Asian Languages & Literature
University of Washington

In Search of the Words of the Buddha

Richard Salomon has earned international recognition for his identification of the earliest surviving Buddhist texts, whose importance for Buddhist culture is comparable to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism and early Christianity. Salomon also directs the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project, a groundbreaking collaboration between The British Library and the University of Washington dedicated to providing access—in book and digital form—to the unprecedented insights contained in these important texts. Acquired by the British Library in 1994, these fragile birch-bark scrolls were buried in clay pots in ancient Gandhara (now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) almost 2,000 years ago. Salomon’s work on the Gandharan texts includes A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra (2000) and Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara (1999), which are part of a series Salomon edits for University of Washington Press. Salomon earned his Ph.D. in Sanskrit from University of Pennsylvania and has published over 150 books and articles, among them Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages (1998), which is considered the standard reference work on the subject.