Recent discoveries of Pali MS from Afghanistan

[I previously sent the list one other notice on similar birchbark
material from the same region]



24 June 2007
The Buddhist Scrolls, Pt 2

SOURCE: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ark/stories/2007/1950209.htm

Out of the turmoil of Afghanistan, several sensational collections of
early Buddhist manuscripts have come to the West in the last ten
years. They are the oldest original manuscripts of Buddhism still
existing.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, and on The Ark today, we take a
second look at the recently carbon-dated Buddhist scrolls, which came
to light around 10 years ago.

Out of the turbulent recent history of Afghanistan, hundreds of
precious Buddhist manuscripts from the 1st to the 5th centuries came
on the market in the 1990s. Since then, scholars have been working on
three separate collections of the manuscripts, but their precise
origins are unknown.

Mark Allon is an Australian scholar working on the early Buddhist
manuscripts project.

Mark Allon: These manuscripts appeared on the antiquities market and
found their way into public and private collections. We surmise what
the origins of these manuscripts would be because we know by the
language characteristics of them, that they must come from what is
referred to as Ancient Gandhara, that is Eastern Afghanistan, North
West Pakistan, but that straddles two countries; where within that
region is a little bit uncertain.

Richard Salomon, who heads the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project, who
worked on these when they first were discovered, speculated that they
came from Eastern Afghanistan, the Jalalabad Plains, particularly
Hadda.

Rachael Kohn: Given that these manuscripts have passed through hands
perhaps of people who have been dealing in them, maybe even stolen
them from their original spot, what sort of issues does it raise for
the scholar?

Mark Allon: First and foremost we have lost all of the contextual
information and that means that we can never fully understand these
manuscripts. We do not know where they were buried, why they were
buried. The Senior collection for example, as I mentioned, has an
inscription on the pot which states that it's a donation, and that it
was deposited in a stupa, that is a religious Buddhist monument. And
we know from other contexts that this was a relatively common
practice, but the British Library manuscripts we don't know the
context for that.

So we don't know. We think by the fact that they appear to have been
old when they were buried, that they were like the many Jewish
manuscripts where they were sacred objects that couldn't be destroyed,
so they were put in a pot and interred in a stupa perhaps, to sanctify
that space.

Rachael Kohn: So apart from not knowing the context, and that's a
problem for scholars who want to explain what these texts mean, what
about actually working on them? Does it raise ethical issues in the
academy?

Mark Allon: Yes, it does. We as scholars, consider that we are
preserving the Buddhist culture of the region from which they come.
Whether that be Afghanistan or Pakistan. If these objects had not come
into the West, they would have been destroyed, and there are many
accounts say from central Asia of whole libraries of say Nestorian
Christian documents, beautifully illustrated, that were destroyed by
the local communities because they were 'pagan' books. And this also
applies to Afghanistan.

So we see our work as part of preserving the culture of this region
and as importantly, of making these very significant documents
available to the wider public, to the scholar community and to the
world of knowledge at large.

Rachael Kohn: Were there actual incidents in the university where
projects were terminated because of these ethical issues?

Mark Allon: Yes, the Schoyen collection in Norway actually closed down
for a short period of time, because the head of that project came
under criticism from a colleague who claimed that scholars should not
work on these manuscripts.

Rachael Kohn: Because they were stolen?

Mark Allon: Yes, or because of their uncertain origins. However the
University of Oslo requested the Norwegian Ethics Committee to
adjudicate on the issue, and they came down in favour of scholars,
maintaining that scholars had an obligation to make this material
available to a wider public, to expand knowledge and understanding.

Rachael Kohn: Do we actually know how they found their way onto the market?

Mark Allon: They appeared in Peshawar in north-west Pakistan in the
markets, which was a clearing house for many of these antiquities at
the beginning of the 1990s and throughout the 1990s. I don't really
know what happened to them then, how many hands they went through, I
really am unfamiliar with that whole area.

Rachael Kohn: Well it sounds like a great number of scholars around
the world are working on these manuscripts, and certainly the Schoyen
collection has thousands of manuscripts, or fragments of manuscripts.
Can you draw a picture of how many of you are acting?

Mark Allon: Yes. Within the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project based in
Seattle, there must be approximately ten of us. We invite scholars
with certain skills to come in and work on material as we need. Each
of those scholars has particular specialties. So my own specialty is
the Sutras, that is the early discourses, whereas say the specialty of
Dr Cox is the scholastic material, so that is what she is working on.
Timothy Lenz is working on the story literature, Richard Salomon the
head of the project is working on the poetical literature, and has
done much to establish the project.

In the case of the scholars working on the Schoyen material, apart
from myself and Richard Salomon and some of the doctorate students at
the University of Washington, it includes scholars from the University
of Oslo, from England, from America, Japan and so on. So it is very
much an international collaboration.

Rachael Kohn: Now Mark, how on earth did you train to translate
scripts in an extinct language, Gandhari?

Mark Allon: When I was at art school in Sydney I became interested in
Buddhism. I went to Canberra, to the Australian National University,
to study the languages of Buddhism, and Western philosophy and so on.
So my training there was in particularly Pali, but also Sanskrit and
some Chinese and Tibetan. I was most interested in Pali which is
related to Gandhari. I went to England to do my doctorate in Pali. I
then had a fellowship in Japan. When this material started appearing,
I contact Richard Salomon, the head of the team, and he invited me to
work on it. I had the prerequisites for that. I had studied this
language, Gandhari, only briefly at the University in Canberra, the
ANU. So I spent my first period of time in Seattle learning the
language, and becoming familiar with the script, and just dealing with
these manuscripts.

Rachael Kohn: Can you say something about the script, which is Kharoshthi.

Mark Allon: That's right. The language is Gandhari, as I mentioned,
the script is Kharoshthi. This script was adopted from the Aramaic
script which was a vestige of the Achaemenid Empire which occupied
this region, north-west India, up until Alexander the Great took it
from him in the 4th century BC.

Rachael Kohn: And did that script come down through Persia? I mean we
associate Aramaic with the Hebrew Bible, with Rabbinic texts etc.

Mark Allon: Yes. It is not really my area, but as I understand Aramaic
was the administrative language, or one of the administrative
languages of the Achaemenid Empire which stretched from Persia way
across to India. That must have been used in the north west, to the
Indian subcontinent as an administrative language, and when the
Buddhists arrived there, they adopted that script or modified that
script, to write their own texts.

It was first witnessed in fact in the north-west, in the inscriptions,
the edicts of the Mauryan Emperor, Ashoka, and throughout most of the
Indian subcontinent, he distributed his edicts which were carved on
stone, on rock or pillars, in a Prakrit language, similar to Pali.
However in the north-west he produced bilingual versions, either Greek
and Aramaic, and his inscriptions, as opposed to the rest of India
which were written in the Brahmi script, so a Prahkrit language in the
Brahmi script, were written in the Gandhari language and Kharoshthi
script. So he is clearly communicating with a different foreign
language group, the Greeks and the remnants of the Achaemenid Empire
and then also adopting to the local language of that area, Gandhari.

Rachael Kohn: Mark, have there even been Buddhist texts that have
appeared in the Greek language?

Mark Allon: We don't have any examples of that, and I would speculate
that they never were.

Rachael Kohn: Well Mark, with these newly discovered Buddhist texts,
in fact many of them are really fragmentary, aren't they? Can you give
me some idea of the sorts of fragments that they contain?

Mark Allon: This is an example of a verse texts. It is called the
Rhinoceros Sutra for which we have versions in Sanskrit and Pali as
well. The first line of this Sutra reads:

LANGUAGE

This text was edited and translated, published by Richard Salomon. The
translation of this verse is:

'Laying aside violence towards all beings, not harming even one
amongst them, benevolent and sympathetic with a loving mind, one
should wander alone, like the rhinoceros.'

Or another verse is:

'If one should not find a wise companion, a well-behaved strong
fellow, then like the king who has abandoned the realm that he had
conquered, one should wander alone like the rhinoceros.'

Now that translation is complete, but it is based on the repetitive
nature of these verses, the verses in this particular text. So in
fact, one and a half lines of that verse are missing, that is, the
words 'Like a king who' and 'the realm'.

Rachael Kohn: What is the significance of the rhinoceros?

Mark Allon: This imagery has been debated for some time, because the
particular words in question could be translated either as, 'One
should wander alone like the rhinoceros' or 'One should wander, or be
alone, like the single rhinoceros horn.' The Indian rhinoceros has a
single horn. I think actually there's a double imagery. In the
Buddhist tradition being independent, self sufficient, was highly
valued and the elephant, that is the male elephant who lives alone in
the forest or the rhinoceros who lives alone, the male rhinoceros,
alone, in the savannah, these were animals that were considered to be
worthy of emulation.

Rachael Kohn: That's very interesting, because it's a rather fearsome
creature and one that we don't normally associate with the Buddha, or
the enlightened life.

Mark Allon: That's true, yes.

Rachael Kohn: One of the biggest issues with the Dead Sea Scrolls has
been preservation, and being fragmentary and being so old, they can
easily deteriorate when exposed to oxygen. What sort of special
problems have the Buddhist texts presented?

Mark Allon: I don't think that they present the same problems as the
Dead Sea Scrolls, probably because the Dead Sea Scrolls are vellum,
whereas these are birchbark and palm leaf. Once they are preserved,
and in this case between glass, they are quite stable, and of course
they're preserved in a dry, temperature controlled environment.

Rachael Kohn: And where are most of them held?

Mark Allon: The British Library manuscripts are kept at the British
Library. The Senior manuscripts are currently in the United States,
and the Schoyen manuscripts are currently in Norway.

Rachael Kohn: Can people see them? View them? Are they on display?

Mark Allon: They have been on display. The British Library displayed
some of these. Generally they're not available to the wider public,
because they're very fragmentary. The glass frames themselves could be
easily dropped and would shatter into a thousand pieces.

Rachael Kohn: Can people see images of them on line?

Mark Allon: Yes, people can visit either our website, that is the
Early Buddhist Manuscript Project or the website of the Schoyen
collection and see images.

Rachael Kohn: Still, I am holding out for a worldwide tour of these
texts; do you think that's possible?

Mark Allon: It is possible that some of these will tour, or will be
available for the public to see.

Rachael Kohn: Mark, have you been surprised at the amount of interest
that has been shown recently with the carbon dating of these
manuscripts?

Mark Allon: Yes, in some ways. Of course it is very important to us
and it is nice to know that the wider public is interested in such
things.

Rachael Kohn: Well you have been thrust from the back dusty rooms of
academe into the bright lights of the media recently.

Mark Allon: No doubt soon to return.

Rachael Kohn: Let's hope we see an exhibition here in Australia
similar to the one on the Dead Sea Scrolls in 2000.

That was Dr Mark Allon, from the Department of Archaeology at the
University of Sydney.

To view a text, just go to our website.

Guests

Dr Mark Allon
lectures in the Dept of Archaeology at the University of Sydney, and
is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Fellow working on the
newly-discovered manuscripts.

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