Rett wrote:

> Here, I seem to remember that the oldest current palm leaf
> manuscripts of the Buddhist tripitaka are at most something like 300
> years old. They have been copied and recopied back until the time
> they were first committed to writing. I doubt that any palm leaf
> manuscripts of the tripitaka dating to the 1st century CE are still
> in existence.

Perhaps it is understandable with a list specializing in Pali, but I am
surprised at the appatrent lack of awareness or interest that there are
valuable Tripitaka materials available other languages than Pali, though it
is, of course, true that the only "complete" Tripitaka surviving in an Indic
language is in Pali. Nevertheless, there is also a certain amount of Skt
and Prakrit Tripitaka materials -- mostly found in the region spanning NW
India to Central Asia. For example, most recently there is the extremely
exciting Dirgha-agama ms that has surfaced piecemeal from Afghanistan with
more similar materials likely to appear -- all of these Tripitaka materials
are at least 15 centuries old. Although preserved in Skt or Gandhari
Prakrit etc, they occasionally provide superior and illuminating readings to
those found in parallel Pali Tipitaka mss. I understand that work is
currently in hand to transcribe and edit this Dirgha-agama. Though an
"entire" Tripitaka in any Indic language other than Pali is never likely to
be found, it is important to remember that the Pali version was just one of
many Tripitakas circulating in Buddhist India -- we know from these non-Pali
mss fragments (and the Chinese and Tibetan agama translations) that the core
of all Tripitakas was largely identical, but there is also much
contemporaneous material only included in any one version and not in
another. Thus it is not advisable for scholars to adopt a sectarian view
that the Pali Tipitaka is somehow the only "authentic" one.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge