August 22, 2002
Scholars working to decipher ancient Buddhist manuscript
Somewhere in eastern Afghanistan, Taliban soldiers may well be sharing a cave with vessels containing Buddhist texts that were created 2,000 years ago.
Maybe. But for now, one of the oldest and most important ancient Buddhist manuscripts is found on the UW campus.
The saga began several months ago, when Richard Salomon, professor of Asian languages and literature, heard that an ancient Buddhist manuscript was available for sale in the United Kingdom
This manuscript was of particular interest to Salomon because he directs the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, which began in 1996 as a partnership with the British Library to analyze a scroll that came into the library’s possession. Salomon was able to demonstrate that this was among the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence, dating from the first or second century. Since that revelation, Salomon, along with professor Collett Cox and several graduate students, have been at work deciphering the letters on the scroll fragments and translating the text.
Salomon and Cox were excited about acquiring a scroll for the UW that could complement the British Library holdings. From looking at portions of the scroll in a digitized form, they were sure it was from the same part of the world — near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan — and about the same time period as the pieces in the British Library. They brought the information to the UW Libraries staff, suggesting that they consider acquiring the scroll. “We don’t have collections of this type, said Libraries Director Betsy Wilson, “and we don’t have expertise for conservation of birch bark. But after talking with Rich and Collett, we were convinced that from a scholarly perspective, this was something worth acquiring.”
But where would the money come from? Given recent budgets, using state resources was impossible. “I began making phone calls around campus to see if others would join the libraries in raising funds,” Wilson recalls. “Each call I made was greeted with enthusiasm. More than one person told me, ‘This is the most important humanities research going on at the University.’ ” Within four days, the necessary funds were raised from private sources at the UW and from some key individuals.
As luck would have it, Wilson herself was about to travel to London on business and arranged to pick up the scroll. Normally, a special courier would be hired to transport such a treasure, at a cost of about $10,000.
With the scroll in Seattle the work began. Salomon and Cox were impressed with the condition of the manuscript. Still, it was far from intact. After all, it was written on birch bark 2,000 years ago. What they had were eight fragments from a much larger document. The fragments were not contiguous. But, each piece that they analyzed seemed to deal with the same general topic.
“We looked for parallels with other Buddhist texts,” Cox says. “And we did find something.”
What they found was vocabulary and phrases that were reminiscent of dialogues of the Buddha — but with important differences. “We’d see some sentences that were identical with dialogues preserved in other languages,” Cox says, “but then we’d see phrases such as ‘They state that…’ We began to realize that we had found a commentary.”
This is by far the oldest ‘raw’ (unedited and not reworked) commentary on Buddhist teachings that has been discovered. As with most early Buddhist texts, it concerns the problem of suffering. It discusses how an individual can reduce or avoid suffering, by “cooling” of the sensations through meditation. “The text uses interesting examples of how sensations normally work,” Cox says. “It compares sensations to fire sticks — the sticks you’d rub together to start a fire. If the sticks aren’t in contact, there’s no fire. Similarly, if there’s no sense contact, there’s no fire of sensation. The practice of meditation, which is central to Buddhism, is supposed to heighten awareness and thereby calm the effects of ordinary sense contact.”
The task of deciphering and interpreting the text and its companion at the British Library will take decades. The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project group, consisting of Salomon, Cox, post-doctoral researchers and several graduate students, meets at least once a week to discuss a portion of the text. They will read a line and see what words might be represented. The possible interpretations vary widely, and fitting the pieces together is like a giant puzzle. Does a particular line refer to sailors on a ship, or to women making bread? Some meetings will be very productive and the group will agree on the meaning of a line or two; other meetings are just frustrating. “We had one five-hour session discussing a blank space and what might belong there,” Cox recalls.
While the work is tedious, the rewards for a scholar are great. “We have very little detailed evidence from this critical period in the history of early Buddhism,” Cox says. “The region where these manuscripts come from, Gandhara, was a center for early Buddhist schools. From Gandhara, Buddhism spread to Central Asia, China and the rest of East Asia. From these texts we will learn a lot about monastic life and early Buddhist history. We’ll learn what elements of the tradition were considered important at that time, and how Buddhist teachers of that era saw the history of their religion. With this text and what is found at the British Library, we’re beginning to see the details of a stage of development of Buddhism of which we were completely ignorant just a few years ago.
“For anyone interested in Indian Buddhism or Chinese Buddhism or Buddhism in Southeast Asia, this is the most exciting discovery in the history of Buddhism as a scholarly discipline. This is not just another text; it is of a completely different order of significance. It’s difficult to describe the magnitude of what we have here. When scholars complete their analysis of this material, it will be revolutionary in how we conceive of early Buddhist monastic life.”
There’s a great benefit in having the actual documents here and not working from digital images, Salomon says. “Sometimes, we can take a close look at the scroll and fill in a portion of the text in a way that isn’t possible with a digital image.”
In the small community of Buddhist scholars, Salomon knows that others would “give their right arm” to have a look at the scroll itself. “We got lucky,” he says. “This might have been snapped up by a private collection and disappeared from view and from scholarly access.”
The team already has published three volumes of analysis of the British Library texts, with three other manuscripts in preparation. But working on the UW manuscript is now the highest priority.
“For 100 years, scholars had just one manuscript — tiny scraps, really — from this period,” Salomon says. “But then in 1995 was the British Library scroll, and then some other things, and now this manuscript. I’m sure there’s more.”
Cox points out that there were references by early 20th century archaeologists to scrolls in caves in eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan — an area that has been in the news frequently in the last year. She still has hopes of more texts being discovered.
One of the next steps that will take place with the UW manuscript is developing a plan for conservation and preservation. UW Libraries will be hiring an outside conservator with expertise in working with birch bark. Until this conservation work is completed, access to the manuscript will be extremely limited, as each movement of the pieces can cause new damage. The libraries will be raising additional funds for conservation.
