This edition is based on the reprint of the 1879 edition made by the Pali Text Society in 2000. There were no errata published there, and although there appear to be numerous mistakes, which are meant to be there – as accurate reflections of the manuscript evidence – and which are printer’s errors I have been unable to determine.
I have tried, therefore, as far as possible, to reproduce what I saw in the printed edition, following Oldenburg when he says in his Introduction: “In many passages I have refrained from correcting manifest grammatical blunders, errors in numbers of years etc., because I was afraid of correcting not the copyist but the author himself.” – Hermann Oldenberg
The Dīpavaṁsa, an edition of which I here lay before the public, is a historical work composed in Ceylon by an unknown author. George Turnour, who first drew the attention of European scholars to the Dīpavaṁsa,2 declared it to be identical with a version of the Mahāvaṁsa to which the Mahāvaṁsa Ṭīkā occasionally alludes, the version preserved in the Uttaravihāra monastery.
This is certainly wrong. We must undertake, therefore, a research of our own as to the origin of the Dipavaṁsa and its position in the ancient literature of the Ceylonese.
Recent Comments