Project description
Opening new avenues in the study of ancient wisdom
Bridging the chasm between modern scholars and the ancient wisdom of Buddhism has long been hindered by a dearth of textual material. Surviving manuscripts, primarily in Indic languages, provide a glimpse into the development of Buddhist literature, but recent discoveries, like those in Mes Aynak and a private Thai collection, have offered unprecedented insights. With this in mind, the ERC-funded Gandhara Corpora project spearheads a transformative effort, employing philological and codicological research to comprehensively study these early Sanskrit manuscripts. The work will pave the way for a digital archive that promises to unravel the mysteries of Greater Gandhāra’s Buddhist manuscript cultures.
Objective
The foundation of the academic study of the development of Buddhism lies in the research of surviving textual material first composed in Indic languages over centuries before and into the first millennium. In the last several years, fantastic manuscript finds have surfaced opening new windows into the scholarly study of the development of Buddhist literature. I am one of the few scholars to have access to such material. This project represents a multifaceted, holistic approach to the study of an important and voluminous genre of manuscript witnesses from an early era of Buddhist textual transmission composed in Sanskrit in the Gilgit/Bamiyan type scripts from the historic region of Greater Gandhāra covering modern day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of Northern India. This project centers the study of two large, recently discovered caches of highly important early Buddhist Gilgit/Bamiyan type sūtra manuscripts and their place in the body of works from Greater Gandhāra. The first cache was excavated from the Mes Aynak archeological site in Afghanistan and the second is a collection of newly identified manuscripts held in a private collection in Thailand. The philological, paleographical, codicological, and critical research conducted in this project will examine textual and material production, transmission, and relationship networks in the Buddhist manuscript cultures of Greater Gandhāra and beyond in the first millennium of the Common Era. These results will be made permanently available through the development of a digital archive allowing for the creation of an akṣara database of individual syllables representing unique scribal identifiers, which will identify individual scribes across manuscripts and scriptorium networks, digital preservation of the manuscripts, their editions and translations, study of their textual, paleographical, and codicological features, and the direct comparison of the content of these texts with parallels in multiple languages.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
9000 Gent
Belgium