Master Of Gandhari Sheds Light On Buddhism

[sabaijai]

Master of Gandhari sheds light on Buddhism

Out of the turmoil of Afghanistan, hundreds of precious Buddhist manuscripts have come to the west.

The earliest of them, from the 1st century AD, are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence. They are written in Gandhari, a Middle Indo-Aryan language derived from Sanskrit, which was used in ancient Gandhara, a region that corresponds to parts of modern-day Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan.

Dr Mark Allon, a lecturer in the Department of Indian Subcontinental Studies, has been working on these "Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism" for nine years and is the first person to have read some of the texts since they were written.

"Before the discovery of these manuscripts, Gandhari was primarily known through coin legends and inscriptions which are highly formulaic and have a limited vocabulary," he said. "These manuscripts therefore substantially increase the corpus of documents in this language."

The bulk of them are now kept in three separate collections in Europe, including the British Library. "If they had not come into the west, these 'pagan' documents would most likely have been destroyed by the Taliban," said Dr Allon. "So we see our work as part of preserving the history and culture of this region and, just as importantly, of making these very significant documents available to the wider public, to the scholarly community and to the world of knowledge at large."

The Gandhari manuscripts are constructed of birch bark which becomes brittle with age, or palm leaf. A large number are damaged or fragmentary, and they are exceptionally difficult to read: there are no spaces between words and the spelling was never standardised. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, meaning 'law' or 'teaching' may appear in Gandhari as dharma, darma, dhama, dhrama, or dhrarma.

"It takes a long time to reconstruct a manuscript," said Dr Allon, "and often I'm not able to make sense of the text at first." But with further research - perhaps looking for the same story in other languages such as Pali, Sanskrit, or Chinese - what was previously merely a string of letters suddenly becomes meaningful text.

"The Buddha died around 400 BC leaving no written texts. Rather, his sermons and stories of his life, such as of his enlightenment gained under a Bodhi tree, were preserved in oral texts composed by his followers," said Dr Allon.

"Most Buddhist manuscripts are relatively recent, so the discovery of these very ancient manuscripts sheds new light on the transmission of the literature and on ancient Buddhism."

He describes his work as difficult but very rewarding. "The more difficult the problem, the more exciting the result. It's something I experience virtually every day."

Dr Allon's interest in Buddhist studies started at art school in Sydney. At university he studied Buddhist languages and western philosophy as his major, with a particular interest in Pali, which is related to Gandhari.

When the Gandhari manuscripts started appearing in 1996, Dr Allon went to work for Professor Richard Salomon, head of the British Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, based in Seattle, USA.

In 2002 he returned to Australia to take up a five-year ARC research project on Gandhari manuscripts in the Department of Archaeology at Sydney. He started a three-year lectureship at the University last September which is funded by the University Buddhist Education Foundation.

"It is important that Buddhist studies is represented in Australian universities," he said. "Buddhism is becoming popular in Australia and many of our recent immigrants originate from Buddhist countries or from countries whose history and culture has been shaped by Buddhism."

One Gandhari manuscript translated by Dr Allon reads: "The Buddha's teaching is easy to perform, but only by a wise man, not a fool." Two thousand years later, Mark Allon is proving the truth of those words.

Source

[cm das]

It's great to see mention of this project here on the forum. I was an MA student in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington from 1997-2000 & I was fortunate enough for 2 of those years to have the opportunity to work with Mark Allon & Richard Salomon on the Early Buddhist Manuscript project. It was a small team, usually 7 or 8 of us & we'd get together every Friday to pour over digital images of the birch bark manuscripts. Sometimes in 3 or 4 hours we'd barely cover one line of text. The work was difficult given the poor state of the manuscripts & the above-mentioned lack of standardized orthography in Gandhari. But it was amazingly rewarding & exciting to work on the project as well. And I can definitely say that Mark Allon & Richard Salomon exemplify the best in scholarship. Not only are they extremely bright & knowledgeable people, they also are genuine, funny, & friendly. Both were very supportive of me in my studies. If anyone has questions about the project, feel free to post them here or pm me. I haven't been involved for a while now but it was a memorable experience for me & I'd be happy to share more if there's interest.

[sabaijai]

It's great to see mention of this project here on the forum. I was an MA student in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington from 1997-2000 & I was fortunate enough for 2 of those years to have the opportunity to work with Mark Allon & Richard Salomon on the Early Buddhist Manuscript project. It was a small team, usually 7 or 8 of us & we'd get together every Friday to pour over digital images of the birch bark manuscripts. Sometimes in 3 or 4 hours we'd barely cover one line of text. The work was difficult given the poor state of the manuscripts & the above-mentioned lack of standardized orthography in Gandhari. But it was amazingly rewarding & exciting to work on the project as well. And I can definitely say that Mark Allon & Richard Salomon exemplify the best in scholarship. Not only are they extremely bright & knowledgeable people, they also are genuine, funny, & friendly. Both were very supportive of me in my studies. If anyone has questions about the project, feel free to post them here or pm me. I haven't been involved for a while now but it was a memorable experience for me & I'd be happy to share more if there's interest.

Thanks for sharing that with us. Have you kept in touch with the project coordinators?

[cm das]

I haven't kept in touch with the project coordinators, though reading this article inspired me to try & contact MArk Allon again. In fact I had planned to do my PhD. work on this project at the University of Washington. But I was ultimately dissuaded by three factors. First was the language requirement: in order to earn a doctorate studying these manuscripts I would have been required to pass reading tests in Sanskrit, Pali, French, German (no problem so far) and also Chinese & Tibetan (I have no experience with these languages). So with all that language study I was looking at several years of additional coursework on top of my research. The second factor was that brilliant scholars who were finishing the PhD program that I was about to start couldn't find teaching jobs! Old-fashioned philologists are out of favor at most American universities (orientalism & all that). I didn't really like the idea of working my ass off for 8 years or so only to find myself unemployable in my field. Finally, I was just burned out. The work was fascinating but my life was way out of balance - I spent more time with my dictionaries and grammars than I did with my wife or my friends. Once I took a break from intensive study of that sort, I didn't want to go back. Only now, 7 years later, am I staring to think again about pursuing a PhD.