Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Mahāyānasūtras – 89
reproach for his wicked deeds nor repents of them, but if he at the
moment of his death encounters a good and wise preceptor who
recites to him the superscription and titles of the twelve sections of
the Mahāyāna texts, and if he has thus heard of all the Sūtras, he will
be absolved from the great sins which would otherwise hurl him into
birth and death for thousands of ages.” It is the spirit of the Purāṇas
which is perceived in every line of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka. The
few points of contract between the text of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka
and that of the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa which Kern indicates by no
means suffice to bring the work in line with the Vedic literature
(Sacred Books of the East 21, p. xvi f.), and it is precisely on this
account that the book cannot belong to the earliest period of
Buddhism. If we did not know that it had already been translated
into Chinese between 255 and 316 A.D., we should not consider it as
so ancient, for the latter date must at least be its age.
Elements of diverse epochs
At all events, however, the book contains elements of diverse
periods. It is impossible that the Sanskrit prose and the gāthās in
“mixed Sanskrit” should have arisen contemporaneously, even if
they did not incorporate often glaring inconsistency of contents.
Frequently in the prose passages as also in the gāthās the [72] book is
spoken of as a metrical composition. It is probable that originally the
book consisted only of verse with brief prose passages interspersed
by way of introduction and links between the verses. These brief
prose paragraphs were subsequently expanded especially as the
dialect of the verse gradually became obsolete. And, without being
exactly commentary they came to serve as an exposition. It is
remarkable that just those chapters which contain no gāthās prove