Bower Manuscript

The Bower Manuscript is named after its accidental purchaser Hamilton Bower, a British Army Lieutenant. The story begins with the brutal murder of Andrew Dalgleish, a Scotsman camping in the Karakoram mountains, north of Kashmir. He was hacked to death inside his tent by an Afghan named Dad Mahomed. The British government wanted to bring Mahomed to justice, and therefore sent Hamilton Bower with some troops to go after the killer, states Wujastyk. Mahomed learned about the effort and escaped. Bower, in the chase, followed Mahomed through the Himalayan valleys into the Takla Makan desert. Bower arrived near Kucha (Xinjiang) in early March 1890 and set his camp. On the night of 2 or 3 March, a man came to his tent and offered to sell him old manuscripts and artifacts that his treasure hunters had found. Bower bought them. Bower took the manuscripts with him when he returned to Simla and forwarded it to Colonel James Waterhouse, the then President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Waterhouse reported the manuscript at the monthly meeting of the Society on 5 November 1890, whose proceedings were widely distributed. At the meeting, he stated that Bower visited the site where the manuscript was found, and referred to the stupa as something that looked like a huge "cottage loaf" near the "Ming–oi" Buddhist monastery ruins, 16 miles from Kucha near the banks of a river. After the meeting, in parallel, some attempts were made to decipher the manuscript, but they proved unsuccessful. German Indologist Georg Buhler succeeded in reading and translating two leaves of the manuscript, reproduced in the form of heliogravures in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Immediately after his return to India in February 1891, Hoernle began to study the manuscript. He found that the manuscript leaves were jumbled out of sequence, but had the page numbers marked on the left. After re-arranging them, he concluded that it was an abridged collection of several different treatises. He presented the first decipherment two months later, at the meeting of the Society in April 1891, with evidence that it was "the oldest Indian written book that is known to exist". Between 1893 and 1897 Hoernle published a complete edition of the text, featuring an annotated English translation and illustrated facsimile plates. A Sanskrit Index was published in 1908, and a revised translation of the medical portions (I, II, and III) in 1909; the Introduction appeared in 1912. ==Description and dating==

The 'Bower Manuscript' is a collation of seven treatise manuscripts, compiled into a larger group and another a smaller one. The larger manuscript is a fragmentary convolute of six treatises (Part I, II, III, IV, V and VII), which are separately paginated, with each leaf approximately 29 square inches (11.5 inch x 2.5 inch). Part VI is written on smaller folio leaves, both in length and breadth, with each leaf approximately 18 square inches (9 inch x 2 inch). The Bower manuscript, as discovered, had 56 birch bark leaves, cut into oblong palmyra shape (rectangular strips with rounded corners). This is the form commonly found in numerous ancient and medieval Indian manuscript books (pothī). The pages are bound in Indian style, with each leaf containing a hole about the middle of the left side, for the passage of the binding string. Hoernle determined that the manuscript belonged to the 4th or 5th–century because the script used matched with dated inscriptions and other texts of that period in the north and northwest India. He also compared the style and script for numerals – particularly zero and position value – and the page numbering style in the manuscript with those found in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts. By combining such evidence with palaeographic evidence therein, he concluded that the Bower manuscript could not be dated in or after the second half of the 6th century. Winand M. Callewaert dates it to c. 450 CE. Based on the handwriting and fonts prevalent in the inscriptions discovered in India from that era, Hoernle suggested the first scribe who wrote Parts I through III likely grew up and came from Kashmir or Udyana (North India) to Kucha (China) because his writing shows early Sarada script influences. Part VI, and possibly V and VII were written by scribe(s) who may have come to China from a region that is now the central India to Andhra Pradesh, for similar reasons. The writer of part IV appears to have the style of someone used to "writing with a brush", and therefore may have been a local native or a Buddhist monk who came from interior China. ==Contents==

The text consists of seven separate and different treatises, of which first three are on medicine, next two on divination, and last two on magical incantations. This is the part where the initial 43 verses are in eighteen different, uncommon meters (Sanskrit prosody) such as the vasanta tilaka, trishtubh and arya, while the verses thereafter are in the shloka style. The verses credit the knowledge to past sages. Verse 9, for example, attributes the knowledge to Susruta, who received it from the sage king of Kashi. Part IV is almost complete, while the manual constituting Part V is markedly more fragmentary and defective. The dice is stated to be a group of three dice, each with four faces (tetrahedron) numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4. When cast, it would yield one of 64 possible casts, of which 60 combinations are listed in Part IV (the missing 4 may be scribal error or lost; but those 4 are mentioned in later verses). while Part VII is for protecting against other evils befalling a person. Both these parts are a small select portion of the actual Mayuri text, and tiny compared to the much larger dharani compilations. According to Hoernle, Yashomitra may well have been a Buddhist monk of great repute, the one for whom the stupa was built, and in whose memory the manuscript was prepared and buried in the stupa mound. == Legacy ==

The discovery of the Bower Manuscript, its antiquity, and its decipherment by Hoernle triggered "enormous excitement" in the 1890s, states Wujastyk. Famous explorers were commissioned by some of the world's major powers of the era – such as Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Russia – to go on a Central Asia and Xinjiang expedition. They were to seek manuscripts and other ancient treasures. These expeditions yielded major discoveries such as the Dunhuang manuscripts, as well as famous forgeries such as those of Islam Akhun, in the decades that followed. The European Union-funded International Dunhuang Project has continued the legacy of the Bower manuscript which in part inspired Rudolf Hornle to seek funds from the then Government of India to finance the first 1900–1901 expedition of Marc Aurel Stein. ==References==