98 xavier tremblaywho express some principal reservations continue to use the language
as criterion for the determination of Buddhist schools.^107 According
to this reasoning, the introduction of Buddhism in the Tarim Basin
would be the work of the Dharmaguptaka school. At some time, this
school and the Gndhr it resorted to would then have been ousted by
Sanskrit and the Sarvstivda school (Kucha, Agni), or by the Mahyna
movement (Khotan).
Waldschmidt’s and Bernhard’s hypothesis had the great merit of
discerning strata among the evidence. The monastic archives which
have been unearthed were closed or destroyed in 648 (Qizil caves near
Kucha) or at the beginning of the eleventh century (Khotan), those in
Turfan during the fteenth century. This is not only remote from the
period of the rst missions, but there are de nite traces of discon-
tinuity in the tradition. For instance, the Khotan Dharmapada, some
orthographical devices of Khotanese^108 and the not yet systematically
plotted Gndhr loan words in Khotanese^109 betray indisputably that
the rst missions in Khotan included Dharmaguptakas and used a
Kharo
h -written Gndhr. Now all other manuscripts from Khotan,
and especially all manuscripts written in Khotanese, belong to the
Mahyna, are written in the Brhm script, and were translated from
Sanskrit. Only a few scraps (from Farhad Beg) go back as early as the
fourth to sixth century. Nevertheless, the Dharmaguptaka hypothesis
oversimpli es the facts:- The sectarian homogeneity is in fact illusory. The Chinese visitors
noted that the city-states lodged monks of different schools. So, for
instance, according to Faxian in 399/400,^110 most of the Khotanese
monks (and thus not all of them) were Mahyna monks, while
Xuanzang was lodged in a Sarvstivda monastery when he visited
Khotan.^111
(^107) Bernhard 1970, pp. 59–61: “It is, of course, true that a living language does not
necessarily belong exclusively to one single sect or school, and it would hardly be neces-
sary to make such a statement of the obvious, if it were not for the fact that scholars
over and over again speak of the Sanskrit canon and of one canon in Northwestern
Prkrit as though there could be only one canon in the same language” (p. 61). Similarly
Sander 1991, p. 140; Salomon 1999a, pp. 10f.; pp. 169–171. 108
See Hitch 1984.
(^109) Upon which see provisionally Bailey 1946; 1947, pp. 139–145; 1949, pp. 121–128;
- The older Indian loan words in Sogdian and Bactrian are Gndhr too.
(^110) T.2085.51.857b5 (tr. Giles 1965, p. 64)
(^111) T.2053.50.251b12 (tr. Li 1995, p. 165).
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