Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden, pt. 10: Die Katalognummern 3200-4362.

• Author: Salomon, Richard
• Position: Book review

Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden, pt. 10: Die Katalognummern 3200-4362. Edited by KLAUS WILLE. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. X.10. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 2008. Pp. xi + 470.

This is the tenth volume of the Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden (hereafter SHT), presenting the fragments of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts from the region of Turfan on the northern rim of the Tarim Basin in the modern Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, which were discovered and brought to Germany by four German expeditions undertaken between 1902 and 1914. In this as in other volumes of SHT the fragments are presented with detailed descriptions and annotated transcriptions, except in the case of those which have been published elsewhere or which are too small to be of practical use.

This volume continues to exemplify the high standard of philological quality which has characterized SHT since the publication of the first volume in 1965 by Ernst Waldschmidt, Walter Claviter, and Lore Holtzmann, including the previous volumes edited by Klaus Wille. (See the reviews of SHT 7 and 8 in Salomon 1998 and 2003.) The SHT project was originally planned to comprise ten volumes, but this volume is evidently not the final one, since it covers catalogue numbers 3200-4362, whereas, according to SHT 8: vii, the catalogue numbers run to 7172. Nothing is mentioned in the Vorwort (pp. ix--xi) about future volumes of SHT, but we may presumably expect them in due course.

Like its predecessors, SHT 10 contains a vast variety of texts and genres, with a strong predominance of siltra and vinaya literature. The texts and genres represented in the fragments are conveniently summarized in the "Obersicht iiber die Handschriften nach dem Inhalt" (pp. 445-48). Sutras from the Dirgha-, Madhyama-, and Sarnyukta-agamas are well attested in the fragments, but there are virtually none (except for one provisional identification) from the Ekottarikagama. This is in keeping with the general pattern of the Turfan manuscripts as a whole, among which the Ekottarikagama is relatively very sparsely attested, in contrast with other major corpora of Buddhist manuscript discoveries such as the Gilgit, Bamiyan, and the various GandhAri collections, in all of which the Ekottarilagama is well represented. The reason for the differing patterns remains to be explained.

Other genres represented include abhidharma, stotra...