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LZ在CD上扒出来的。据当年的狗主回忆，估计考试的文章是这个改写的。因为原文实在太长了，但是考到的要点这篇文章都有，大家提前熟悉下吧！上长文章！！！
Through some stunningfinds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscriptshere at the University of Washington and at the British Library are confirminga longstanding hypothesis that an ancient tradition of Buddhist literatureexisted in Gandhari, a dialect of Prakrit, an early Indic language thatdeveloped from Sanskrit. They are confident that that canon may soon take itsplace next to the four other great traditions of Buddhist texts: the livingtraditions of Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan, and the ancient, fragmentary one ofSanskrit.
The Gandhari canon may prove to be a cruciallink in understanding the way Buddhism moved northward along the Silk Road,into Central and East Asia, even as it largely died out in India, where it wasborn in the fifth or fourth century BC. "We're putting this language onthe map of major languages of the ancient world, which it really was,"says Richard G. Salomon, a professor of Asian languages and Sanskrit here, andthe director of the British Library-University of Washington Early BuddhistManuscripts Project.
Mr. Salomon is in charge of reconstructing,decoding, and publishing a collection of manuscripts of a kind that he and hiscolleagues feared they would never live to see. Until recently, concreteevidence of the Gandhari tradition consisted of a single manuscript, discoveredin 1892 and published 70 years later as The Gandhari Dharmapada (OxfordUniversity Press), edited by the late University of Cambridge scholar, JohnBrough.
Specialists knew that other manuscriptsexisted. In the 1830s, for example, one French archaeologist wrote of findingsome, "but when they touched them, they literally crumbled in theirhands," says Graham W. Shaw, the director of the British Library'sOriental and India Office Collections.
Although no other substantial Gandhari manuscripthad come to light, Mr. Salomon was among a handful of researchers who studiedthe language, from the Brough edition, from secular documents in a relatedlanguage, and from inscriptions on pots, coins, and archaeological ruins. Mr.Salomon specialized in those arcane inscriptions, which are in Kharosthi, ascript based on the Aramaic alphabet.
In 1994, his preparation paid off when he wascontacted by officials at the British Library, who had acquired a collection ofwhat appeared to be many more Gandhari-dialect manuscripts written inKharosthi. An anonymous donor had given the library 29 extremely fragile andbrittle fragments of manuscript on birch-bark rolls. " aper and vellum arelike cast iron by comparison," says Mr. Shaw. "The sheer fact thatany kinds of manuscripts on this material have survived is a miracle."
Library experts and Mr. Salomon determinedthat the manuscripts dated from the first century AD, and that made them theoldest known Buddhist manuscripts anywhere, and the oldest Indic manuscriptsknown to have survived. Judging by comparisons with other artifacts and bycomments in travelers' and early archaeologists' journals, Mr. Salomon deducedthat the manuscripts probably had been found in a jar in a cave near Jalalabadin what is now eastern Afghanistan, close to the ancient region of Gandhara.
Gandhara was the seat of a series of powerfuldynasties from the third century BC to the fourth century AD. Well-known fromabundant archaeological remains, it was a crossroads of cultural influencesfrom 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 and other evidence show that it was also an importantcenter of Buddhism. "It only stood to reason that there'd be a literarycomponent of that culture," says Mr. Salomon. "Some of the pieceswere in place, and now the literary language falls right into place, too."
Mr. Salomon, whose curly hair and heavyspectacles make him appear rather more bookish than swashbuckling, visiblywinces as he takes stock of how long it has taken for the tradition to emerge."Many Gandhari manuscripts were destroyed, lost, thrown out," hesays. "Believe it or not, they were not recognized as valuable objects,even by scholars -- certain archaeologists -- who should have knownbetter."
The British Library collection has grown from29 to 57 fragments, and to triple its original volume, with the addition ofother groups of manuscripts that were sitting unidentified in privatecollections. They include sermons, tales, and commentaries, many of which arewell-known from other Buddhist literary traditions. One such find -- eightsmall, contiguous fragments, making a piece about the size of a page from astandard paperback, from a large commentary on the benefits of meditation --has just been acquired by the University of Washington Libraries, while theother manuscripts are at the British Library. Because the documents are sofragile, the Washington researchers study digital and photographic images ofthem.
To date the manuscripts, researchers have usedsuch techniques as comparing their contents with inscriptions on coins, andnames or events mentioned in other texts. Similar sleuthing suggests that theKharosthi scrolls came from the library of a Gandharan monastery of theDharmaguptaka sect of Buddhists; that they date from the first century AD; andthat they were found in modern-day northern Pakistan or eastern Afghanistan.Interlinear notations such as "copied" indicate that the manuscriptswere discarded ones that had been replaced by freshly made ones. Apparently,says Mr. Salomon, the monasteries had well-organized scriptoriums and largelibraries even at that early stage.
That leads him and his colleagues to believethat the texts have enormous significance because they support the"Gandhari hypothesis" that Mr. Brough and some other scholars longago proposed: that some early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts wereprepared from Gandhari rather than Sanskrit originals.
Greeted with skepticism at first, thatpossibility now appears certain. The new discoveries reveal "a missinglink between the birth of Buddhism in India and its later forms in China andelsewhere in Asia," says Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit andIndian studies at Harvard University.
The link is quite complicated, Mr. Witzelsays. The newly found manuscripts are "not from the formative stages ofBuddhism." The religion's original language was probably a losteastern-Indian dialect, as later Pali texts from western India suggest. Butsince that tradition was probably never written down, says Mr. Salomon,"this brings us as close as we're ever going to get to the earliestwritten form of the Buddha's words."
Even though the Gandharan finds predate allother Buddhist holdings, the tradition links up with the other strains ofBuddhism in "very complicated, messy ways" that do not tell anystraightforward historical tale, Mr. Salomon explains. "In a way, that'sdisappointing. But that's a superficial reaction. Then it's daunting. And thenit's exciting. It really does shake things up."
In trying to identify exactly what therelationships are, he and his colleagues, including Collett D. Cox, anassociate professor of Buddhist studies here, and Mark Allon, an AustralianResearch Council fellow at the University of Sydney, are minutely comparingthem with parallels in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and are even finding a fewparallels in the Tibetan tradition, which developed later, but from a differentstream. For example, among the texts in the collection is theAnavatapata-gatha, a collection of sermons on the nature of perception that theBuddha is said to have delivered on the banks of Lake Anavatapata. Those areknown from later versions in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan.
Also found was a version of the versecompilation known in Pali as the Khaggavisana-sutta of the Sutta-nipata, theBuddha's sermons on the horn of the rhinoceros (sutta-nipata). In both the Paliand Gandhari "Rhinoceros Sutra," the rhinoceros, as an animal thatwanders alone, symbolizes detachment from material things.
Many texts in the collection, however, do nothave such analogues. "A large proportion of this literature," saysMr. Salomon, "existed only in that region, and is not part of pan-Buddhistliterature. That is again daunting" -- because it makes translation evenharder -- "and yet wonderful."
Wonderful, agrees Mr. Shaw of the BritishLibrary, because the writings in the new manuscripts are proving to be closerto those in Chinese Buddhist versions than to those in the Pali canon, whichhas generally been regarded as the standard. "There were obviously variousBuddhist canons circulating in early days in different dialects," he says.The manuscripts also throw light on the way that Buddhist tradition wastransmitted. "Oral transmission had been the preferred or normal way --memorization, recitation, and so forth," says Mr. Salomon. "Whatwe're now finding out is that, in the first and second century AD, the notionof writing things down took off in a big way."
For those reasons the manuscripts are, saysMr. Witzel of Harvard, "the Qumran manuscripts of Buddhism." Hisallusion is to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and their importance in understandingearly Christianity and its Judaic roots. Scholars in the broad field of Indicstudies generally agree that the comparison of the two writings, which datefrom the same time, is apt. Mr. Salomon concurs, but he adds, referring to thefamous squabbles that have bogged down the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls:"From the beginning, I've structured this project's strategies to be theexact opposite to the Dead Sea Scrolls. That entails actually doing researchand publishing it, rather than dickering around for 40 years, or whatever theywere doing."
Setting a brisk pace by academic-publishingstandards, the project has released one major volume a year since 1999 in aseries 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 andthe cultures." He knows 12 ancient and modern languages |
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发表于 2012-9-14 17:48:11
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