Birch-barch MS (1st century) & Kacc

Jim,

   I am now making very rapid progress on Kacc., and am resolved to
have my edition (including an English translation) complete in one
year.

   "Up here" ( = nowhere, Bokeo province) I can get a good four to six
hours of work done on Pali each day --much of the rest of the time
being taken up with activities such as splitting firewood, and
generally "coping" with the environs.

   And, I'm delighted to say, the pace of my work is improving
exponentially --i.e., once one adjusts to the EXTREME BREVITY with
which Kacc expresses itself, one can farily quickly read and
understand the verses.

   However, for me, it has taken, perhaps, fully two years for me to
adjust to Kacc's strange, truncated turn of phrase?

   I should also mention that the obscure secondary sources I've
accumulated have been useful in suggesting, e.g., why Kacc uses the
locative and genitive in such strange ways, etc.

   So, my advice is: wait for my edition.  Really, I will be finished
in one year's time, and, if not, my "fail safe" plan is to take three
months off at the end of this "humanitarian assignment" and absolutely
polish off the MS before publication (I may not need as much as three
months, at the current pace).

   See the article below, re: Birch Bark MS

E.M.

A preliminary survey of some early Buddhist manuscripts recently
acquired by the British Library
Richard Salomon
The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.117 No.2 (April-June 1997)
pp.353-358
COPYRIGHT 1997 American Oriental Society

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1. Introduction; general description of the manuscripts
The Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library have
recently acquired, with the assistance of an anonymous benefactor, a
substantial collection of early Buddhist texts written on birch-bark
scrolls in the Gandhari or Northwestern Prakrit language and the
Kharosthi script. The original provenance of the manuscripts is not
known, but may be Afghanistan, in view of certain resemblances
(discussed below) to other materials previously found there.

The manuscripts comprise thirteen rolls of birch bark which had been
removed from their original container. According to verbal reports,
they were originally found inside one of a group of five large clay
pots, each bearing a Kharosthi dedicatory inscription, which have also
been acquired by the Library. The bark rolls are extremely fragile
and, in fact, had already been seriously damaged, in that substantial
portions of one vertical edge of most of the manuscripts had been
destroyed. When acquired by the Library, the scrolls were still in
their original rolled-up state, and the exceedingly delicate task of
unrolling them was successfully carried out by the conservation staff
of the British Library. This has now made it possible to prepare
preliminary photographs of the manuscripts, an example which is shown
in figure 1, and to conduct a provisional survey of their contents.

The scrolls proved to consist of birch-bark strips, typically about
five to nine inches in width, on which the texts were written in black
ink. The long scrolls were built up out of shorter strips, apparently
around twelve to eighteen inches long, which were overlapped and glued
together, as shown by blank spaces in several fragments in which the
original strips have separated. The scrolls were reinforced by a
thread sewn along both margins. In a few cases traces of the original
thread are preserved, and in many places the needle holes along the
margins are still visible. Typically, the scribes began writing at the
top of the recto, continued to the bottom of the recto, and then
reversed the scroll both from top to bottom and from front to back and
continued writing from the bottom edge of the verso back to the top of
the scroll. This means that the texts both began and ended at the top
of the scroll, which would be on the outside when it was rolled up
from the bottom. But this is precisely the part of the scroll that is
most subject to wear and tear, especially in the case of a fragile
material like birch bark, which becomes extremely brittle when it
dries out. The unfortunate result is that, but for one fragmentary
exception, we do not have the beginning or end of any scroll, or the
label or colophon that might have accompanied it. Virtually all the
surviving material, in other words, is from the middle and bottom of
the original scrolls. This situation is apparently not due to damage
inflicted since they were recently rediscovered, but probably reflects
their already imperfect condition when they were interred in antiquity
(as discussed in part 2). The surviving sections of the scrolls range
in length from mere fragments of a few lines or even a few letters to
substantial, though still incomplete, portions of complete scrolls.
The longest intact section of a single scroll is about eighty-four
inches long.

For all these reasons, the condition of the manuscripts is only fair
at best, and often much worse than that. All are incomplete, and many
are mere fragments. Moreover, in most cases the delicate surface of
the bark is peeled, faded, discolored, or otherwise damaged, so that
it can be difficult or, not infrequently, nearly impossible to
decipher the texts. Even where the texts are more or less legible,
they contain, almost without exception, frequent and sizable lacunae.

2. Constitution, disposition, and affiliation of the manuscripts

It has already become clear in the course of the preliminary
cataloguing of the manuscripts that the original thirteen rolls do not
all constitute single texts or scrolls. Although some of them do
contain the remnants of a single scroll, several proved to contain
fragments, of widely varying size, of two, three, or even more
originally separate scrolls. In several cases it was also noticed that
separate fragments of the same text, and presumably of the same
original scroll, were found in two or more of the thirteen rolls. And
in at least one case, a scroll was broken in half lengthwise and the
two long narrow halves of the text were placed in different rolls.
This lengthwise splitting of the original scroll probably resulted
from its having been bound by a string or ribbon and left untouched
for a long period in antiquity, with the result that, as the bark
became dry and brittle, the binding cord cut through and divided it in
half.

These peculiarities of the condition and disposition of the texts all
point to the conclusion that these manuscripts were already in
fragmentary or damaged condition in antiquity, before they were
interred in the clay jar in which they were reportedly discovered.
This implies that they were discarded worn-out texts, an impression
which is confirmed by the observation that five of them have secondary
interlinear notations, in hands clearly different from those of the
original scribes, reading likhidago, "[it has been] written,"
likhidago sarva "[it has] all [been] written," and the like (see fig.
2). These interlineations seem to be notations by later copyists who
had rewritten the texts onto new manuscripts and marked the old ones
as "copied," i.e., as ready to be discarded. Such discards were then
rolled up together, apparently more or less at random, placed inside
clay pots, and buried, perhaps in a small stupa within the precincts
of the monastery to which they belonged. Such a practice is attested
by earlier discoveries, such as those at Hadda, in eastern
Afghanistan, where Barthoux (1933: 60) found similar clay pots
containing, in some cases, fragmentary remains of birch-bark
manuscripts, and in others, pieces of human bone. It thus appears that
the relics of venerable monks and of Buddhist texts were conceived and
treated similarly as sacred objects deserving of ritual interment.

What we have in this new collection, in other words, is, in all
likelihood, something roughly analogous to the genizah of Jewish
tradition, that is, a collection of discarded documents for which
religious law or custom required a ritual interment. The source of
these discarded texts was no doubt the library, or perhaps rather the
scriptorium, of a Gandharan Buddhist monastery, probably an
establishment of the Dharmaguptaka sect. This affiliation is indicated
by the inscription on the jar in which the scrolls were reportedly
found, which records its dedication to members of that sect
(dhamauteana parigrahami, "in the possession of the Dharmaguptakas").
Although this sect has hitherto been only very sparsely attested in
the northwest, this and several other recent discoveries, including
several that have not yet been published, of Kharosthi inscriptions
recording donations to the Dharmaguptakas indicate that they were a
major sect in that region, particularly in Afghanistan.

All in all, the preliminary survey revealed that the thirteen original
rolls of manuscript material contained thirty-two separate
"fragments," a fragment being here defined as a piece, of any size, of
an originally separate scroll. However, it was further determined, by
connecting separated fragments on the grounds of similar handwritings
and contents, that these thirty-two "fragments" actually stemmed from
about twenty-two different original scrolls. The number of separate
texts, however, is larger, probably about twenty-six, because some
scrolls contain two, and possibly even more than two, separate and
apparently unrelated texts. In many such cases, it appears that the
first scribe used only the recto, which was apparently the preferred
writing surface, and ended at or near the bottom. Another scribe,
perhaps at a later date seems to have used the empty surface at the
bottom of the recto and the completely blank verso to record another
text.

These figures, at this point, are only provisional, and will almost
certainly have to be adjusted as a result of the more detailed studies
of the manuscripts, but they are sufficiently secure to give a general
idea of the extent of the collection. Although this is presumably only
a small fraction of the total amount of literature in the monastery's
library, it should prove to be enough to give at least a partial view
of the contents of such a library.

3. Identification and classification of the texts

Identification and classification of the texts is still for the most
part at a preliminary stage, and only a few of them have been
positively identified with parallel texts in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese,
or Tibetan. But the major genres of Buddhist canonical and
paracanonical literature represented by this collection have become
clear, at least in general outline. Most of the texts which are
sufficiently legible to be analyzed in the preliminary survey seem to
fall into the following categories:

1. Didactic or popular poetry, such as a Gandhari version of the
"Rhinoceros' Horn Sutra," a well-known poem otherwise preserved in
Pali as the Khagga-visana-sutta of the Sutta-nipata, and in Sanskrit
incorporated into the Mahavastu (ed. E. Senart, 1.307-9).
2. Avadana texts describing the past lives and karmic background of
various Buddhist personages, for example, a collection of stories
describing the previous incarnations (provayoge = Sanskrit purvayogah)
of Ajnata-kaundinya, Ananda, and the Buddha himself.
3. Canonical sutra texts and commentaries thereon, for instance, a
Gandhari version of the Sangiti-sutra (also extant in Pali, Sanskrit,
and Chinese) with an unidentified commentary.
4. Abhidharma texts, as yet unidentified.
5. Stotra text (only one fragment).
It may seem surprising that no Vinaya material at all has been found
in this substantial body of manuscripts. BUt a similar lacuna has been
noted among the oldest of the Central Asian Sanskrit manuscripts, and
Sander (1991: 141-42) has plausibly hypothesized that the Vinaya texts
were preserved by oral recitation and not normally set down in writing
in early times. It is possible, of course, that the absence of Vinaya
texts among these new manuscripts is merely coincidental, "the luck of
the draw," as it were, but I think it more likely that there were few
if any Vinaya manuscripts in our hypothetical complete monastic
library, for reasons similar to those adduced by Sander.
4. Date of the manuscripts

Certain considerations point to a possible date for the manuscripts as
early as the first half of the first century A.D. The first of these
is a clear reference, though in an uncertain context in a fragmentary
text, to jihonige mahaksatra . . . (see fig. 3). Here a reconstruction
such as mahaksatra(pe*) 'great satrap' is obvious, and there can be
little doubt that the reference is to the Indo-Scythian satrap
Jihonika, who is known from his coins and from the Taxila silver-vase
inscription (Konow 1929:81-82), and who is likely to have ruled around
the fourth decade of the first century A.D. (MacDowall 1973: 229). Of
course, this reference to a contemporary historical figure, which is a
(pleasant) surprise though not completely without parallel in Buddhist
tradition, only establishes that the text in question was originally
composed during or after the reign of Jihonika, but not necessarily
that our actual manuscript was written in or around his time.

But the dedicatory inscription on one of the clay pots associated with
the manuscripts (though not, apparently, the one in which they were
found) also points to a date in the early first century A.D. This
inscription records its donation by a woman named Vasavadatta, the
wife of Susoma or Suhasoma (. . . deyadharme vasavadatae
susomabharyae. . . . svamiasa suhasomasa sammepratyasae . . . bhavatu,
". . . the pious gift of Vasavadatta, wife of Susoma . . . . May it be
for the principal share [of merit] for [her] husband Suhasoma"). Both
of these names match with ones known from other inscriptions datable
to the early first century. Vasavadatta is given as the name of the
sister of the Apraca prince Indravarman in his reliquary inscription
of the Azes year 63 =6 A.D. (Salomon and Schopen 1984: 108-9).
Suhasoma appears as the name of a royal kinsman (anakaena) and
official (asmanakarena) of King Senavarman of Odi in his gold-leaf
inscription (Salomon 1986: 265), which is undated but attributable
from its reference to the Kusana overlord Kujula Kadphises to the
first half of the first century. Of these two names, the second in
particular, Suhasoma, is an unusual one and therefore very likely to
refer to the same person in the two inscriptions where it occurs.

Unfortunately, the chronological significance of this inscription on
jar A is vitiated by the lack of any reliable evidence as to the
archaeological relationship of that jar with the jar (D) in which the
scrolls were found. While there is reason to believe that both may
have come from the same site, and hence may be more or less
contemporary, there is no way to establish this. Other criteria, such
as paleographic and linguistic features, indicate a dating range for
the manuscripts from the beginning of the first century to the first
half of the second century A.D. Thus, although it cannot be proven at
this point, there is some reason to think that they date from the
earlier part of the range, i.e., from the first half of the first
century A.D. The possibility of such a date for this group of relics
has been confirmed, or at least not contradicted, by
thermoluminescence testing of the clay pots, which indicated a dating
range from the first to the eighth centuries A.D., with a 10% margin
of variation and no weighting implications for any period within this
broad span.

5. Relationships to previous discoveries
Though unprecedented, the discovery of a large corpus of Buddhist
texts written on birch-bark scrolls in the Gandhari language and
Kharosthi script is not entirely unexpected. Only one more-or-less
intact manuscript of this type has previously come to light, namely
the "Gandhari Dharmapada," definitively published in Brough 1962,
which was discovered in 1892 near Khotan (now in Xinjiang Autonomous
Region, China). The new manuscripts are broadly similar in form, age,
and contents to the Gandhara Dharmapada, though there are some
significant differences in the details of such features as language,
orthography, and arrangement of the text.

But besides the well-known case of the Gandhari Dharmapada, there have
apparently been several other examples of similar materials found in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, though none of these has ever been properly
published; therefore, they have gone almost entirely unnoticed in
scholarship on the relevant fields. Thus, the early archaeological
explorer of the northwest, Charles Masson (in Wilson 1841: 59-60),
reported that some of the Buddhist reliquaries which he found in
eastern Afghanistan were "accompanied by twists of tuz-leaves,
inscribed internally with characters"; Wilson, in an editor's note (p.
60, n. 1), explained that "it seems likely that what Mr. Masson
denominates 'tuz-leaves' is the inner bark of the Bhurj or birch tree,
which was very commonly used for writing upon." Barthoux, in his
excavations at Hadda (1933:60-61), discovered numerous Kharosthi texts
on birch bark, including some contained in clay pots like the newly
discovered manuscripts. The fate of these manuscripts is described in
his own words: "ces fragments, tres fragiles, etaient deja broyes par
les decombres, et en les retirant, malgre toutes les precautions
prises, l'on achevait de les detruire" (p. 61), and this explains why
these, and probably the other similar discoveries as well, were never
properly published.

6. Implications for the study of Buddhist literature and canons
Mainly on the basis of the evidence of the Gandhari Dharmapada, and
secondarily on the grounds of inscriptional testimony of what seem to
be Gandhari versions of Buddhist texts (Brough 1962: 42) and of
evidence from the Chinese Buddhist tradition, it has been proposed
that there may have existed a Buddhist canon in Gandhari, of which,
until now, only a few fragments have survived. Thus Brough concluded,
with due caution, that "the existence of this [Gandhari] Dharmapada
does imply the existence of a canon of which it formed a part" (p.
43). The new discovery thus confirms what already seemed likely,
namely that the Gandharan Buddhists in the early centuries of the
Christian era did have a substantial corpus of written scriptures in
the Gandhari language, comprising a considerable variety of genres
ranging from didactic poetry to scholastic Abhidharma.

As to the contents, arrangement, and affiliations of this canon, it
would be premature to make anything more than some very partial and
provisional observations. Broadly speaking, it appears to represent
early northern Indian Buddhist teaching and practice; nothing has been
found in the texts to suggest anything like Mahayana doctrinal
developments. This is in accord with the apparent connection of the
scrolls with an establishment of the Dharmaguptakas (see sec. 2), a
non-Mahayana sect generally understood to be affiliated with the
Sarvastivadins.

Some, though by no means all, of the texts have either direct
parallels or partial similarities to portions of the Pali canon or to
Chinese translations of northern Indian Buddhist texts. Of special
interest is an apparent concentration of texts parallel or related to
various parts of the Pali Khuddaka-nikaya, and especially the
Sutta-nipata. These include the aforementioned Gandhari version of the
"Rhinoceros' Horn Sutra" (Khagga-visana-sutta), which appears as the
third sutra in the Pali Sutta-nipata, as well as a commentary on a
sequence of verses, most of which correspond to passages from various
sections of the Sutta-nipata. Another scroll preserves a small
fragment that matches well with the concluding portion of the
Bhiksu-varga of the Gandhari Dharmapada, which in turn closely
resembles the Uraga-sutta, the first sutta of the Pali Sutta-nipata.

This pattern of close association with the Sutta-nipata is of special
interest because the Sutta-nipata generally, and certain parts of it
in particular (including the Khaggavisana-sutta and the Uraga-sutta),
have long been felt by Buddhist scholars to represent one of the
earliest strata of the Pali canon, on the grounds of their numerous
linguistic, stylistic, and doctrinal archaisms. The apparent
concentration of Sutta-nipata-related texts in the new Gandhari corpus
thus is likely not only to confirm the long-standing hypothesis of the
antiquity and importance of this collection, but also to illuminate
its textual history and role in the propagation of early Buddhism.
This, of course, is only one example of the many contributions which
the new documents can be expected to make to the study of Indian
Buddhist textual and doctrinal history.

7. Linguistic and paleographical features
The new documents should also prove to be highly useful for linguistic
and paleographic studies. As might be expected, the various
manuscripts show considerable divergences and inconsistencies in their
renderings of the Gandhari language, reinforcing the impression gained
from the previously known specimens, mostly epigraphical, that the
language was never fully standardized or regularized. However, these
differences, though considerable, are likely to be more on the level
of orthography than of actual dialectal or chronological variation.
Examples of notable orthographic or dialectal peculiarities which were
previously attested only sporadically, if at all, in Gandhari
documents include the replacement, in one set of texts in the same
hand, of g by gh in all cases. We also find in several documents the
use of the subscript pre-consonantal form of r to denote, apparently,
a geminate consonant; for instance, in the Rhinoceros' Horn Sutra MS
the word for "rhinoceros" (Sanskrit khadga) is regularly spelled
(according to conventional transcription) kharga, which seems to
reflect the pronunciation khagga. Also worthy of note is the absence
of certain dialectal/orthographic features peculiar to the Gandhari
Dharmapada, such as its distinctive treatment of combinations of nasal
+ homorganic stop of the type vinadi = Sanskrit vindati (Brough 1962:
98-99). These contrasts make it clear that the linguistic and
orthographic peculiarities of the Dharmapada text do not represent a
simple contrast between literary and epigraphic Gandhari, as it might
have seemed until now. Detailed linguistic and paleographic study of
the new documents should gradually clarify the complex patterns of
development of Gandhari as a literary language.
8. Plans for study and publication
In 1996, the British Library and the University of Washington entered
into a formal cooperative agreement in order to facilitate the
efficient and systematic study and publication of this new collection
of early Buddhist manuscripts, once again with the assistance of an
anonymous donor. The goal of the project is to coordinate the
preparation of a series of volumes, to be published by the British
Library, containing editions, translations, and studies of the texts.
An initial introductory volume containing a detailed description and
survey of the collection is currently under preparation and is to be
published as soon as possible. This is to be followed by the first
text volume, which will present the "Rhinoceros' Horn Sutra" and
associated texts. Plans for further volumes, including a projected
facsimile edition of the manuscripts, are currently under discussion.

RICHARD SALOMON
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON


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REFERENCES
Barthoux, J. 1933. Les Fouilles de Hadda, I: Stupas et Sites. Text et
Dessins. Memoires de la Delegation archeologique francaise en
Afghanistan 4. Paris: Les Editions d'art et d'histoire.
Brough, John. 1962, The Gandhari Dharmapada. London Oriental Series 7.
London: Oxford University.
Konow, Sten. 1929. Kharoshthi Inscriptions with the Exception of Those
of Asoka. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. II, part 1. Calcutta:
Government of India.
MacDowall, David W. 1973. "The Azes hoard from Shaikan-Dheri: Fresh
Evidence for the Context of Jihonika." In South Asian Archaeology:
Papers from the First International Conference of South Asian
Archaeologists Held in the University of Cambridge, ed. Norman
Hammond. Pp. 215-30. London: Duckworth.
Salomon, Richard. 1986. "The Inscription of Senavarma, King of Odi."
Indo-Iranian Journal 29: 261-93.
Salomon, Richard, and Gregory Schopen. 1984. "The Indravarman (Avaca)
Casket Inscription Reconsidered: Further Evidence for Canonical
Passages in Buddhist Inscriptions." Journal of the International
Association of Buddhist Studies 7: 107-23.
Sander, Lore. 1991. "The Earliest Manuscripts from Central Asia and
the Sarvastivada Mission." In Corolla Iranica: Papers in honour of
Prof. Dr. David Neil MacKenzie on the occasion of his 65th birthday on
April 8th, 1991, ed. Ronald E. Emmerick and Dieter Weber. Pp. 133-50.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Wilson, H. H. 1841. Ariana Antiqua: A Descriptive Account of the
Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan. . . London: East India Company.