The Spread of Buddhism

108 xavier tremblay

as expressed by Toñuquq, counsellor of Bilgä Khan, in the Chinese

sources and in his famous funeral inscription. But Bilgä began projects

to build walled cities and Buddhist temples at the beginning of his reign

in 716,^162 and a very common name in the runic inscriptions is ybr’

(with variants) derived from the Sanskrit vara, “Master”, through the

intermediary of Sogdian ’yr.^163

All these accounts had been known for a long time, but were only

paid attention to after the discovery in 1956 of the Bugut inscription

of ca. 590 AD, in which the  rst editors Kljatornyj & Livic (1972)

and Bazin (1975, pp. 41–43) found Buddhist features. Most of them

have been questioned in the revision by Yoshida & Moriyasu (1999).^164

Anyway, since the Bugut inscription is written in Sogdian, it points

to the fact that the Türk language was unwritten at that time,^165 so

that “the language of the Tujue” into which, as mentioned above, a

Nirvastra was translated probably refers to Sogdian. In any case, the

extant fragments of the Turkic Nirvastra^166 cannot be the Nirvastra

translated in 574.

4.2. Buddhism among the Uighurs

Apart from the Sogdian inscription in Bugut, the earliest dated Turkic

Buddhist monument is a Uighur dedicatory inscription from the years

760/780.^167 However, the Uighurs’ royal clan was not Buddhist, but

Manichaean after the  rst Khan, Bügü Khan, converted in 763. And

even if his successors of the Yalaqar clan between 763 and 808 do not

seem to have been Manichaeans, they were not Buddhist either.^168 In

(^162) Liu Mau-Tsai 1958, p. 172.
(^163) Tremblay 2001, p. 21 n. 32.
(^164) Yoshida’s and Moriyasu’s doubt seems overemphasised. For instance, an expres-
sion like nwm snk’, whether it means “sagha of the religion” (with Kljatornyj & Livic
1975) or “stone of the law” (with Yoshida & Moriyasu 1999), sounds Buddhist. 165
Bazin 1975, p. 44; 1991, pp. 98, 203 assumes that the very  rst Turkic texts
were the runic inscriptions of Bilgä Khan of 716–734. However, the still undeciphered
“western Turkic runes” (Tremblay 2001, p. 21 n. 33) may be older.
(^166) Elverskog no. 32.
(^167) Tekin 1976.
(^168) Ton Baa Khan, for instance, summoned Turkic wizards, not Indian monks or
Manichaean astrologers, before his Tibetan campaign in 765. As for the later Aqsu-
Kucha Kingdom under the Uighur Yalaqar clan, a Manichaean Pothi-Book from ca.
925 found in Murtuq (near Kucha) testi es to the Manichaean presence in Kucha,
while a Tocharian B of cial prayer devised for a Hwhkhw (= qaan?) as late as 1020
may point to the fact that the Yalaqars had become Buddhist. Cf. Tremblay 2001,
p. 41 with n. 41 (and Schmidt apud eum).
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