Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments.

• Author: Hinuber, O.V.
• Position: Review

Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments. By RICHARD SALOMON. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 1999. Pp. xx + 273, plates, figs., maps. $55 (cloth); $40 (paper).

In 1994 five clay pots and twenty-six accompanying potsherds together with twenty-nine fragmentary scrolls of birch-bark were acquired by the British Library through the good services of an anonymous benefactor, to whom all interested in Buddhist or Indological studies arc deeply indebted. For these fragments, carefully unrolled by experts of the British Library, who managed to do this risky job with admirable success, and now edited by Richard Salomon and his colleagues and pupils at Seattle, are among the most spectacular finds of objects relating to Buddhism during the past century. This has already received due attention, not only in the media, but also in this journal in the form of a brief article by R. Salomon, "Preliminary Survey of Some Early Buddhist Manuscripts Recently Acquired by the British Library," JAOS 117 (1997): 353-58.

Until now, the well-known Khotan-Dharmapada (ex Gandhari-Dharmapada) was the only literary Buddhist text available in Kharosthi script and in Gandhari language. Now, the new fragments (catalogued pp. 42-54) enrich our knowledge about the Buddhist canon and about Buddhist literature considerably, and not only because they seem to contain really new texts. These are all texts that have resisted identification and remain without any known (or discovered) parallel (p. 11). Moreover, besides further versions of the Dharmapada, which entail the change of name of the former Gandhari Dharmapada into "Khotan Dharmapada," as suggested by R. Salomon, there is a broad variety of texts from Avadanas to Abhidharma and, most interestingly, very early commentaries on Satras (pp. 24ff.), which could, perhaps, provide parallels to the early Theravada commentaries, such as the Suttavibhanga on the Patimokkha or the Niddesa on parts of the Suttanipata. Moreover, we are able for the first time to be really certain about the exist ence of a Buddhist canon in Gandhari, always and correctly assumed to have existed from the evidence provided by the Khotan-Dharmapada and from quotations of canonical scriptures, particularly in an inscription discussed by R. Salomon, "The Inscription of Senavarma, King of Odi," IIJ 29 (1986): 261-93.

Among the fragments there is only one lonely text written in Brahmi and in Sanskrit. As this is a medical text (fragment 6, p. 46), we find here the earliest direct evidence that Buddhists, while using Middle Indic languages for their respective canons, availed themselves of specialized and technical literature in Sanskrit. (1)

To satisfy the interest also of the outsider to the field of Indological...