Gāndhārī Manuscripts in the British Library, Schøyen and Other Collections | The Senior Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts | Gāndhārī Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts: Exegetical Texts | The Bajaur and Split Collections of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts within the Context of Buddhist Gāndhārī Literature | The Gilgit Manuscripts: An Ancient Buddhist Library in Modern Research | The Manuscript of the Dīrghāgama and the Private Collection in Virginia | The Schøyen Collection | Japanese Collections of Buddhist Manuscript Fragments from the Same Region as the Schøyen Collection | Dating and Localizing Undated Manuscripts | Survey of the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Turfan Collection (Berlin) | The Central Asian Sanskrit Fragments in the Pelliot Collection (Paris) | Survey of the Identified Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Hoernle, Stein, and Skrine Collections of the British Library (London) | Further Collections of Sanskrit Manuscripts from Central Asia | From the Kathmandu Valley to the Tarim Basin | Indic and Khotanese Manuscripts: Some New Finds and Findings from Xinjiang | Earlier Inventories of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Tibet: A Synoptic List of Titles | Indic Buddhist Manuscripts in the People’s Republic of China: The Peking University Project | Indic Buddhist Manuscripts in Vienna: A Sino-Austrian Co-operative Project, with Methodological Remarks on Śāstric “Urtexts” | Sanskrit Manuscript Projects in the China Tibetology Research Center | The Sanskrit Manuscript Research Project at Taisho University | Various Aspects of Dealing with Buddhist codices unici | Reflections on the Pali Literature of Siam | Pali Manuscripts of Sri Lanka

Die sensationellen Handschriftenfunde der letzten zwanzig Jahre haben ein ganz neues Interesse am literarischen Erbe des indischen Buddhismus geweckt. Entdeckt vor allem in Pakistan und Afghanistan, eröffnen die Handschriften ganz unerwartete Perspektiven auf geistesgeschichtliche Prozesse. Einige Fragmente stammen sogar aus vorchristlicher Zeit und übertreffen damit an Alter alles, was bisher an Handschriften aus dem indischen Kulturraum bekannt war. Zugleich lässt ihr Inhalt überraschende Entwicklungen in den Überlieferungen des frühen Buddhismus ans Licht treten. All dies hat weltweit zu verstärkten Bemühungen um die philologische Sicherung dieses Erbes geführt. Gleichzeitig sind lange vernachlässigte Handschriftenfunde aus den vorangegangenen hundert Jahren wieder in den Blick gerückt, und auch dies hat zu einer intensiven Phase der weiteren Erschließung beigetragen. 

Der vorliegende Band hat das Ziel, alle Funde systematisch zu erfassen, ihre Bedeutung für die Literatur des indischen Buddhismus nachzuzeichnen und vor allem auch den aktuellen Stand ihrer Erschließung zu präsentieren. Die einzelnen Beiträge sind an den Fundorten orientiert, und es ist gelungen, für die Beschreibung der Schriften die jeweiligen Spezialisten zu gewinnen. Erstmals wird so eine Gesamtschau der handschriftlichen Überlieferung aus Indien vorgenommen. Sie zeigt die Mosaiksteine, die bewahrt sind, deutet aber gleichzeitig an, was immer noch als verloren gelten muss, und nicht zuletzt führt sie die Grundlagen aller modernen Darstellungen der Lehre des Buddha vor Augen, soweit diese auf indischsprachigen literarischen Quellen beruhen. The sensational manuscript finds of the last two decades have led to a new burst of interest in the literary heritage of Indian Buddhism. Discovered mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, these finds have opened up fresh and often quite unexpected perspectives on the historical development of this religious and philosophical tradition. Some fragments date from the end of the first millennium BCE, and are therefore older than any manuscripts previously known from the Indian cultural sphere. At the same time their content throws light on the surprising ways in which early strands of Buddhism unfolded. All this has led to intensive philological efforts to preserve this legacy, while simultaneously bringing long-neglected manuscript finds from the last century back into view, and setting off another phase of intensive work on them.

The volume aims to record all these finds systematically, to describe their significance for Indian Buddhist literature, and above all to present the current state of work on them. The individual contributions are organized by the places where the manuscripts come from, with each find or collection described by the specialists working on it. For the first time, therefore, a complete picture of the Indian Buddhist manuscript tradition is presented, which shows the pieces of the mosaic which have survived, while at the same time giving us an idea of how much has been lost. What is more, it affords a clear view of the foundations of all modern representations of Buddhism, insofar as these are based on literary sources in Indian languages.

Papers Presented at the Conference Indic Buddhist Manuscripts: The State of the Field. Stanford, June 15-19 2009

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Paul Harrison

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From Birch Bark to Digital Data: Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research