Concept
Gandhāran Buddhist texts
Overview
The Gandhāran Buddhist texts are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, dating from about the 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE and found in the northwestern outskirts of Pakistan. They represent the literature of Gandharan Buddhism and are written in the Gandhārī language, Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit. The texts constitute the largest collection of Gandhārī manuscripts known to date.
Many of manuscripts are now housed at the Islamabad Museum in Pakistan. Some were sold to European and Japanese institutions and individuals, and are currently being recovered and studied by several universities. The Gandhāran texts are in a considerably deteriorated form, their survival alone being extraordinary, but educated guesses about reconstruction have been possible in several cases using both modern preservation techniques and more traditional textual scholarship, comparing previously known Pāli and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit versions of texts. Other Gandhāran Buddhist texts — "several and perhaps many" — have been found over the last two centuries but lost or destroyed.
The texts are attributed to the Dharmaguptaka sect by Richard Salomon, a leading scholar in the field, and the British Library scrolls "represent a random but reasonably representative fraction of what was probably a much larger set of texts preserved in the library of a monastery of the Dharmaguptaka sect in Nagarāhāra."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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It may be two hundred and fifty cubits in height, rich in elegant carving and inlaid work, covered above with gold and silver, and finished throughout with a combination of all the precious substances. Behind the tope there has been built a Hall of Buddha, of the utmost magnificence and beauty, the beams, pillars, venetianed doors and windows, being all overlaid with gold-leaf. Besides this, the apartments for the…
Confucius, Chinese literature
States what Gandhāran Buddhist texts is.
For this reason, too, it is a legend universally believed, that Pythagoras, for instance, received his Philosophy from India and Egypt; the fame of the wisdom of these people, which wisdom is understood also to contain Philosophy, is an old one. The Oriental ideas and religious worship which prevailed throughout the West up to the time of the Roman Empire, likewise bear the name of Oriental Philosophy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Gandhāran Buddhist texts is.
The Semitic people, whose migration to Babylonia succeeded that of the Sumerians, lost all knowledge of the Sumerian language, but they preserved the written texts as sacred. In the course of folk migrations, cuneiform writing likewise penetrated to the coast regions of Asia Minor, although in this instance it was continually used to express new idioms not to be found in the land of its origin. Letters have been…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Close in meaning to Gandhāran Buddhist texts; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Gandhāran Buddhist texts
Related ideas
- Pure Land
- Library of Congress
- Orthography
- Pakistan
- Phonology
- Prakrit
- Russia
- Abhidharma
- Dhammapada
- Sanskrit
- Mahayana
- Buddhism
- The Buddha
- China
- Gandharan Buddhism
- France
- Peshawar
Place in the tradition
Part of Buddhist philosophy.