Nariman J.K. Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992. — 893 p. — ISBN 81-208-0795-2.What follows is the first nine chapters of J. K. Nariman’s book Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism (Bombay 1919). For the chapters we are reproducing here Nariman was relying mainly on a section of Moriz Winternitz’ Geschichte der Indischen Literatur, before it was translated into English as History of Indian Literature. These chapters begin with the early texts which have survived from the Early Buddhist Tradition, and continue in the following chapters in both Winternitz’ and Nariman’s book to the Mahāyāna texts proper. The work is now quite dated in terms of its scholarly references, and no attempt has been made to provide more up-to-date references, which would by now require an encyclopedic essay in itself. Despite these deficiencies the work provides a just overview of many of the main works that have survived from the Sanskrit tradition, and still serves as an good introduction to these works. The original publication of Nariman’s text was in plain text and did not try to distinguish the original sounds, except for ‘sh’ which was used to represent both ‘ś’ and ‘ṣ’. One problem the reader will have to face is that there is little access access to all the articles and books quoted by Nariman.