Madhyamakasastra

The Prasannapada is a commentary of the Mulamadhyamakakarika (MMK) by Nagarjuna. The commetator is Candrakirti who is nowadays categorized into Prasangika in the Madhyamika school. It should be noted that Prasannapada is the only extant Sanskrit commentary of MMK.

The work consists of the karikas of MMK in Sanskrit, followed by a Hindi introduction to MMS, and the Sanskrit text of Prasannapada of Candrakirti critically edited by Svami Dvarikadas Sastri.

The previous edition of the Madhyamakasastra of Nagarjuna with the commentary called Prasannapada by Candrakirti was mainly based on the one edited by Louis de la Vallee Poussin and published in the Bibliotheca Buddhica, Vol. IV, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1912 (referred to as B in the margin). There was an earlier edition of this work, published by Buddhist Text Society, Calcutta, in 1897 and edited by Saraccandra Sastri. This Calcutta edition is full of mistakes, and its value is no more than a manuscript in print. It was used by Poussin for what it was worth, but he also used two Mss., one from Paris and the other from Cambridge. He added a number of useful indices and exhaustive footnotes, textual and exegetical. Out of his notes, textual ones are retained with some modifications by me at the foot of the page below the text, while I have made as much use as possible of his exegetical notes in my Critical Notes printed at the end of the Volume.