buddhism in the west uyghur kingdom and beyond 201
We have five stake inscriptions from the Turfan area, four in Uyghur script
and one in Chinese. The first three stakes are housed in the Museum of Asian
Art (Berlin), the fourth in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum
(Ürümči) and the fifth in the British Library in London. The fourth stake was
found in 1965 in a stūpa at Yingsha (英沙) near Turfan.
The dedicatory inscription from Toyok is regarded even in a recent study
as the “earliest dated Turkic Buddhist monument” and the date is given as
760/780.48 This would mean that the inscription belongs to the East Uyghur
Empire. Based on the language—which is standard Old Uyghur without
any archaisms—and on paleographic observations49 this inscription rather
belongs to the 11th century at the earliest.50 Stake inscription I found in ruin
α at Kočo is, for instance, to be dated to the year 1008, stake inscription III
to 1019.51 The stake inscriptions are highly important documents of local
Buddhism in the Turfan oasis.
Stake inscription I was commissioned by a high-ranking lay couple, the
upāsikā (OU upasanč) Täŋrikän Tegin Silig Tärkän Kunčuy Täŋrim and her
under the same title in Eurasia Nostratica: Festschrift für Karl Menges, Volume 2, ed. Pentti
Aalto et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977), 225–230.
48 Tremblay, “Spread of Buddhism in Serindia,” 108. But see already Zieme, Religion und
Gesellschaft, 11 (n. 7): “die Datierung ist zweifelhaft”.
49 The published facsimiles are far from satisfactory so this would have to be corroborated
by checking the original. The inscription was first published in Huang Wenbi 黃文弼,
Tulufan kaoguji 吐魯番考古記 [Record of the Archaeology of Turfan] (Beijing: Zhongguo
kexueyuan, 1954), 116, pl. 99.
50 Moriyasu is of a similar opinion (“an older inscription from Toyoq dated around the 11th
century”). Cf. Moriyasu, Takao, “Uighur Buddhist Stake Inscriptions from Turfan,” in De
Dunhuang à Istanbul: Hommage à James Russell Hamilton, ed. Louis Bazin and Peter
Zieme (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 166.
51 Numbering according to Moriyasu, “Stake Inscriptions,” 150. Stake inscription II is in
Chinese and can be dated to 983 (Moriyasu, “Stake Inscriptions,” 151). Other datings of
stake inscriptions I and III are summarised in Moriyasu, “Stake Inscriptions,” 151–152.
The new datings of stake inscriptions I and III were discovered independently by
Hamilton and Moriyasu (see bibliographical references in Moriyasu, “Stake Inscriptions,”
152, footnote 14). Stake IV is roughly dated to the 11th century in Moriyasu, “Stake
Inscriptions,” 156 and stake V to the 13th–14th centuries (Moriyasu, “Stake Inscriptions,”
157). Stake inscriptions I and III are edited with translation and commentary in Moriyasu,
“Stake Inscriptions,” 159–199. Some years later, a study of philological details including
some new readings of stake inscription III was published in Hamilton, James, “Remarks
Concerning Turfan Stake Inscription III,” in Turfan Revisited—The First Century of
Research into the Arts and Cultures of the Silk Road, ed. Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst
et al. (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), 121a–124b.