The Spread of Buddhism

the spread of buddhism in serindia 79

late historical hazards, not to its pristine reality. Firstly, all the languages

of Serindian Buddhism are dead languages which were totally unknown

before the eve of the twentieth century and which require a great deal

of linguistic work before they can be, even approximately, understood.

Secondly, almost all the countries which are covered by this survey have

become Muslim: Eastern Iran between the eighth and the ninth century,

Khotan in 1008, Turfan around 1430. Buddhism withdrew progressively

to Hami (which fell in 1451) and Dunhuang (islamicised around

1500). The last Buddhist Uighur manuscript was copied in Suzhou

, in the present Chinese province of Gansu , in 1702.^8 How-

ever, Buddhism has survived down to the present among the Yellow

Uighurs (Sar uur) who live in Gansu near Suzhou.^9

As a consequence, manuscripts are often fragmentary, and always

dif cult to understand. It remains nonetheless a historical mistake to

leap from “no (more) visible” or “arcane indeed” to “unexistant” or

“unim por tant”. As a matter of fact, Iranian and Tocharian Buddhists

are at least responsible for one major contribution to the spread of

Buddhism and its intellectual evolution: the  rst translations of Buddhist

texts and concepts into Chinese.

This article will be historically oriented. Those readers interested

in philological questions may  nd answers in the survey of all sources

given in Tremblay (2001, pp. 137–182). More speci c and complete

surveys are Fussman (1989a, pp. 444–451) for the Gndhr inscrip-

tions; von Hinüber (1979) for the Gilgit manuscripts; Verzeichnis der

orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD) vol. 10 and Sander in

Encyclopaedia of Buddhism IV:1 (1981, pp. 52–75 and 1991) for the Sanskrit

texts of the Turfan Basin; Salomon (1999a and 2002) for the British

Library Kharo

h fragments, a collection of recently found Gndhr

manuscripts; MSC for the Schøyen collection, a private collection that

contains about 1500 Buddhist manuscripts of most Asian countries

spanning nearly 2000 years; Emmerick (1992) for Khotanese; Schmidt

(1988, pp. 306–314) and Emmerick (1992, pp. 59ff.) and Skjærvø (2002)

for Tumuqese; and Elverskog (1997) for Turkic Buddhism.

(^8) Hamada 1990. For the edition of the text, see Radloff & Malov 1913; Radloff

1930. 9
      Malov 1912; Thomsen in Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, vol. 1, pp. 564f., with
      further literature.

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