Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Mahāyānasūtras – 104
be born as beasts, spirits and denizens of hell. They will address
homilies to fathers of families but will remain themselves
unbridled.”
, published by L.
Finot Bib. Budd, II, St. Petersburg 1901; La Vallée-Poussin “Le
Museon” IV, 1903, p. 306 ff. With the Pāḷi Ratthapālasutta our Sūtra
has nothing in common except the name Rāṣṭrapāla in Pāḷi
Ratthapala.
questions among the
so forth; Nanjio, Catalogue, p. xiii ff. Finot, p. ix ff, 28 ff.
This vaticination of corrupt monasticism reminds us of a similar one
in the Pāḷi Theragāthā. And the Chinese translation of the
ccha made between 589 [85] and 618 shows that the
circumstances depicted here must have arisen already in the sixth
century. But the sūtra cannot be much older than the Chinese
translation as is evidenced by the barbarous language, especially in
the gāthās, which is an intermingling of Prakrit and bad Sanskrit, the
artificial meter and the untidy style.
The most important and the most reputed of all the “philosophic”
Mahāyānasūtras are the Prajñāpāramitās, sūtras of perfection of
wisdom. They treat of six perfections (pāramitās) of a Bodhisattva,
but particularly of the Prajñā or wisdom, the supreme excellence.
This wisdom, however, consists in the recognition of the Śūṇyavāda
or negativism which declares everything as “void,” denies Being as
well as non-Being and has for a reply to every question a “No”. It is
believed to have been at first a sūtra of one hundred and twenty-five