Thanks to Jayarava for taking the time to send us so many useful comments on our Unit on the Heart Sutra. His main comments are as follows:
1. On the attribution of the text
“I note (p.14) that you still attribute T251 to Xuanzang without any qualifications. Since Jan Nattier’s 1992 JIABS article on the Heart Sutra this attribution is seriously in doubt. She notes a suggestion by Robert Buswell that the Xīnjīng is a 抄經 or digest text. This seems to me to be exactly right. It is a collection of quotes from Kumārajīva’s Large Sutra on Perfection of Wisdom (T223) rather than an Indian Sutra. See Buswell’s edited volume on Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha and work by Tanya Storch on how bibliographers treated these texts.
All the evidence now points to the Sanskrit text being a translation of the Chinese. I know this is still controversial in Asia, but having gone over the text with a fine toothed comb I can see no other explanation for various Sinicisms in the Sanskrit text or the unidiomatic constructions that pepper it.”
We take his points. This controversy is definitely worth knowing about. We will provide links to the relevant articles on the links page.
2. On punctuation in the Taisho
“In note 4 page 15 you comment at length about punctuation in the Taishō. As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out to me in recent days, the punctuation you discuss is from the CBETA edition. The printed Taishō only uses the small circle 。and has none of the other marks. I was admonished not to refer to CBETA as “the Taishō”.
This is correct, We ought to have made t clear that our comments on punctuation referred to the CBETA edition.