Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Mahāyānasūtras – 107
denied, – even the doctrine of the Buddha and the Buddha himself.
This we read in the Vajracchedikā (Ch. 13.)
The Vajracchedikā has been edited by Max Müller and translated by
him in the Sacred Books of the East. For Stein Fragments in Khotan
see Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1903. It was translated into
French by Harlez (Journal Asiatique 1891). The same scholar printed
and translated the Manchu version (Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde
des Morgenlandes 1897). It was translated into Chinese about 401. In
Japa
degenerate into magical formulæ. Fragments of the Vajracchedikā
in a north Aryan translation and a Adhyardhaśatika Prajñāpāramitā
in a Sanskrit recension with sections in the north Aryan have been
made known to us from Central Asia by Leumann.
There are no doubt as many non-Buddhist readers who see in
utterances like those of Ch. 13 profound sense as those who see
nothing but nonsense in it. As a matter of fact it need not be either
one or the other, but just that “middle doctrine” which proceeds in
paradoxes in that it on one [88] hand asserts nihilism in the strictest
sense of the word and on the other so far recognises the phenomenal
world as to admit the relative truth of things and the doctrine
becomes comparatively intelligible only by the assumption of a dual
nature of verity, a superior and an inferior one as has been clearly
and significantly taught by Nāgārjuna. It may be noted that among
those who are the least enthusiastic about this phase of Buddhism is
Barth who declares (Revue de l'histoire des Religions 1882) that “la
sagesse transcendante, qui sait, qu’il n’y a ni choses existantes ni nonexistantes,
ni de realite qui ne soit aussi une non-realite, saggesse