buddhism in the west uyghur kingdom and beyond 205
a deep impact on the Uyghurs. Many Sanskrit terms were transmitted via a
Tocharian (A or B) intermediary. Tocharian A in particular was a written lan-
guage of high prestige among the Uyghurs who studied and commissioned
texts in this language.75 As spoken languages both varieties of Tocharian ceased
to be used after ca. 800.76 One should bear in mind that after the foundation of
the West Uyghur Kingdom it was not only a local form of Tocharian Buddhism
in the Turfan oasis that helped shape Uyghur Buddhism. Two important cen-
tres of Tocharian civilisation on the Northern edge of the Taklamakan desert,
Kučā and Šorčuk, were also part of the West Uyghur Kingdom.
When, after 840, many Uyghurs reached the Turfan region, they encoun-
tered a multilingual society, with Chinese and Sogdians as the most sig-
nificant communities.77 But linguistic and cultural contacts of the Uyghurs
with Sogdians started earlier, at the very latest in the East Uyghur Empire in
Mongolia. Uyghur Manichaeism and its literature—which is not only influ-
enced by Sogdian Manichaeism but also based on Parthian and Middle Persian
literature—paved the way for the spread of Buddhism among the Uyghurs in
various ways:
· the Manichaeans created for the first time a highly specialised literary
Turkic language,
· the Manichaean Uyghurs were accustomed to translate from Indo-European
languages because most Manichaean texts in Old Uyghur are translations
from Middle Iranian languages (Sogdian, Parthian, Middle Persian),
· they had educated scribes, painters and architects,78
· they had strong ties with the ruling elite,
75 See especially Pinault, Georges-Jean, “Le Tokharien pratiqué par les Ouïgours. À propos
d’un fragment en Tokharien A du Musée Guimet,” Études de Dunhuang et Turfan, ed.
Jean-Pierre Drège (with the assistance of Olivier Venture) (Genève: Droz, 2007), 327–
- On the impact of Tocharian literature see Zieme, Peter, “Some Notes on Old Uigur
Translations of Buddhist Commentaries,” Annual Report of The International Research
Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University for the Academic Year 2011 15 (2012):
148: “The texts were translated at a time when Tocharian was still used as a ‘church’
language at least. At the end of the 10th or the beginning of the 11th century the Tocharian
tradition ended and probably also its use as a vernacular, although new studies want to
draw a different picture.”
76 Hansen, Valerie, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77.
77 Hansen, The Silk Road, 83.
78 On the importance of scribes and painters in Central Asian Manichaeism see van
Tongerloo, Aloïs, “The Importance of Writing in the Central Asian Manichaean Milieu,”
in Writing in the Altaic World (Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Permanent