Gandharan Buddhist Manuscripts
composition: probable
witness: birch-bark scroll fragments from Gandhara, dated by paleography and, in some cases, radiocarbon analysis
Birch-bark scrolls written in Gandhari using the Kharosthi script preserve some of the earliest physical Buddhist manuscripts known, opening a direct textual window onto Buddhist literature centuries before most other Buddhist canons survive in manuscript form.
- the oldest substantial body of Buddhist manuscripts yet identified, mostly on birch bark in Kharosthi
- written in Gandhari, dated roughly 1st century BC to 3rd century AD
- content spans multiple early Buddhist schools and text genres, not one unified canon
- most surfaced on the antiquities market since the 1990s, complicating findspot and provenance reconstruction
More than one hundred birch-bark and a smaller number of palm-leaf manuscripts and fragments, written in the Gandhari language using the Kharosthi script, recovered from Gandhara and neighboring regions of the northwestern Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan, most surfacing on the antiquities market since the 1990s with findspots reconstructed from internal and contextual evidence rather than controlled excavation in most cases. Dated on paleographic and, in some cases, radiocarbon grounds to roughly the first century BC through the third century AD, they are the oldest substantial body of Buddhist manuscripts yet identified, predating by centuries most surviving manuscripts of the Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese Buddhist canons. Their contents span monastic disciplinary texts, verse collections, commentaries, and Mahayana sutras, revealing a diversity of early Buddhist textual communities and schools rather than a single unified canon, and documenting Gandhara's role as a crossroads for the movement of Buddhist texts along Silk Road networks.
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