The British Library Collection In 1994, the
British Library acquired a group of some eighty Gandharan manuscript fragments from the first half of the 1st century CE, encompassing twenty‐seven birch‐bark scrolls. These
birch bark manuscripts were stored in clay jars, which preserved them. They are thought to have been found in western Pakistan, the location of Gandhara, buried beneath ancient
monasteries. A team has been at work, trying to decipher the manuscripts: several volumes have appeared to date (see below). The manuscripts were written in the Gandhārī language using the
Kharoṣṭhī script and are therefore sometimes also called the
Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts. The collection is composed of a diversity of texts: a
Dhammapada, discourses of the Buddha such as the
Rhinoceros Sutra,
Avadanas and
Purvayogas, commentaries and
Abhidharma texts. There is evidence to suggest that these texts may belong to the Dharmaguptaka school. There is an inscription on a jar pointing to that school, and there is some textual evidence as well. On a semi-related point, the Gandhāran text of the
Rhinoceros Sutra contains the word
mahayaṇaṣa, which some might identify with "
Mahayana." However, according to Salomon, in Kharoṣṭhī orthography there is no reason to think that the phrase in question,
amaṃtraṇa bhoti mahayaṇaṣa ("there are calls from the multitude"), has any connection to the Mahayana.
The Senior Collection The Senior collection was bought by Robert Senior, a British collector. The Senior collection may be slightly younger than the British Library collection. It consists almost entirely of
canonical sutras, and, like the British Library collection, was written on birch bark and stored in clay jars. The jars bear inscriptions referring to Macedonian rather than ancient Indian month names, as is characteristic of the
Kaniska era from which they derive. There is a "strong likelihood that the Senior scrolls were written, at the earliest, in the latter part of the first century A.D., or, perhaps more likely, in the first half of the second century. This would make the Senior scrolls slightly but significantly later than the scrolls of the British Library collection, which have been provisionally dated to the first half of the first century." Salomon writes: {{quote|The Senior collection is superficially similar in character to the British Library collection in that they both consist of about two dozen birch bark manuscripts or manuscript fragments arranged in scroll or similar format and written in Kharosthi script and Gandhari language. Both were found inside inscribed clay pots, and both are believed to have come from the same or nearby sites, in or around
Hadda in eastern Afghanistan. But in terms of their textual contents, the two collections differ in important ways. Whereas the British Library collection was a diverse mixture of texts of many different genres written by some two dozen different scribes, all or nearly all of the manuscripts in the Senior collection are written in the same hand, and all but one of them seem to belong to the same genre, namely sutra. Moreover, whereas all of the British Library scrolls were fragmentary and at least some of them were evidently already damaged and incomplete before they were interred in antiquity,} some of the Senior scrolls are still more or less complete and intact and must have been in good condition when they were buried. Thus the Senior scrolls, unlike the British Library scrolls, constitute a unified, cohesive, and at least partially intact collection that was carefully interred as such.}} He further reports that the "largest number of parallels for the sutras in the Senior collection are in the
Saṃyutta Nikāya and the corresponding collections in Sanskrit and Chinese."
The Schøyen collection The Buddhist works within the
Schøyen collection consist of
birch bark,
palm leaf and
vellum manuscripts. They are thought to have been found in the
Bamiyan caves of Afghanistan, where refugees were seeking shelter. Most of these manuscripts were bought by a Norwegian collector, named
Martin Schøyen, while smaller quantities are in possession of Japanese collectors. These manuscripts date from the second to the 8th century CE. In addition to texts in Gandhāri, the Schøyen collection also contains important early sutric material in Sanskrit. The Buddhist texts within the Schøyen collection include fragments of
canonical Suttas, Abhidharma, Vinaya, and Mahāyāna texts. Most of these manuscripts are written in the
Brahmi scripts, while a small portion is written in Gandhāri/
Kharoṣṭhī script. Among the early Dharmaguptaka texts in the Schøyen Collection is a fragment in the Kharoṣṭhī script referencing the Six
Pāramitās, a central practice for bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism. the
Library of Congress purchased a scroll from a British antiquities dealer. Called the "Bahubuddha Sutra", or "The Many Buddhas Sutra", the scroll arrived in pieces in a pen case but retains 80% of the text with the beginning and ending missing due to age. It is
carbon dated to ca. 75 CE (with a two-sigma range of 47-147 CE), making it one of the oldest Buddhist texts in existence. It is very similar to the first Chinese translation of the
Aṣṭasāhasrikā by
Lokakṣema (ca. 179 CE) whose source text is assumed to be in the Gāndhārī language. Comparison with the standard Sanskrit text shows that it too is likely a translation from Gāndhāri as it expands on many phrases and provides glosses for words that are not present in the Gāndhārī. This points to the text being composed in Gāndhārī, the language of Gandhāra (in what is now the
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, including
Peshawar,
Taxila and the
Swat Valley). The "Split" ms. is evidently a copy of an earlier text, confirming that the text may date before the first century of the common era.
The Bajaur Collection The Bajaur Collection was discovered in 1999, and is believed to be from the ruins of a Buddhist monastery in the
Dir region of Pakistan. The name derives from the
Bajaur district, whose boundary with the Dir district is marked by the banks of the river where the monastery was situated. The collection comprises fragments of 19 birch-bark scrolls and contains approximately 22 different texts. Most of the texts are not the work of the same scribe, with as many as 18 different hands identified. The fragments range from small sections only a few centimeters in length to a nearly complete scroll nearly 2m long. It is dated to the 1st-2nd Century CE, and written using the Kharosthi script. The fragments were fixed in frames and used to produce high-quality digital images at the
University of Peshawar, with collaboration with the
Freie University of Berlin. Notable texts from the collection include the earliest identified
Vinaya text, in the form of a
Pratimoksa sutra, and a relatively complete
Mahayana text connected with the Buddha
Aksobhya showing a well-developed movement in the vein of
Pure Land Buddhism. While the majority of the texts in the collection are Buddhist texts, two non-Buddhist works are included in the form of a loan contract and an
Arthasastra/Rajnitit text, one of the few known
Sanskrit texts composed using the Kharosthi script. ==Published material==