Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The British Library Sanskrit Fragments.

• Author: Baums, Stefan
• Position: Book review

Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The British Library Sanskrit Fragments, vol. II. Edited by SEISHI KARASHIMA and KLAUS WILLE. Tokyo: INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED BUDDHOLOGY, 2009. Vol. II. 1: pp. 668. Vol. II.2: 382 plates.

The British scholar Rudolf Hoernle (1841-1918) began the study of Central Asian manuscript fragments--sent to him by British agents in Central Asia by arrangement with the Government of India--in 1895 when he served as principal of the Mohammedan College of Calcutta (the "Calcutta Madrasah"). The manuscripts, hailing from various sites around Khotan on the southern branch of the Silk Road and around Kucha on the northern branch, were primarily written in Brahmi script and in the Sanskrit, Khotanese, Tumshuqese, and Tocharian languages. After his retirement to Oxford in 1902, Hoernle continued to receive and study manuscript consignments from Central Asia, as he prepared his epoch-making publication Manuscript Remains of Buddhist Literature Found in Eastern Turkestan (1916).

The book under review publishes--in most cases for the first time--Sanskrit and Tocharian fragments from Hoemle's collection (now part of the British Library's Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections) that were not included in Manuscript Remains. It is the second part of a series established by Seishi Karashima and Klaus Wille in 2006, the first of which (reviewed by Richard Salomon in JAOS 128: 809) presented Sanskrit and Tocharian fragments from the British Library's Hoernle and Stein collections. BLSF II comes in two volumes; the text volume is simultaneously available in PDF format from the website of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University (http://iriab.soka.ac.jp/ orc/Publications/BLSF/index_BLSF.html), while images of the fragments and some (but not all) transliterations can be accessed individually in the International Dunhuang Project's database (http://idp.bl.uk/). This is a change of procedure from BLSF I, the images of which were simultaneously published on the IDP and IRIAB websites, but the combination of the BLSF II text volume and the IDP's presentation of the raw data is very convenient indeed. It is only to be regretted that parts of the PDF version of the text volume are not searchable, an oversight that should be easy to correct.

The volume contains an introductory essay by Ursula Sims-Williams on the history of the Hoernle manuscripts after their deposit in the British...