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From June 30 to July 3, 2008, the Department of Asian Languages and Literature hosted an international workshop on Gandhāran manuscript studies. The attendees included visitors and local UW scholars from Australia, China, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States. The workshop was scheduled to follow the fifteenth conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS) at Emory University (Atlanta GA), in order to take advantage of the presence in the U.S. of international experts in the topic.
The study of recently discovered manuscripts in the Gāndhārī language, which represent the earliest surviving documents of the Buddhist tradition, has for the past twelve years, has during the past twelve years become an important and influential academic sub-field at the University of Washington, where the Department of Asian Languages and Literature’s Gandhāran manuscripts research team has been studying several groups of these manuscripts under the direction of Professors C. Cox and R. Salomon. Recently, other collections of similar manuscripts have come to light, and these are being studied and published by Prof. Harry Falk and Dr. Ingo Strauch of the Free University of Berlin, who shared their exciting findings at the workshop. The main goal of the workshop was to share and compare the approaches of the various scholars working in this area and to correlate their results, and this was fully accomplished in a spirited interchange. Another important accomplishment of the workshop was the finalizing of an agreement and of the technical arrangements whereby the data gathered by the Berlin team would be incorporated into the UW’s online Gāndhārī dictionary (http://www.ebmp.org/a_gdp.php), which is being compiled by post-doctoral scholar Dr. Andrew Glass and PhD candidate Stefan Baums of Asian L&L.
Among the most important new announcements was that some of the Gandhāran manuscripts have been dated by radiocarbon testing to periods around the first century b.c. , and possibly even earlier. Previously, it had been thought that the earliest Gandhāran manuscripts dated to the first century a.d. at the earliest, but the new data indicates that some of them go back to the period at which, according to later historical traditions of the Theravāda school, Buddhist texts were first set down in writing.
Another exciting development is the recent discovery of at least six manuscripts containing texts belonging to the innovative Mahāyāna tradition. Until recently, all known Gandhāran manuscripts reflected the more traditional “mainstream” or non-Mahāyāna tradition. Since the geographical, historical, and doctrinal origins of Mahāyāna Buddhism constitute a central issue in the study of Buddhism, the discovery of an apparently extensive Mahāyāna literature at a surprisingly early period in Gandhāra will necessitate a fundamental rethinking of the entire problem.
Participants in the Gandhāran Manuscripts Workshop
Front: O. von Hinüber (Freiburg), Tien-chang Shih (UW), T. Lenz (UW), C. Cox (UW), R. Salomon (UW), H. Falk (Berlin)
Rear: B. Chaowarithreonglith (UW), P. Harrison (Stanford), P. Skilling (Bangkok), M. Allon (Sydney), D. Boucher (Cornell), A. Glass (UW), I. Strauch (Berlin), S. Baums (UW), Q. Lin (UW)
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