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In certain cliffhangers on late-night television, dashing and strangely underdressedarchaeologists in faraway places unearth artifacts of uncertain provenance. The discoveries cast newlight on an ancient civilization. In reality, archaeologists are less swashbuckling, but once in a greatwhile they do turn up objects -- ancient manuscripts, say, inscribed in little-known languages -- thathave that effect.
Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhistmanuscripts here at the University of Washington and at the British Library are confirming alongstanding hypothesis that an ancient tradition of Buddhist literature existed in Gandhari, a dialectof Prakrit, an early Indic language that developed from Sanskrit. They are confident that that canonmay soon take its place next to the four other great traditions of Buddhist texts: the living traditionsof Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan, and the ancient, fragmentary one of Sanskrit.
The Gandhari canon may prove to be a crucial link in understanding the way Buddhismmoved northward along the Silk Road, into Central and East Asia, even as it largely died out in India,where it was born in the fifth or fourth century BC. "We're putting this language on the map of majorlanguages of the ancient world, which it really was," says Richard G. Salomon, a professor of Asianlanguages and Sanskrit here, and the director of the British Library-University of Washington EarlyBuddhist Manuscripts Project.
Mr. Salomon is in charge of reconstructing, decoding, and publishing a collection ofmanuscripts of a kind that he and his colleagues feared they would never live to see. Until recently,concrete evidence of the Gandhari tradition consisted of a single manuscript, discovered in 1892 andpublished 70 years later as The Gandhari Dharmapada (Oxford University Press), edited by the lateUniversity of Cambridge scholar, John Brough.
Specialists knew that other manuscripts existed. In the 1830s, for example, one Frencharchaeologist wrote of finding some, "but when they touched them, they literally crumbled in theirhands," says Graham W. Shaw, the director of the British Library's Oriental and India OfficeCollections.
Although no other substantial Gandhari manuscript had come to light, Mr. Salomon was among a handful of researchers who studied the language, from the Brough edition, from secular documents in a related language, and from inscriptions on pots, coins, and archaeological ruins. Mr. Salomon specialized in those arcane inscriptions, which are in Kharosthi, a script based on the Aramaic alphabet. In 1994, his preparation paid off when he was contacted by officials at the British Library,who had acquired a collection of what appeared to be many more Gandhari-dialect manuscriptswritten in Kharosthi. An anonymous donor had given the library 29 extremely fragile and brittlefragments of manuscript on birch-bark rolls. " aper and vellum are like cast iron by comparison,"says Mr. Shaw. "The sheer fact that any kinds of manuscripts on this material have survived is amiracle."
Library experts and Mr. Salomon determined that the manuscripts dated from the first centuryAD, and that made them the oldest known Buddhist manuscripts anywhere, and the oldest Indicmanuscripts known to have survived. Judging by comparisons with other artifacts and by commentsin travelers' and early archaeologists' journals, Mr. Salomon deduced that the manuscripts probablyhad been found in a jar in a cave near Jalalabad in what is now eastern Afghanistan, close to theancient region of Gandhara.
Gandhara was the seat of a series of powerful dynasties from the third century BC to thefourth century AD. Well-known from abundant archaeological remains, it was a crossroads ofcultural influences from India, the West, China, and East Asia, and a melting pot of Greeks,descendants of Scythian invaders from the North, and many others. Archaeological remains andother evidence show that it was also an important center of Buddhism. "It only stood to reason thatthere'd be a literary component of that culture," says Mr. Salomon. "Some of the pieces were inplace, and now the literary language falls right into place, too."
Mr. Salomon, whose curly hair and heavy spectacles make him appear rather more bookishthan swashbuckling, visibly winces as he takes stock of how long it has taken for the tradition toemerge. "Many Gandhari manuscripts were destroyed, lost, thrown out," he says. "Believe it or not,they were not recognized as valuable objects, even by scholars -- certain archaeologists -- who shouldhave known better."
The British Library collection has grown from 29 to 57 fragments, and to triple its originalvolume, with the addition of other groups of manuscripts that were sitting unidentified in privatecollections. They include sermons, tales, and commentaries, many of which are well-known fromother Buddhist literary traditions. One such find -- eight small, contiguous fragments, making a pieceabout the size of a page from a standard paperback, from a large commentary on the benefits ofmeditation -- has just been acquired by the University of Washington Libraries, while the othermanuscripts are at the British Library. Because the documents are so fragile, the Washingtonresearchers study digital and photographic images of them.
To date the manuscripts, researchers have used such techniques as comparing their contentswith inscriptions on coins, and names or events mentioned in other texts. Similar sleuthing suggeststhat the Kharosthi scrolls came from the library of a Gandharan monastery of the Dharmaguptakasect of Buddhists; that they date from the first century AD; and that they were found in modern-daynorthern Pakistan or eastern Afghanistan. Interlinear notations such as "copied" indicate that themanuscripts were discarded ones that had been replaced by freshly made ones. Apparently, says Mr.Salomon, the monasteries had well-organized scriptoriums and large libraries even at that early stage.
That leads him and his colleagues to believe that the texts have enormous significancebecause they support the "Gandhari hypothesis" that Mr. Brough and some other scholars long agoproposed: that some early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts were prepared from Gandhari ratherthan Sanskrit originals.
Greeted with skepticism at first, that possibility now appears certain. The new discoveriesreveal "a missing link between the birth of Buddhism in India and its later forms in China andelsewhere in Asia," says Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies at HarvardUniversity.
The link is quite complicated, Mr. Witzel says. The newly found manuscripts are "not from the formative stages of Buddhism." The religion's original language was probably a lost eastern-Indian dialect, as later Pali texts from western India suggest. But since that tradition was probably never written down, says Mr. Salomon, "this brings us as close as we're ever going to get to the earliest written form of the Buddha's words."
Even though the Gandharan finds predate all other Buddhist holdings, the tradition links up with the other strains of Buddhism in "very complicated, messy ways" that do not tell any straightforward historical tale, Mr. Salomon explains. "In a way, that's disappointing. But that's a superficial reaction. Then it's daunting. And then it's exciting. It really does shake things up."
In trying to identify exactly what the relationships are, he and his colleagues, includingCollett D. Cox, an associate professor of Buddhist studies here, and Mark Allon, an AustralianResearch Council fellow at the University of Sydney, are minutely comparing them with parallels inPali, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and are even finding a few parallels in the Tibetan tradition, whichdeveloped later, but from a different stream. For example, among the texts in the collection is theAnavatapata-gatha, a collection of sermons on the nature of perception that the Buddha is said tohave delivered on the banks of Lake Anavatapata. Those are known from later versions in Sanskrit,Chinese, and Tibetan.
Also found was a version of the verse compilation known in Pali as the Khaggavisana-suttaof the Sutta-nipata, the Buddha's sermons on the horn of the rhinoceros (sutta-nipata). In both thePali and Gandhari "Rhinoceros Sutra," the rhinoceros, as an animal that wanders alone, symbolizesdetachment from material things.
Many texts in the collection, however, do not have such analogues. "A large proportion of thisliterature," says Mr. Salomon, "existed only in that region, and is not part of pan-Buddhist literature.That is again daunting" -- because it makes translation even harder -- "and yet wonderful."
Wonderful, agrees Mr. Shaw of the British Library, because the writings in the newmanuscripts are proving to be closer to those in Chinese Buddhist versions than to those in the Palicanon, which has generally been regarded as the standard. "There were obviously various Buddhistcanons circulating in early days in different dialects," he says. The manuscripts also throw light onthe way that Buddhist tradition was transmitted. "Oral transmission had been the preferred or normalway -- memorization, recitation, and so forth," says Mr. Salomon. "What we're now finding out isthat, in the first and second century AD, the notion of writing things down took off in a big way."
For those reasons the manuscripts are, says Mr. Witzel of Harvard, "the Qumran manuscriptsof Buddhism." His allusion is to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and their importance in understanding earlyChristianity and its Judaic roots. Scholars in the broad field of Indic studies generally agree that thecomparison of the two writings, which date from the same time, is apt. Mr. Salomon concurs, but headds, referring to the famous squabbles that have bogged down the publication of the Dead SeaScrolls: "From the beginning, I've structured this project's strategies to be the exact opposite to theDead Sea Scrolls. That entails actually doing research and publishing it, rather than dickering aroundfor 40 years, or whatever they were doing."
Setting a brisk pace by academic-publishing standards, the project has released one major volume a year since 1999 in a series from the University of Washington Press. Achieving that efficiency -- even publishing the texts at all -- is a matter of old-fashioned "philological slogging," says Mr. Salomon. "Technology helps, but the bottom line is knowing the words and the letters and the languages and the cultures." He knows 12 ancient and modern languages
The Kharosthi Club
Any Friday afternoon here, he and his colleagues are in session for what they like to call "theKharosthi Club," trying to tease out secrets that ancient Gandhara does not give up easily. In aclassroom, the researchers pore over images of the tattered manuscripts, badly obscured by creases,with missing fragments and distorted or jumbled script. The damage occurred when the documentswere painstakingly unrolled by British Library conservationists, and fragile leaves of birch-barkmanuscript inevitably adhered to others.
"Are you interpreting that loop as part of that letter, or the one to the right or the left? Or theone above?" asks one researcher, holding the image of the page this way, then that.
"This needs the treatment," concludes Mr. Salomon, meaning that the original manuscript page, still housed at the British Library, must be viewed under infrared light. "That brings out things that are literally not there to the naked eye," he says.
In each session, the Kharosthi Club -- seven or eight University of Washington researchers of the language and script, a good proportion of the world's total supply -- spend an afternoon that may extend well into the evening parsing out locatives from genitives without endings, grappling over orthographic issues, testing possible ways of reading letters or words, and making judgment calls: Is a reading justified on the basis of, say, the handwriting of a particular scribe? In some cases, even an educated conjecture cannot be made, so some words go untranslated, as often occurs in the translation of ancient texts.
To piece together fragments of manuscript, the researchers often must work with images ofsmall tatters of bark, fitting them together as one might assemble a raggedly cut jigsaw puzzle. Thatwork is facilitated by computer-graphics software, but still, as Mr. Salomon says, "there were nohigh-tech miracles." For him, performing the philological, editorial, historical, and literary-criticalwork of the project has been a case of being in the right place after preparing to get there for a longtime, beginning with his studies of Sanskrit as a Columbia University undergraduate in the 1960s."As luck would have it, this stuff pops up, so that'll be almost exclusively my field for the rest of myworking life," he says.
In addition to numerous volumes about the manuscripts, he envisages a dictionary ofGandhari, and a grammar -- and, over all, a boom in Gandharan literary studies. He and hiscolleagues Ms. Cox, Mr. Allon, and one postdoctoral fellow, Timothy Lenz, have completed fourvolumes in the series. A doctoral candidate, Andrew Glass, has contributed significantly to sectionson paleography and orthography in two books.
"It's a growth industry," says Mr. Salomon. He and his colleagues already had a sense ofGandharan culture, but of the manuscript finds, he says: "It's like the flesh being added to the bones."
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发表于 2011-12-10 00:40:43
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