Scrolls Confirmed As Oldest Buddhist Texts

[sabaijai]

Rare manuscripts dubbed the "dead sea scrolls of Buddhism" have been carbon dated to the first and fifth centuries AD by Australian scientists, and could be the missing link in Buddhist history, an Australian scholar says.

The manuscripts, which were written on fragile birch bark, provide an important insight into the development of Buddhist literature and help fill the gaps in some areas of Buddhist history.

Buddhism was traditionally a spoken tradition and until now, little has been known about how it developed from the spoken to the written word.

While Buddhism flourished throughout Asia, it disappeared from India, Central Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, taking with it many literary traditions.

"When we first learnt about these manuscripts we looked at the scripts and the language and made a rough estimate of their approximate age," says Dr Mark Allon, from the University of Sydney, an Australian researcher who is translating the text.

"My life will pass and this work will not be finished. There are many, many manuscripts, and it takes a long time to decipher and publish any one manuscript. The first manuscript I worked on, which was a scroll approximately a metre long, 72 lines, took me four years." says Allon, in an interview with ABC Radio.

Carbon dating, conducted by researchers from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, confirmed the assessment.

The scientists used the process of accelerator mass spectrometry to radiocarbon date the bark on which the manuscripts were written.

This process counts the rare carbon-14 isotopes in a sample and uses this to calculate the sample's approximate age based on the radioactive decay over time.

The scrolls, written in an ancient language derived from Sanskrit and known as the Senior collection and the Schoyen collection, are privately owned. A third collection is owned by the British Library.

Two manuscripts from the Senior collection, which is named after the scrolls' British owner, date to between 130 and 250AD.

And three manuscripts from the Schøyen text, named after the scrolls' Norwegian owner, date to between the 1st and 5th century AD.

They were discovered in Afghanistan during the war-torn country's post-Soviet upheaval, making their way into the antiquities market in the period of Taliban rule.

Allon says the Senior collection dating is particularly important because it makes a major contribution to Indian Buddhism chronology.

"One of the manuscripts we studied was found in a pot with an inscription on it indicating that it was donated in the year 12. While it didn't say what era that was, the characteristics of the inscription tell us that it must refer to the Kanishka era."

Kanishka was a very important king in northern India in about the 1st or 2nd century AD, but the dates he lived and ruled have been debated for a century or more.

"What the carbon dates told us was that the earlier date favoured by some scholars, namely 78AD, is no longer tenable because the carbon dates tell us that the manuscripts actually dated from 130AD to 250AD."

The manuscripts are believed to have originated from Afghanistan and are among many archaeological artefacts that were sold on the international market in times of war.

Dr Geraldine Jacobsen was in charge of the delicate chemistry needed to prepare the samples for dating. She explained that before analysing the actual scrolls - which were made out of birch bark - a sample chemistry test needed to be conducted.

"As we have never tested birch bark before we needed to ensure we got the chemistry right as sometimes samples don't survive the pre-treatment stage," she said.

"In the treatment, we had to remove any impurities that might have affected the date and as we had no idea how the scrolls were handled or if any conservation attempts were made, we had to use a series of organic solvents, such as hexane, chloroform and methanol to remove grease or resins.

"This process was followed by washing with acid and alkaline solutions which remove other possible contaminants, including the solvents we used in the first step, as these would also affect the dating if they remained."

Another problem Dr Jacobsen faced was the delicate nature of the birch bark which was extremely fragile and might be destroyed during treatments.

However the test sample showed the bark could survive the chemistry so they proceeded to go ahead with the dating process in one of the lab's particle accelerators. This process is called accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and tests commenced on the scrolls in 2004.

Carbon dating dates the material itself, in this case when the bark grew, not the time the writing took place. However by dating the bark it gives a very good indication of when the texts were written. The scrolls discovery and the dating of them has added valuable information to the annals of Buddhist history.

The carbon dating tests were carried out by Dr Ugo Zoppi who has since returned to the United States to continue his scientific career in this field.

source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1587489.htm

source: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1587563.htm

source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cf...jectID=10371631

source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Buddhi...1701602409.html

[camerata]

Speaking of ancient and lost Buddhist manuscripts (which we don't very often), I can highly recommend Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia. It reads like a turn-of-the-century tale of derring-do in Chinese Turkestan, but it's about a lost Buddhist civilization buried under the desert and the treasures that were (ahem!) "recovered" and carried off to farang museums.

Some of the manuscripts found have been dated to almost the beginning of Buddhism's spread eastwards to China. Others had belonged to Nestorian Christians and Manichaeans fleeing from persecution by Christians and Muslims to the west.