The Spread of Buddhism

110 xavier tremblay

A controversy has arisen on the respective importance of Sogdian

and Tocharian in early Uighur Buddhism. The discussion concerns

the milieu where the  rst contact between the Uighurs and Buddhism

took place. J. P. Laut (1983, pp. 92f.; 1986, pp. 9–11) has proposed

what he himself called the “Sogdian hypothesis”. According to him,

the early Turkic Buddhism proceeds from Sogdian Buddhism. This

in uence could even go back to the First Türk Empire. T. Moriyasu

(1990), on the other hand, has criticised the “Sogdian hypothesis”

and put forward what could be dubbed a “Tocharian hypothesis”.

According to him, the Sogdians with whom the Turks were in contact

rather professed Manichaeism and, apart from a super cial and per-

haps short-lived Buddhist in uence during the First Türk Empire, the

Turks were in uenced by Sogdian Manichaeism before they had any

broader knowledge of Buddhism. When later the Uighurs conquered

the Tarim Basin (791), the Tocharian population felt it necessary to

translate their writings in Turkic. They used the sole Turkic religious

vocabulary available, which is Manichaean. The numerous Sogdian loan

words in the early phase of Turkic Buddhism would thus be borrowed

from the Manichaeans.

T. Moriyasu (1990, pp. 153f.) has pointed out some Sogdian loan

words in Buddhist Turkic which cannot have come from written Buddhist

Sogdian and are thus inconsistent with the “Sogdian hypothesis”. But

in fact, these examples do not prove what Moriyasu hoped for:

1. T. Moriyasu draws attention to the fact that the Skt. ikpada
   “precept” did not enter in Uighur as q’p(w)t (Brhm cähpath) through
   the more educated form k’pt attested in Buddhist Sogdian, but that
   it entered through a popular pronunciation borrowed from Parthian
   x’pt/ [xp] which is more or less directly re ected in the
   Sogdian Manichaean x’p. This is true, but both the Turkic and the
   Manichaean Sogdian terms (whose  nals differ) were independently
   borrowed from spoken Buddhist Sogdian.


2. According to T. Moriyasu, the Turkic translation of Skt. dharma
   through the Sogdian loanword nwm “law” (< ) agrees with
   Manichaean Sogdian rather than with Buddhist Sogdian, in whose
   manuscripts one  nds instead, at all epochs, the transcription rm.
   However, nwm is a non-denominational word, also attested in Christian

entered through Tocharian in the Turkic Maitreyasamiti from Sängim (ed. BTT 9;

Elverskog, no. 81; 9th century according to Laut 1986, p. 163).

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