206 wilkens
· the relationship between the religious and the political sphere had been
already defined by the Manichaeans (on which see below),
· Eastern Manichaeism was considerably buddhicised.
Sogdo-Uyghur Manichaean civilisation reached its peak after the establish-
ment of the West Uyghur Kingdom, and especially in the Turfan region where
numerous Manichaean manuscripts and works of art were found.
2.3.1 Uyghur Buddhist Texts (Sogdian Influence)
Uyghur Buddhist texts were translated from several source languages. This is
a highly significant and complex process of implementation of Buddhist cul-
ture: texts were translated first from Tocharian, then from Chinese and later
from Tibetan79 and Sanskrit.80 The impact of Sogdian Buddhism is still subject
to scholarly debate. But Tocharian, Chinese and Sogdian Buddhism must have
International Altaistic Conference [PIAC]), ed. Juha Janhunen and Volker Rybatzki
(Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1999), 253–261.
79 On translations made from Tibetan see Zieme, Religion und Gesellschaft, 40–42. There is
also one text called “The History of the Buddha Statue of Sandalwood in China” which
was translated from Old Uyghur into Tibetan by Anzang and Dhanyasena in the year 1263.
See Kudara, Kōgi, “Uigur and Tibetan Translations of ‘The History of the Buddha Statue of
Sandalwood in China’,” in Turfan Revisited—The First Century of Research into the Arts and
Cultures of the Silk Road, ed. Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst et al. (Berlin: Reimer, 2004),
149a–154b.
80 On colophons which mention a translation from an Indian original, see Zieme, Religion
und Gesellschaft, 42. A fragment of a late wordlist in Sanskrit and Old Uyghur is preserved
in U 1419 (see Zieme, Peter and György Kara, Ein uigurisches Totenbuch: Nāropas Lehre in
uigurischer Übersetzung von vier Traktaten nach der Sammelhandschrift aus Dunhuang
British Museum Or. 8212 (109) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1979), 56, n. 27. To the last phase of
Uyghur Buddhism in the Mongol Empire belongs a stratum of ‘learned’ loanwords, which
are closer to the original Sanskrit terms than those which entered the Uyghur vocabulary
via Tocharian or Sogdian. See Röhrborn, Klaus, “Zum Wanderweg des altindischen
Lehngutes im Alttürkischen,” in Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients:
Festschrift für Bertold Spuler zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Hans R. Roemer and Albrecht
Noth (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 340–341. Röhrborn speaks of a kind of renaissance of Sanskrit
learning in Mongol times (Röhrborn, “Wanderweg,” 340). This new westward orientation
in terms of religion is certainly due to the growing influence of Tibetan Buddhism in
Yuan times and is complementary to the eastward orientation of the Uyghurs as far as
politics and social processes are concerned. Oda thinks that it was Indian Buddhists who
carried out missionary work among the Uyghurs and were responsible for the spread of
the Brāhmī script. Cf. Oda, Juten, “Uighuristan,” Acta Asiatica 34 (1978): 40. However, this
scenario is not very convincing. Sinicisation of the Uyghur elite made progress especially
during the 14th century.