A Preliminary Survey of Some Early Buddhist Manuscripts Recently Acquired by

the British Library

Richard Salomon

Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1997), pp. 353-358.

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 A Preliminary Survey of Some Early Buddhist Manuscripts Recently Acquired by the British Library
1. Introduction; general description of the manuscripts
The Oriental and India Office Collections of the Brit-
ish Library have recently acquired, with the assistance
of an anonymous benefactor, a substantial collection of
early Buddhist texts written on birch-bark scrolls in the
Giindhiiri or Northwestern Prakrit language and the Kha-
rosthi script. The original provenance of the manuscripts
is not known, but may be Afghanistan, in view of certain
resemblances (discussed below) to other materials previ-
ously found there.
The manuscripts comprise thirteen rolls of birch bark
which had been removed from their original container.
According to verbal reports, they were originally found
inside one of a group of five large clay pots, each bear-
ing a Kharosthi dedicatory inscription, which have also
been acquired by the Library. The bark rolls are extremely
fragile and, in fact, had already been seriously damaged,
in that substantial portions of one vertical edge of most of
the manuscripts had been destroyed. When acquired by
the Library, the scrolls were still in their original rolled-
up state, and the exceedingly delicate task of unrolling
them was successfully carried out by the conservation
staff of the British Library. This has now made it possible
to prepare preliminary photographs of the manuscripts,
an example which is shown in figure 1, and to conduct a
provisional survey of their contents.
The scrolls proved to consist of birch-bark strips, typ-
ically about five to nine inches in width, on which the
texts were written in black ink. The long scrolls were
built up out of shorter strips, apparently around twelve to
eighteen inches long, which were overlapped and glued
together, as shown by blank spaces in several fragments
in which the original strips have separated. The scrolls
were reinforced by a thread sewn along both margins. In
a few cases traces of the original thread are preserved,
and in many places the needle holes along the margins
are still visible.
Typically, the scribes began writing at the top of the
recto, continued to the bottom of the recto, and then re-
versed the scroll both from top to bottom and from front
to back and continued writing from the bottom edge of
the verso back to the top of the scroll. This means that
the texts both began and ended at the top of the scroll,
which would be on the outside when it was rolled up
from the bottom. But this is precisely the part of the
scroll that is most subject to wear and tear, especially in
the case of a fragile material like birch bark, which be-
comes extremely, brittle when it dries out. The unfortu-
nate result is that, but for one fragmentary exception, we
do not have the beginning or end of any scroll, or the
label or colophon that might have accompanied it. Vir-
tually all the surviving material, in other words, is from
the middle and bottom of the original scrolls. This situa-
tion is apparently not due to damage inflicted since they
were recently rediscovered, but probably reflects their al-
ready imperfect condition when they were interred in an-
tiquity (as discussed in part 2). The surviving sections of
the scrolls range in length from mere fragments of a few
lines or even a few letters to substantial, though still in-
complete, portions of complete scrolls. The longest intact
section of a single scroll is about eighty-four inches long.
For all these reasons, the condition of the manuscripts
is only fair at best, and often much worse than that. All
are incomplete, and many are mere fragments. Moreover,
in most cases the delicate surface of the bark is peeled,
faded, discolored, or otherwise damaged, so that it can be
difficult or, not infrequently, nearly impossible to deci-
pher the texts. Even where the texts are more or less leg-
ible, they contain, almost without exception, frequent and
sizable lacunae.
2. Constitution, disposition, and afiliation of the
manuscripts
It has already become clear in the course of the pre-
liminary cataloguing of the manuscripts that the orig-
inal thirteen rolls do not all constitute single texts or
scrolls. Although some of them do contain the remnants
of a single scroll, several proved to contain fragments, of
widely varying size, of two, three, or even more origi-
nally separate scrolls. In several cases it was also noticed
that separate fragments of the same text, and presumably
of the same original scroll, were found in two or more
of the thirteen rolls. And in at least one case, a scroll was
broken in half lengthwise and the two long narrow halves
of the text were placed in different rolls. This length-
wise splitting of the original scroll probably resulted
from its having been bound by a string or ribbon and left
untouched for a long period in antiquity, with the result
that, as the bark became dry and brittle, the binding cord
cut through and divided it in half.
354 Journal of the American Oriental Society 11 7.2 (1997)
Fig. 1. MS I, 1 (r). This is an example of one of the better preserved fragments. All figures reproduced by kind permission of the
British Library Board.
These peculiarities of the condition and disposition of
the texts all point to the conclusion that these manu-
scripts were already in fragmentary or damaged condi-
tion in antiquity, before they were interred in the clay jar
in which they were reportedly discovered. This implies
that they were discarded worn-out texts, an impression
which is confirmed by the observation that five of them
have secondary interlinear notations, in hands clearly dif-
ferent from those of the original scribes, reading likhi-
dago, "[it has been] written," likhidago sarva "[it has] all
[been] written," and the like (see fig. 2). These interlin-
eations seem to be notations by later copyists who had
rewritten the texts onto new manuscripts and marked the
old ones as "copied," i.e., as ready to be discarded. Such
discards were then rolled up together, apparently more or
less at random, placed inside clay pots, and buried, per-
haps in a small sttipa within the precincts of the monas-
tery to which they belonged. Such a practice is attested
by earlier discoveries, such as those at Hadda, in eastern
Afghanistan, where Barthoux (1933: 60) found similar
clay pots containing, in some cases, fragmentary remains
of birch-bark manuscripts, and in others, pieces of human
bone. It thus appears that the relics of venerable monks
and of Buddhist texts were conceived and treated simi-
larly as sacred objects deserving of ritual interment.
What we have in this new collection, in other words,
is, in all likelihood, something roughly analogous to the
genizah of Jewish tradition, that is, a collection of dis-
carded documents for which religious law or custom re-
quired a ritual interment. The source of these discarded
texts was no doubt the library, or perhaps rather the scrip-
torium, of a Gandharan Buddhist monastery, probably an
establishment of the Dharmaguptaka sect. This affiliation
is indicated by the inscription on the jar in which the
scrolls were reportedly found, which records its dedica-
tion to members of that sect (dhamaiiteanaparigrahami,
"in the possession of the Dharmaguptakas"). Although
this sect has hitherto been only very sparsely attested in
the northwest, this and several other recent discoveries,
including several that have not yet been published, of
Kharosthi inscriptions recording donations to the Dhar-
maguptakas indicate that they were a major sect in that
region, particularly in Afghanistan.
All in all, the preliminary survey revealed that the
thirteen original rolls of manuscript material contained
thirty-two separate "fragments," a fragment being here
defined as a piece, of any size, of an originally separate
scroll. However, it was further determined, by connect-
ing separated fragments on the grounds of similar hand-
writings and contents, that these thirty-two "fragments"
actually stemmed from about twenty-two different ori-
ginal scrolls. The number of separate texts, however, is
larger, probably about twenty-six, because some scrolls
contain two, and possibly even more than two, separate
and apparently unrelated texts. In many such cases, it
appears that the first scribe used only the recto, which
was apparently the preferred writing surface, and ended
at or near the bottom. Another scribe, perhaps at a later
 A Preliminary Survey of Some Early Buddhist Manuscripts
SALOMON:
Fig. 2. Detail of MS VI.3 (r). Note the interlinear copyist's notations likhidago, "[it has been] written:' between the third and sec-
ond line from the bottom, at the center; and likhidago sa[rva], "[it has] all [been] written," across the bottom line, at the center.
date, seems to have used the empty surface at the bottom
of the recto and the completely blank verso to record
another text.
These figures, at this point, are only provisional, and
will almost certainly have to be adjusted as a result of
the more detailed studies of the manuscripts, but they
are sufficiently secure to give a general idea of the ex-
tent of the collection. Although this is presumably only
a small fraction of the total amount of literature in the
monastery's library, it should prove to be enough to give
at least a partial view of the contents of such a library.
3. Identijication and classijication of the texts
Identification and classification of the texts is still for
the most part at a preliminary stage, and only a few of
them have been positively identified with parallel texts in
Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Tibetan. But the major genres
of Buddhist canonical and paracanonical literature repre-
sented by this collection have become clear, at least in
general outline. Most of the texts which are sufficiently
legible to be analyzed in the preliminary survey seem to
fall into the following categories:
1. Didactic or popular poetry, such as a Gandhari ver-
sion of the "Rhinoceros' Horn Siitra," a well-known poem
otherwise preserved in Pali as the Khagga-visrina-sutta
of the Sutta-niprita, and in Sanskrit incorporated into the
Mahrivastu (ed. 8. Senart, 1.307-9).
2. Avadana texts describing the past lives and karmic
background of various Buddhist personages, for example,
a collection of stories describing the previous incarna-
tions (provayoge = Sanskritpiirvayogah)of Ajiilta-kaun-
dinya, Ananda, and the Buddha himself.
355
3. Canonical siitra texts and commentaries thereon,
for instance, a Gandhari version of the Sarigiti-siitra (also
extant in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese) with an unidentified
commentary.
4. Abhidharma texts, as yet unidentified.
5. Stotra text (only one fragment).
It may seem surprising that no Vinaya material at all
has been found in this substantial body of manuscripts.
But a similar lacuna has been noted among the oldest
of the Central Asian Sanskrit manuscripts, and Sander
(1991: 141-42) has plausibly hypothesized that the Vi-
naya texts were preserved by oral recitation and not
normally set down in writing in early times. It is pos-
sible, of course, that the absence of Vinaya texts among
these new manuscripts is merely coincidental, "the luck
of the draw," as it were, but I think it more likely that
there were few if any Vinaya manuscripts in our hypo-
thetical complete monastic library, for reasons similar to
those adduced by Sander.
4. Date of the manuscripts
Certain considerations point to a possible date for the
manuscripts as early as the first half of the first cen-
tury A.D. The first of these is a clear reference, though in
an uncertain context in a fragmentary text, to jihonige
maha/qatra . . . (see fig. 3). Here a reconstruction such as
maha/qatra(pe*) 'great satrap' is obvious, and there can
be little doubt that the reference is to the Indo-Scythian
satrap Jihonika, who is known from his coins and from
the Taxila silver-vase inscription (Konow 1929: 81-82),
and who is likely to have ruled around the fourth de-
cade of the first century A.D. (MacDowall 1973: 229). Of
356 Journal of the American Oriental Society 11 7.2 (1997)
Fig. 3. Detail of MS 11.1 (r). Line 2 reads ra jihonige mahak~atra. . .
course, this reference to a contemporary historical figure,
which is a (pleasant) surprise though not completely with-
out parallel in Buddhist tradition, only establishes that
the text in question was originally composed during or
after the reign of Jihonika, but not necessarily that our
actual manuscript was written in or around his time.
But the dedicatory inscription on one of the clay pots
associated with the manuscripts (though not, appar-
ently, the one in which they were found) also points to
a date in the early first century A.D. This inscription
records its donation by a woman named Vgsavadatts,
the wife of Susoma or Suhasoma (. . . deyadharme
vasavadatae susomabharyae.. . . . svamiasa suhasomasa
sammepratyaSae . . . bhavatu, ". . . the pious gift of Vgsa-
vadattz, wife of Susoma. . . . May it be for the principal
share [of merit] for [her] husband Suhasoma"). Both of
these names match with ones known from other inscrip-
tions datable to the early first century. Vlsavadattz is
given as the name of the sister of the Apraca prince In-
dravarman in his reliquary inscription of the Azes year 63
= 6 A.D. (Salomon and Schopen 1984: 108-9). Suhasoma
appears as the name of a royal kinsman (anakaena) and
official (apnanakarena) of King Senavarman of Odi in
his gold-leaf inscription (Salomon 1986: 265), which is
undated but attributable from its reference to the Kuszna
overlord Kujula Kadphises to the first half of the first
century. Of these two names, the second in particular,
Suhasoma, is an unusual one an8 therefore very likely to
refer to the same person in the two inscriptions where
it occurs.
Unfortunately, the chronological significance of this
inscription on jar A is vitiated by the lack of any reliable
evidence as to the archaeological relationship of that jar
with the jar (D) in which the scrolls were found. While
there is reason to believe that both may have come from
the same site, and hence may be more or less contempo-
rary, there is no way to establish this. Other criteria, such
as paleographic and linguistic features, indicate a dating
range for the manuscripts from the beginning of the first
century to the first half of the second century A.D. Thus,
although it cannot be proven at this point, there is some
reason to think that they date from the earlier part of the
 A Preliminary Survey of Some Early Buddhist Manuscripts
SALOMON:
range, i.e., from the first half of the first century A.D.The
possibility of such a date for this group of relics has been
confirmed, or at least not contradicted, by thermolumi-
nescence testing of the clay pots, which indicated a dat-
ing range from the first to the eighth centuries A.D., with
a 10% margin of variation and no weighting implica-
tions for any period within this broad span.
5. Relationships to previous discoveries
Though unprecedented, the discovery of a large corpus
of Buddhist texts written on birch-bark scrolls in the
Gandhari language and Kharosthi script is not entirely
unexpected. Only one more-or-less intact manuscript
of this type has previously come to light, namely the
"Gandhari Dharmapada," definitively published in Brough
1962, which was discovered in 1892 near Khotan (now in
Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China). The new manu-
scripts are broadly similar in form, age, and contents to
the Gandhari Dharmapada, though there are some sig-
nificant differences in the details of such features as
language, orthography, and arrangement of the text.
But besides the well-known case of the Gandhari
Dharmapada, there have apparently been several other
examples of similar materials found in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, though none of these has ever been properly
published; therefore, they have gone almost entirely un-
noticed in scholarship on the relevant fields. Thus, the
early archaeological explorer of the northwest, Charles
Masson (in Wilson 1841: 59-60), reported that some of
the Buddhist reliquaries which he found in eastern Af-
ghanistan were "accompanied by twists of tuz-leaves,
inscribed internally with characters"; Wilson, in an edi-
tor's note (p. 60, n. I), explained that "it seems likely
that what Mr. Masson denominates 'tuz-leaves' is the
inner bark of the Bhurj or birch tree, which was very
commonly used for writing upon." Barthoux, in his ex-
cavations at Hadda (1933: 60-61), discovered numerous
Kharoghi texts on birch bark, including some contained
in clay pots like the newly discovered manuscripts. The
fate of these manuscripts is described in his own words:
"ces fragments, trks fragiles, Ctaient dkja broyes par les
decombres, et en les retirant, malgre toutes les precau-
tions prises, l'on achevait de les detruire" (p. 61), and
this explains why these, and probably the other similar
discoveries as well, were never properly published.
6. Implications for the study of Buddhist literature
a n d canons
Mainly on the basis of the evidence of the Gandhari
Dharmapada, and secondarily on the grounds of inscrip-
357
tional testimony of what seem to b e Gandhari versions
of Buddhist texts (Brough 1962: 42) and of evidence
from the Chinese Buddhist tradition, it has been pro-
posed that there may have existed a Buddhist canon in
Giindhari, of which, until now, only a few fragments
have survived. Thus Brough concluded, with due cau-
tion, that "the existence of this [Gandhari] Dharmapada
does imply the existence of a canon of which it formed
a part" (p. 43). The new discovery thus confirms what
already seemed likely, namely that the Gandhsran Bud-
dhists in the early centuries of the Christian era did have
a substantial corpus of written scriptures in the Gandhari
language, comprising a considerable variety of genres
ranging from didactic poetry to scholastic Abhidharma.
As to the contents, arrangement, and affiliations of this
canon, it would be premature to make anything Inore than
some very partial and provisional observations. Broadly
speaking, it appears to represent early northern Indian
Buddhist teaching and practice; nothing has been found
in the texts to suggest anything like Mahiiyana doctrinal
developments. This is in accord with the apparent con-
nection of the scrolls with an establishment of the Dhar-
maguptakas (see sec. 2), a non-Mahiiyiina sect generally
understood to be affiliated with the Sarvastivadins.
Some, though by no means all, of the texts have
either direct parallels or partial similarities to portions
of the Pali canon or to Chinese translations of northern
Indian Buddhist texts. Of special interest is an appar-
ent concentration of texts parallel or related to various
parts of the Pali Khuddaka-nikciya, and especially the
Sutta-nipata. These include the aforementioned Can-
dhari version of the "Rhinoceros' Horn Siitra" (Khagga-
visana-sutta), which appears as the third siitra in the Pali
Sutta-nipdta, as well as a commentary on a sequence of
verses, most of which correspond to passages from vari-
ous sections of the Sutta-nipata. Another scroll preserves
a small fragment that matches well with the concluding
portion of the Bhik~u-vargaof the Gandhari Dharma-
pada, which in turn closely resembles the Uraga-sutta,
the first sutta of the Pali Sutta-nipdta. This pattern of
close association with the Sutta-nipdta is of special in-
terest because the Sutta-nipata generally, and certain
parts of it in particular (including the Khagga-visanu-
sutta and the Uraga-sutta), have long been felt by Bud-
dhist scholars to represent one of the earliest strata of
the Pali canon, on the grounds of their numerous lin-
guistic, stylistic, and doctrinal archaisms. The apparent
concentration of Sutta-nipata-related texts in the new
Gandhari corpus thus is likely not only to confirm the
long-standing hypothesis of the antiquity and impor-
tance of this collection, but also to illuminate its textual
history and role in the propagation of early Buddhism.
358 Journal o f the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997)
This, of course, is only one example of the many contri-
butions which the new documents can be expected to
make to the study of Indian Buddhist textual and doc-
trinal history.
7. Linguistic and paleographical features
The new documents should also prove to be highly
useful for linguistic and paleographic studies. As might
be expected, the various manuscripts show consider-
able divergences and inconsistencies in their renderings
of the GBndhZri language, reinforcing the impression
gained from the previously known specimens, mostly
epigraphical, that the language was never fully standard-
ized or regularized. However, these differences, though
considerable, are likely to be more on the level of or-
thography than of actual dialectal or chronological var-
iation. Examples of notable orthographic or dialectal
peculiarities which were previously attested only spo-
radically, if at all, in GBndhHri documents include the re-
placement, in one set of texts in the same hand, of g by
gh in all cases. We also find in several documents the use
of the subscript pre-consonantal form of r to denote,
apparently, a geminate consonant; for instance, in the
Rhinoceros' Horn Siitra MS the word for "rhinoceros"
(Sanskrit ktzadga) is regularly spelled (according to con-
ventional transcription) kharga, which seems to reflect
the pronunciation khagga.
Also worthy of note is the absence of certain dia-
lectal/orthographic features peculiar to the GBndhHri
Dharmapada, such as its distinctive treatment of combi-
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Barthoux, J. 1933. Les Fouilles de Hadda, I: Stupas et Sites. Text
et Dessins. Mimoires de la Delegation archeologique
fran~aiseen Afghanistan 4. Paris: Les ~ d i t i o n s&art et
d'histoire.
Brough, John. 1962. The Gcindhciri Dharmapada. London Ori-
ental Series 7. London: Oxford University.
Konow, Sten. 1929. Kharoshrhi Inscriptions with the Excep-
tion of Those of ASoka. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum.
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MacDowall, David W. 1973. "The Azes hoard from Shaikan-
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nations of nasal + homorganic stop of the type vinadi =
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8. Plans for study and publication
In 1996, the British Library and the University of
Washington entered into a formal cooperative agreement
in order to facilitate the efficient and systematic study
and publication of this new collection of early Buddhist
manuscripts, once again with the assistance of an anony-
mous donor. The goal of the project is to coordinate the
preparation of a series of volumes, to be published by
the British Library, containing editions, translations, and
studies of the texts. An initial introductory volume con-
taining a detailed description and survey of the collec-
tion is currently under preparation and is to be published
as soon as possible. This is to be followed by the first
text volume, which will present the "Rhinoceros' Horn
Siitra" and associated texts. Plans for further volumes, in-
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are currently under discussion.
Salomon, Richard. 1986. "The Inscription of Senavarma, King
of Odi." Indo-Iranian Journal 29: 261-93.
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