Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

20 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
conception of the Buddha and Bodhisattva, and the second
gives a very detailed description of the six perfections. The
third volume will in the main contain Abhidharma material
and to my great joy I heard recently from Prof. Lamotte
that he has nearly completed it and that it will appear
in the near future. It is still uncertain whether the author
of this commentary is the Nagarjuna of the Verses on
the Madhyamika Doctrine, but no one doubts that it expounds
authoritatively the point of view of the Madhyamika school.
An almost unbelievable wealth of information is spread before
us in this truly encyclopaedic work which was composed at the
period when the vigour of Buddhist thought was at its very
height. It is rather sad to reflect that the immensely wealthy
Anglo-Saxon nations have taken no steps whatsoever to make
this masterpiece accessible to the English-speaking public.
The standard commentary on Nagarjuna's Verses on the
Madhyamika Doctrine is Candrakirtfs well-known Prasannapada.
Although it calls itself the "Clear-Worded", it has
defied European scholarship for more than half a century after
de la Vallee Poussin's edition of the Sanskrit text, and scholars
have been content to just nibble at the text chapter by chapter. l
During our period J. W. de Jong has done chapters 18-22 into
lucid French, 2 and Jacques May's excellent French translation
of the remaining twelve chapters came out in 1959. But what a
higgledy-piggledy way of dealing with a great classic all this is!
What we really need is a uniform translation of the whole book
into English and there is almost no one who would be willing
or able to do it.
Essentially an exposition of Candrakirti's point of view is
also Prof. T. R. V Murti's The Central Philosophy of Buddhism
(1955), which combines sustained intellectual effort and lucidity
with scrupulous scholarship and metaphysical passion.
The book has to be read to be properly appreciated, and I will
say no more about it. But its title is a challenge to Western
Buddhists which so far they show little sign of heeding, with
the result that their faulty perspective vitiates both their
1 This is the record up to 1940: English: chap. 1, 25, Stclierbatsky,
1927; French: chap. 17 Lamotte, 1938; German: chap. 5, 10, 12-16,
S. Schayer, 1930—1.
2 Cinq Chapitres de la Pmsannapada, 1949.