RE: Recent discoveries of Pali MS from Afghanistan

Dear Eisel,

These manuscripts are in the Gandhari language, not Pali, though the two
are closely related.

This reminds me, I meant to respond to comments on the list by Jim some
time ago regarding the preparation of birch bark for writing.
Unfortunately, we have not idea how the material was prepared for
writing (e.g. whether it was treated with oils or some solution), how
long it could be kept before use (obviously, the stuff can last for a
thousand of years in the "brittle old manuscript" state), etc. We also
have not yet investigated the nature of the inks used. But we do intend
subjecting the manuscripts to further material analysis in the hope of
learning more about these things. 

Best wishes
Mark


Dr Mark Allon
Department of Indian Subcontinental Studies
University of Sydney
Brennan MacCallum Building A18
Sydney NSW 2006, Australia
Phone 02-93513891; fax 02-93512319

>-----Original Message-----
>From: palistudy@yahoogroups.com [mailto:palistudy@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of
>Eisel Mazard
>Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 10:06 PM
>To: palistudy@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [palistudy] 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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