Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments

by Richard Salomon

Book Overview

As the Dead Sea scrolls have changed our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity, so a set of twenty-nine scrolls recently acquired by the British Library promise to provide a window into a crucial phase of the history of Buddhism in India. The fragmentary birch bark scrolls, which were found inside one of a set of inscribed clay pots, are written in the Gandhari Prakrit language and in Kharosthi script. Dating from around the beginning...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295977698
• ISBN13: 9780295977690
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.8" x 11.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

In search of Buddhist origins...

We live in an age inured to change and intoxicated with novelty. Evidence of the past is carelessly tossed away all around us, and few make any effort to dredge it back up later.Thus it is fascinating -- and curiously reassuring -- when anyone stumbles on some long-lost relic or other, and manages to extract from it a few precious clues regarding what man may once have been or where he may have come from. T.V. has bored most of us stiff with endlessly repeated news about King Tut and his celebrated tomb. Obviously some must still be convinced that the barely preserved corpse and outrageously overstuffed grave of an ancient youngster -- however marginal historically -- can still yield valuable information of some kind.Considered for a brief time at least somewhat newsworthy was the recent announcement that a cache of birch-bark manuscripts containing ancient Buddhist texts was discovered (though no one seems to know exactly where, when or how). The news media is no longer much interested in the find, but scholars certainly continue to be -- and for reasons at least as compelling as those which attract us to Tut and his excess of playthings.These manuscripts are believed to be the oldest Buddhist documents in existence, and perhaps the earliest Indian Documents as well. I am in no position to appreciate the significance of this for the study of Indian history or literature. However there can be little doubt that the find is extremely important to an understanding of what Buddhism may once have been -- and how it became what we now think it is.Don't hold your breath waiting to find out about these manuscripts from a T.V. special, as you did perhaps with the Shroud of Turin or the Dead Sea Scrolls. The manuscripts are too dilapidated to show up well in color, and it is easier to make out the freckles on King Tut's mummified visage than the archaic writing on some of these two-thousand-year-old documents.But the scholarly promise of the Gandharan Texts is potentially immense, and in its way every bit as profound as the richest tomb ever excavated. Therefore Richard Salomon's elegant book, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara, is well worth consideration.Saloman, a scholar of immensely lofty standards, still manages to produce a book whose narrative is readable and informative, and whose pictures are interesting (if, to a layperson, somewhat redundant). Naturally it is the ancient texts themselves which fascinate, and this book is intended only to introduce their probable history and document the process of their translation. Therefore only tantalizing excerpts from them are included in it. Susequent volumes willl present their contents more fully.Many readers will approach this book searching only for the sights, smells and textures of so-called original Buddhism, hoping that this early source might have survived unpolluted by the later political, cultural or doctrinal prejudices characterizing modern