Reconstruction of damaged parts of a Sanskrit Manuscript - focusing on the first Abhisamayα of Abhisamayālaṅkāravivṛti by Haribhadra

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how to improve Sanskrit texts using color photos of manuscripts assisted by other sources such as Tibetan translation. For this, I examined the most damaged parts of the Abhisamayālaṅkāravivṛti manuscript N1 - that has been used by the former editor Koei H. Amano for his edition - , namely, folios lv and 2r, and demonstrate how the akṣaras that Amano failed to record can be reconstructed on the basis of the Tibetan translation. The detailed process of the reconstruction has been dealt in the ‘II. Reconstruction of damaged parts of the manuscript N1’ In the ‘III. Reconstruction of three verses about twenty kinds of emptiness,’ among the contents of the missing folio of N1, I picked up three Sanskrit verses in anuṣṭbh meter, which seem to have been composed by Haribhadra on the basis of Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa’s explanation of twenty kinds of emptiness, and tried to restore them from the Tibetan version referring to the Sanskrit texts extracted from the two Abhisamayālaṅkāra commentaries, namely, the Vṛtti by Ārya Vimuktiṣeṇa and Ālokā by Haribhadra. In the ‘I. Two manuscripts of Vivṛti,’ I pointed out two things that I disagree with Amano’s opinions : (1) The type of the manuscript N1 is a Nepalese hooked script, not a Māghadha script. (2) The number 1500 at the colophon of N1, of which meaning is thought to be the date when the scribe finished copying by Amano, is actually used for telling how many syllables the scribe have written down so far (in this case, approximately 48,000 akṣaras).