. Today we are told by scholars that literary work in Sinhalese language started only around the 9th century A.D. However it is proven beyond doubt by the proof of the existence of Sinhalese Daladavamsa that literary work in Sinhalese began much earlier. Its high time we start finding out what happened to among other ancient manuscripts, the original Sinhalese Daladavamsa from the 4th century A.D.
@ 13: 22 Prof. Raj Somadeva, Hugh Neville didn't publish any catalogue of the manuscripts - he was the one who took all those manuscripts out of Srilanka. It was K.D. Somadasa who published the catalogue, in 7 volumes (1987-1995). In those early years of British occupation of our island many people like Hugh Neville were intensely hunting for ancient manuscripts like crazy. They had agents and locals going from village to village looking for manuscripts in the possession of the villagers and in viharas. These crazy collectors sometimes bought them, but sometimes got them free, and they felt that they had FOUND these manuscripts, so they were theirs. Hugh Neville managed to collect a couple of thousands of Sinhalese manuscripts. Besides the Hugh Neville collection, there are hundreds more Sinhalese manuscripts in other British libraries. There are also other collections like the Hugh Neville collection, in libraries in other western countries - USA, Denmark to name two. We need to start cataloguing all our manuscripts. Hugh Neville was a bit obsessed with the Sinhalese language - he had a crazy theory that the purest form of language spoken in ancient Elam (not Eelam, but Elam in middle east) was ancient Sinhalese, namely Elu, which was preserved in Siddath Sangarawa. His theories were most unscholarly, but he was a civil servant and not that much of a scholar, so that kind of thing could only be expected. He also published The Taprobanian magazine. His theories about languages and especially Elu were later distorted and used by Tamil fundamentalists to make claims about our language and on our historical heritage (we have experienced this with Wigneshwaran for example). Fortunately or unfortunately he passed away untimely and quite young.