The Spread of Buddhism

the spread of buddhism in serindia 113

masters of the law. To be intelligible, they used non-technical words

from Sogdian and Turkic, even if their own written higher standard

preferred Indian loan words or calques from Chinese. In this way, their

practice betokens a widespread Sogdian-Turkic bilingualism among

Uighurs. The Buddhist Uighurs mimicked the upper-class n-dialect,

but never so consequently as the Manichaeans. This second Buddhist

wave probably produced a few manuscripts.^180

When the Uighurs seized the Tarim Basin, they began to settle in

the eastern part—Turfan and Agni. The Tocharian A language, used

in that area, slowly died out. But the inhabitants did not cease to be

Buddhists, so they began ca. 820/850 to translate their Tocharian A

and Chinese texts in Turkic, using the Buddhist Uighur idiom already

created. Their own Turkic productions quickly outnumbered those of

the second Buddhist wave, because in Turfan and Agni a well-estab-

lished monastic tradition in Tocharian and Chinese provided numerous

manuscripts as well as cultured translators. At this time, the loan words

from Sanskrit, Tocharian and Chinese were abundant. The city of

Turfan, with its double Tocharian and Chinese tradition, was probably

the major translation centre, so that Tocharian A played a greater role

in Uighur Buddhism than Tocharian B, the language of Kucha.^181

The second and the third Buddhist waves overlapped for some

time, since they did not address the same people: the Sogdian second

wave was active among originally non-Buddhist Turks in Mongolia,

the Turfan third wave  ourished among turkicised Tocharians and

Chinese who had been Buddhists for a long time. The basic Buddhist

Turkic vocabulary owes much to the  rst and second waves, but almost

all extant manuscripts come from the Tarim Basin and belong to the

third tradition.

The turkicised Turfan and Agni people did not learn the court

n-dialect, but the normal Uighur y-dialect, which increasingly became

the standard Buddhist idiom. When eventually the Manichaean

Khan Kl Bilgä täri converted to Buddhism in 1008,^182 the n-dialect

disappeared.

(^180) The Turkic Vimalakrtinirde astra (Fedâkâr 1994; Elverskog no. 38) was probably
translated from Sogdian. The Sogdian version, itself slavishly adhering to Chinese,
is preserved. It was translated long after 500 and probably even after 700 (cf. Weller
1937).
(^181) von Gabain 1957, p. 15.
(^182) Tremblay 2001, p. 89. The Gansu Uighur kingdom had converted in 998 (Pinks
1968, pp. 112–114).
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