The oldest surviving Buddhist texts, preserved on
long rolls of birch-tree bark, are written in Gandhari, an early regional Indic
language that is long extinct. The scrolls originate from the region known in
ancient times as Gandhara, which lies in what is now Northwestern Pakistan. For
researchers interested in the early history of Buddhism, these manuscripts
represent a sensational find, for a number of reasons. The first is their age.
Some of the documents date from the first century BC, making them by far the
oldest examples of Indian Buddhist literature. But for the experts, their
contents are equally fascinating. The texts provide insights into a literary
tradition which was thought to have been irretrievably lost, and they help
researchers to reconstruct crucial phases in the development of Buddhism in
India. Furthermore, the scrolls confirm the vital role played by the Gandhara
region in the spread of Buddhism into Central Asia and China. At Ludwig-Maximilians
University, Munich, a team of researchers led by LMU Indological scholar
Professor Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Professor Harry Falk of the Free University of
Berlin has just begun the arduous job of editing the manuscripts. Most of the
texts survive only as fragments, which must first be collated and reassembled.
The magnitude of the task is reflected in the planned duration of the project –
21 years. The project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities is being
funded by a total grant of 8.6 million euros from the Academies Program, that
is coordinated by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. It
is one of the largest research programs in the field of the Humanities in the
Federal Republic.The researchers work not with the manuscripts themselves, but
with digital scans. The originals are not only extremely fragile, but are held
in various collections scattered around the world. A large fraction of the
surviving material is stored in the British Library in London. The ultimate
goal of the project is to prepare a modern edition of all the Gandhari
manuscripts, thus making them available for further investigation. In addition,
the researchers plan to produce a dictionary of the Gandhari language and a
survey of its grammar. However, the project will be primarily concerned with
illuminating the development of Gandhari literature and the history of Buddhism
in Gandhara. It is already clear that the results will lead to a new
understanding of the earliest phases of Buddhism in India. At the core of
the project is the construction of a comprehensive database in which all
relevant information and results are collected, stored and linked together. The
database will serve as the major source of electronic and printed publications
on the topic, and regular updates will give the international research
community access to the latest results.
3 comments:
I'm really interested in this project as well. I think once compiled and eventually translated it'll serve as a useful secondary canon for early Buddhism. It is potentially more reliable than the Sanskrit, too, since it would predate the Sanskrit editions of early texts.
Dear Jeffrey, you can read all about the books in Richard Salomon’s ‘Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara’, a full account of their discovery, contents, language, background, etc. Unfortunately, as there are only a few of the books, most being versions of some Pali suttas, they cannot be a secondary canon. But one wonders – how many other such books lie hidden and undiscovered in the dust of Afghanistan?
The Gandhara sutras are not a second canon but may-be they are the first canon or a translation of the first. It is well known that the Pali Canon is not the original, but just a translation of other edited documents and then proclaimed as an original by the Ceylonese Buddhist sect.
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