buddhism in the west uyghur kingdom and beyond 209
ing from the language of a given Manichaean text alone, whether it was copied
or used by a Sogdian or a Uyghur.
A field which has to be investigated more thoroughly is Uyghur Buddhist art
and its possible Sogdian antecedents. The illustrations of the Buddhist cycle
of stories Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā are especially interesting in this
respect. There are monochrome miniatures, which all belong to one manu-
script, but there are polychrome illustrations from different manuscripts
as well. One example from the East Asian Library in Princeton (shelf mark:
Peald 6r) is reported to be from Dunhuang (fig. 6.1).93 It is highly likely that is
was imported from Turfan.
The illustrations to the Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā are remarkable in many
respects. First, they resemble the wall paintings from Šorčuk in style (cf. Stein
painting 279d; fig. 6.2),94 especially the Princeton fragment. Some mural paint-
ings in Šorčuk (i.e. those housed in the Hermitage, St Petersburg), show the use
of gold,95 as does one of the illustrations of the Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā
(III 6324; fig. 6.3) as I could confirm by recourse to the original in the Museum of
Asian Art in Berlin. Here the attire and jewellery of the gods and the clothes
of the bodhisattva, the Brahmin, and a monk are executed in gold. It is remark-
able that the sitting posture of the Brahmin on the right can be compared to a
Sogdian mural from Penjikent known as a depiction of the ‘Wise judge’ (first
register room 41/VI).96 It is conceivable that Sogdian Buddhist art transmit-
ted this kind of depiction to the Uyghurs. The illustration found on III 6324
can now be identified as referring to the Kāñcanasāra-Avadāna. The depiction
of deities floating on a cloud is more elegant than on the wall painting from
Šorčuk but nevertheless both examples are quite similar in style.
Another, in this case, monochrome illustration to a manuscript of
the Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā in Old Uyghur shows several scenes of the
Udayana-Avadāna.97 One of the king’s concubines is dancing (fig. 6.4), and
93 The piece was published in Bullitt, Judith Ogden, “Princeton’s Manuscript Fragments
from Tun-huang,” The Gest Library Journal 3.1–2 (Spring 1989): fig. 6.7, and erroneously
identified as belonging to the “Diamondsūtra”.
94 These are housed in the Hermitage (St Petersburg) and the British Museum (London).
95 Russell-Smith, Lilla, Uygur Patronage in Dunhuang: Regional Art Centres on the Northern
Silk Road in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005), 117.
96 Cf. Marshak, Boris, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana. With an Appendix by
Vladimir A. Livshits (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2002), 66, fig. 33.
97 Shelf mark U 417 (Turfan Collection, Berlin). See Plate XI in Wilkens, Jens, “Studien zur
alttürkischen Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā (1): Die Udayana-Legende,” 内陸アジア言
語の研究 Nairiku ajia gengo no kenkyū [Studies on the Inner Asian Languages] 18 (2003):
151–185, in which the Udayana-Avadāna is edited.