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| Part ofa serieson |
| EarlyBuddhism |
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| Buddhism |
*This list is a simplification. It is likely that the development of Buddhist schools was not linear. |
TheGandhāran Buddhist texts are the oldestBuddhist manuscripts yet discovered, dating from about the 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE and found in the northwestern outskirts ofPakistan.[1][2][3] They represent the literature ofGandharan Buddhism and are written in theGāndhārī language which has been grouped by many scholars in theDardic language family.[4][5][6] The texts constitute the largest collection ofGāndhārī manuscripts known to date and are now housed at the Islamabad Museum inPakistan.[7][8]
They were sold to European and Japanese institutions and individuals, and are currently being recovered and studied by several universities. The Gandhāran texts are in a considerably deteriorated form (their survival alone is extraordinary), but educated guesses about reconstruction have been possible in several cases using both modern preservation techniques and more traditional textual scholarship, comparing previously knownPāli andBuddhist Hybrid Sanskrit versions of texts. Other Gandhāran Buddhist texts—"several and perhaps many"—have been found over the last two centuries but lost or destroyed.[9]
The texts are attributed to theDharmaguptaka sect byRichard Salomon, the leading scholar in the field,[10] and theBritish Library scrolls "represent a random but reasonably representative fraction of what was probably a much larger set of texts preserved in the library of a monastery of the Dharmaguptaka sect inNagarāhāra."[11]
In 1994, theBritish Library acquired a group of some eighty Gandharan manuscript fragments from the first half of the 1st century CE, encompassing twenty‐seven birch‐bark scrolls.[12] Thesebirch bark manuscripts were stored in clay jars, which preserved them. They are thought to have been found in westernPakistan, the location ofGandhara, buried in ancientmonasteries. A team has been at work, trying to decipher the manuscripts: several volumes have appeared to date (see below). The manuscripts were written in theGāndhārī language using theKharoṣṭhī script and are therefore sometimes also called theKharoṣṭhī Manuscripts.
The collection is composed of a diversity of texts: aDhammapada, discourses of the Buddha such as theRhinoceros Sutra,avadanas andPurvayogas, commentaries andabhidharma texts.
There is evidence to suggest that these texts may belong to theDharmaguptaka school.[13] There is an inscription on a jar pointing to that school, and there is some textual evidence as well. On a semi-related point, the Gandhāran text of theRhinoceros Sutra contains the wordmahayaṇaṣa, which some might identify with "Mahayana."[14] However, according to Salomon, in Kharoṣṭhī orthography there is no reason to think that the phrase in question,amaṃtraṇa bhoti mahayaṇaṣa ("there are calls from the multitude"), has any connection to the Mahayana.[14]
The Senior collection was bought by Robert Senior, a British collector. The Senior collection may be slightly younger than the British Library collection. It consists almost entirely ofcanonical sutras, and, like the British Library collection, was written on birch bark and stored in clay jars.[15] The jars bear inscriptions referring to Macedonian rather than ancient Indian month names, as is characteristic of theKaniska era from which they derive.[16] There is a "strong likelihood that the Senior scrolls were written, at the earliest, in the latter part of the first century A.D., or, perhaps more likely, in the first half of the second century. This would make the Senior scrolls slightly but significantly later than the scrolls of the British Library collection, which have been provisionally dated to the first half of the first century."[17] Salomon writes:
The Senior collection is superficially similar in character to the British Library collection in that they both consist of about two dozen birch bark manuscripts or manuscript fragments arranged in scroll or similar format and written in Kharosthi script and Gandhari language. Both were found inside inscribed clay pots, and both are believed to have come from the same or nearby sites, in or aroundHadda in eastern Afghanistan. But in terms of their textual contents, the two collections differ in important ways. Whereas the British Library collection was a diverse mixture of texts of many different genres written by some two dozen different scribes,[18] all or nearly all of the manuscripts in the Senior collection are written in the same hand, and all but one of them seem to belong to the same genre, namely sutra. Moreover, whereas all of the British Library scrolls were fragmentary and at least some of them were evidently already damaged and incomplete before they were interred in antiquity,[19][20]} some of the Senior scrolls are still more or less complete and intact and must have been in good condition when they were buried. Thus the Senior scrolls, unlike the British Library scrolls, constitute a unified, cohesive, and at least partially intact collection that was carefully interred as such.[17]
He further reports that the "largest number of parallels for the sutras in the Senior collection are in theSaṃyutta Nikāya and the corresponding collections in Sanskrit and Chinese."[21]
The Buddhist works within theSchøyen collection consist ofbirch bark,palm leaf andvellum manuscripts. They are thought to have been found in theBamiyan caves of Afghanistan, where refugees were seeking shelter. Most of these manuscripts were bought by a Norwegian collector, namedMartin Schøyen, while smaller quantities are in possession of Japanese collectors.[22] These manuscripts date from the second to the 8th century CE. In addition to texts in Gandhāri, the Schøyen collection also contains important early sutric material in Sanskrit.[23]
The Buddhist texts within the Schøyen collection include fragments ofcanonical Suttas, Abhidharma, Vinaya, and Mahāyāna texts. Most of these manuscripts are written in theBrahmi scripts, while a small portion is written in Gandhāri/Kharoṣṭhī script.
Among the early Dharmaguptaka texts in the Schøyen Collection is a fragment in the Kharoṣṭhī script referencing the SixPāramitās, a central practice for bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism.[24]
One more manuscript, written on birch bark in a Buddhist monastery of theAbhidharma tradition, from the 1st or 2nd century CE, was acquired from a collector by theUniversity of Washington Libraries in 2002. It is an early commentary on the Buddha's teachings, on the subject of human suffering.
In 2003,[25] theLibrary of Congress purchased a scroll from a British antiquities dealer.[26] Called the "Bahubuddha Sutra", or "The Many Buddhas Sutra", the scroll arrived in pieces in a pen case[27] but retains 80% of the text with the beginning and ending missing due to age.[25] The content is similar to the "Mahāvastu."[27] They mostly contain educational content.The text is narrated byGautama Buddha and "tells the story of the 13 Buddhas who preceded him, his own emergence and the prediction of a future Buddha."[25]
In 1892 a copy of theDhammapada written in the GandhārīPrakrit was discovered nearKhotan inXinjiang, westernChina. It was broken up and came to Europe in parts, some going toRussia and some toFrance, but unfortunately a portion of the manuscript never appeared on the market and seems to have been lost. In 1898 most of the French material was published in theJournal Asiatique. In 1962 John Brough published the collected Russian and French fragments with a commentary.
About the "Split" collection, Harry Falk writes:
The local origins of the present collection are not clear. Several part[s] of it were seen in Peshawar in 2004. According to usually reliable informants the collection of birch-barks was found in a stone case in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, comprising the Mohmand Agency and Bajaur. It was split on arrival and some parts are now in a Western collection, while others went to a Government agency and yet other parts may still be with the private owner.[28]
The earliest manuscript from Split collection is the one that contains a series ofAvadana tales, mentioning a king and Ajivikas, and Buddhist sects like Dharmaguptakas, Mahasamghikas and Seriyaputras, as well as persons like Upatisya and the thiefAṅgulimāla who gets advice from his wife in Pataliputra. This manuscript is currently held in three glass frames covering around 300 fragments, and the style of handwriting has affinities to Ashokan period. A small fragment was subjected to radiocarbon analysis at the Leibnitz Labor in Kiel, Germany, in 2007, the result was that it is from sometime between 184 BCE and 46 BCE (95.4% probability, two sigma range), and the youngest peak is around 70 BCE, so this reconsideration puts this manuscript, that Harry Falk calls "An Avadana collection", into the first century BCE.[28]: p.19
In 2012, Harry Falk and Seishi Karashima published a damaged and partial Kharoṣṭhī manuscript of the MahāyānaAṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.[29] It iscarbon dated to ca. 75 CE (with a two-sigma range of 47-147 CE), making it one of the oldest Buddhist texts in existence. It is very similar to the first Chinese translation of theAṣṭasāhasrikā byLokakṣema (ca. 179 CE) whose source text is assumed to be in the Gāndhārī language. Comparison with the standard Sanskrit text shows that it is also likely to be a translation from Gāndhāri as it expands on many phrases and provides glosses for words that are not present in the Gāndhārī. This points to the text being composed in Gāndhārī, the language of Gandhāra (in what is now theKhyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, includingPeshawar,Taxila and theSwat Valley). The "Split" ms. is evidently a copy of an earlier text, confirming that the text may date before the first century of the common era.
The Bajaur Collection was discovered in 1999, and is believed to be from the ruins of a Buddhist monastery in theDir region of Pakistan.[30] The name derives from theBajaur district, whose boundary with the Dir district is marked by the banks of the river where the monastery was situated.[30]
The collection comprises fragments of 19 birch-bark scrolls and contains approximately 22 different texts. Most of the texts are not the work of the same scribe, with as many as 18 different hands identified.[30] The fragments range from small sections only a few centimeters in length to a nearly complete scroll nearly 2m long.[30] It is dated to the 1st-2nd Century CE, and written using the Kharosthi script.[30] The fragments were fixed in frames and used to produce high-quality digital images at theUniversity of Peshawar, with collaboration with theFreie University of Berlin.[30]
Notable texts from the collection include the earliest identifiedVinaya text, in the form of aPratimoksa sutra, and a relatively completeMahayana text connected with the BuddhaAksobhya showing a well-developed movement in the vein ofPure Land Buddhism.[30] While the majority of the texts in the collection are Buddhist texts, two non-Buddhist works are included in the form of a loan contract and anArthasastra/Rajnitit text, one of the few knownSanskrit texts composed using the Kharosthi script.[30]
Scholarly critical editions of the texts of the University of Washington and the British Library are being printed by the University of Washington Press in the "Gandhāran Buddhist Texts" series,[31] beginning with a detailed analysis of the GāndhārīRhinoceros Sutra includingphonology,morphology,orthography,paleography, etc. Material from the Schøyen Collection is published by Hermes Publishing, Oslo, Norway.
The following scholars have published fragments of the Gandhāran manuscripts:Raymond Allchin, Mark Allon, Mark Barnard, Stefan Baums, John Brough,Harry Falk, Andrew Glass, Mei‐huang Lee, Timothy Lenz,Sergey Oldenburg, Richard Salomon andÉmile Senart. Some of the published material is listed below:
First studies of these Gandharan manuscripts in 1990’s seemed to show that Sūtra texts were prominent in these collections, but subsequent research showed that such a situation was not evident. Now researchers, likeRichard Salomon, consider that Buddhist discourses (sūtras) are actually a small portion of the whole Gandharan texts, especially in the oldest period. These early sūtras tend to be only a few common and popular texts, mostly belonging toKṣudraka/Khuddaka type of material. Richard Salomon, quotingAnne Blackburn, considers them to be part of a limited “practical canon” used in Gandharan monasteries, he concludes that by comparing them to Sanskrit manuscripts fromXinjiang and katikāvatas instructions from Sri Lankan material.[32]
Palula belongs to a group of Indo-Aryan (IA) languages spoken in the Hindukush region that are often referred to as "Dardic" languages... It has been and is still disputed to what extent this primarily geographically defined grouping has any real classificatory validity... On the one hand, Strand suggests that the term should be discarded altogether, holding that there is no justification whatsoever for any such grouping (in addition to the term itself having a problematic history of use), and prefers to make a finer classification of these languages into smaller genealogical groups directly under the IA heading, a classification we shall return to shortly... Zoller identifies the Dardic languages as the modern successors of the Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) language Gandhari (also Gandhari Prakrit), but along with Bashir, Zoller concludes that the family tree model alone will not explain all the historical developments.
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