The British Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project “was founded in September 1996 in order to promote the study, editing, and publication of a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language that were acquired by the British Library in 1994. The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia.” I discovered this project through an article posted by John Hardy in his wonderful and endlessly varied blog Laputan Logic, which takes forever to load (any of you blog mavens out there want to give him helpful tips?) but is well worth it; recent posts have included fugu, the Jehoash Inscription, Udaipur photos, perpetual motion, and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and in the past he’s discussed non-round protons, the planet Quaoar, and, well, go see for yourself. Just hit Stop when you get tired of waiting for the damn thing to finish loading.
Addendum. I have shamed John into fixing his own blog, and it now loads in a jiffy!
From the sample texts page:
bhayea mitra padibhanavamta
bahosuda dhammadhara urada
(*anae dhammam vi)yigitsa prahae
ek(*o care khargavisanagapo’)One should cultivate a friend who is intelligent,
learned, a master of the dharma, noble.
(*Having understood the dharma)
[and] abandoned doubt, (*one should wander) alone (*like the rhinoceros.)Verses 24-26 of the Gandhari “Rhinoceros Sutra” (*Khargavisana-sutra); from R. Salomon, A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra (Gandharan Buddhist Texts 1; Seattle, University of Washington, 2000).
I doubt I’ll ever be able to abandon doubt, so I’ll probably never get to wander alone like the rhinoceros. Just as well.
I notice that this link too has been subject to the nigh-inevitable rot of infrastructure change over time.
Web archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20030703171340/http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/
The link currently redirects to a gambling site. It seems that after a few years, the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was spun off into its own dot-org domain, whose top level was the four initial letters of the project name, as seen at the end of the URL above. However, the domain’s administrator let the domain lapse, and it was eventually acquired by Easy Betting Made for Players. The U of W never changed their redirect. Sigh.
The modern version of the site is back at the U of W, but it lacks the texts that you cited in the original post (or if they’re there, I cannot easily find them).
https://asian.washington.edu/early-buddhist-manuscripts-project
That’s why whenever you find something useful online, you should download and save it on your computer.
And to hell with copyright.
Ancient literature wouldn’t have survived if medieval monks respected copyright.
Thanks, I changed the link in the post (and fixed the Chronicle one too while I was at it).