The
earliest of them, from the 1st century AD, are the oldest Buddhist
manuscripts in existence. They are written in Gandhari, a Middle
Indo-Aryan language derived from Sanskrit, which was used in ancient
Gandhara, a region that corresponds to parts of modern-day Afghanistan
and north-western Pakistan.
Dr Mark Allon, a lecturer in the Department of Indian Subcontinental
Studies, has been working on these "Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism"
for nine years and is the first person to have read some of the
texts since they were written.
"Before the discovery of these manuscripts, Gandhari was
primarily known through coin legends and inscriptions which are
highly formulaic and have a limited vocabulary," he said.
"These manuscripts therefore substantiall increase the corpus
of documents in this language."
The bulk of them are now kept in three separate collections in
Europe, including the British Library. "If they had not come
into the west, these 'pagan' documents would most likely have
been destroyed by the Taliban," said Dr Allon. "So we
see our work as part of preserving the history and culture of
this region and, just as importantly, of making these very significant
documents available to the wider public, to the scholarly community
and to the world of knowledge at large."
The Gandhari manuscripts are constructed of birch bark which becomes
brittle with age, or palm leaf. A large number are damaged or
fragmentary, and they are exceptionally difficult to read: there
are no spaces between words and the spelling was never standardised.
For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, meaning 'law' or 'teaching'
may appear in Gandhari as dharma, darma, dhama, dhrama, or dhrarma.
"It takes a long time to reconstruct a manuscript,"
said Dr Allon, "and often I'm not able to make sense of the
text at first." But with further research - perhaps looking
for the same story in other languages such as Pali, Sanskrit,
or Chinese - what was previously merely a string of letters suddenly
becomes meaningful text.
"The Buddha died around 400 BC leaving no written texts.
Rather, his sermons and stories of his life, such as of his enlightenment
gained under a Bodhi tree, were preserved in oral texts composed
by his followers," said Dr Allon.
"Most Buddhist manuscripts are relatively recent, so the
discovery of these very ancient manuscripts sheds new light on
the transmission of the literature and on ancient Buddhism."
He describes his work as difficult but very rewarding. "The
more difficult the problem, the more exciting the result. It's
something I experience virtually every day."
Dr Allon's interest in Buddhist studies started at art school
in Sydney. At university he studied Buddhist languages and western
philosophy as his major, with a particular interest in Pali, which
is related to Gandhari.
When the Gandhari manuscripts started appearing in 1996, Dr Allon
went to work for Professor Richard Salomon, head of the British
Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project,
based in Seattle, USA.
In 2002 he returned to Australia to take up a five-year ARC research
project on Gandhari manuscripts in the Department of Archaeology
at Sydney. He started a three-year lectureship at the University
last September which is funded by the University Buddhist Education
Foundation.
"It is important that Buddhist studies is represented in
Australian universities, " he said. "Buddhism is becoming
popular in Australia and many of our recent immigrants originate
from Buddhist countries or from countries whose history and culture
has been shaped by Buddhism."
One Gandhari manuscript translated by Dr Allon reads: "The
Buddha's teaching is easy to perform, but only by a wise man,
not a fool." Two thousand years later, Mark Allon is proving
the truth of those words.
By University of Sydney
http://www.huliq.
com/4129/ master-of- gandhari- sheds-light- on-buddhism
