buddhism in the west uyghur kingdom and beyond 219
the Uyghur population in the 10th century,112 be it in Dunhuang or in the
West Uyghur Kingdom, depending on whether the Uyghur manuscripts dis-
covered in the cave are local products or mainly imported texts. One of the
manuscripts, the Araṇemi-Jātaka (P. Ouïgour 1),113 seems to be particularly
old. It mirrors Manichaean book culture in many respects (codex format, red
punctuation, palaeography) and was possibly imported from the West Uyghur
Kingdom. And we have to take into account the Turkicisation of parts of the
Sogdian, Tocharian and Chinese speaking population in the Turfan region,
which must have begun already in the 8th century114 and was intensified by
the Uyghur migratory movements after the fall of their empire in Mongolia.
Multilingualism must have been very widespread in the oases on the Northern
rim of the Tarim basin and in Dunhuang.115 Marriage ties of the ruling Uyghurs
with the local people must have boosted the spread of Buddhism among the
former.
2.4 Turfan and Dunhuang
Beginning with the turn of the first millennium, contacts between Turfan and
Dunhuang became very close.116 The ‘Return-to-Allegiance Army’ (Chin. Guiyi
112 al-Bīrūnī who wrote his work The Chronology of Ancient Nations (Arab. Āṯār al-bāqiya ʿani
l-qurūn al ḫāliya) around the year 1000 speaks of the presence of Buddhism among the
Taghazghar, i.e. the Tokuz Oguz, a term used in Muslim sources to designate the Uyghurs.
The passage is quoted in Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam, 51. This statement cannot only
refer to Chinese or Tocharian Buddhists in the West Uyghur Kingdom.
113 Ed. Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, vol. 1, 2–9.
114 Tocharian ceased being a written code in the Kučā and Turfan regions by the 8th/9th
century. See Schaefer, “Multilingualism,” 451. Zieme, Religion und Gesellschaft, 42, too,
writes that during the period of Turkicisation in the Turfan oasis, Indians and Tocharians
played only an insignificant role. Haneda forwarded the hypothesis that the number of
Uyghurs migrating from their homeland in Mongolia to the Tarim basin after 840 was
sufficient to Turkicise this region but not Transoxania. See Haneda, “Introduction,”
- Uyghur predominance in the Western part of the Tarim basin is mirrored in various
sources. They vanquished the Tibetans in 798 in the region of Kučā and swept to Kašgar in - See Yoshida, Yutaka, “The Karabalgasun Inscription and the Khotanese Documents,”
in Literarische Stoffe und ihre Gestaltung in mitteliranischer Zeit: Kolloquium anlässlich des - Geburtstages von Werner Sundermann, ed. Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst, Christiane
Reck and Dieter Weber (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2009), 349–362.
115 On multilingualism in Dunhuang see Takata, Tokio, “Multilingualism in Tun-huang,”
in The Silk Road: Key Papers, Part I: The Preislamic Period, Volume 2, ed. Valerie Hansen
(Leiden, Boston: Global Oriental, 2012), 545–562.
116 See especially Moriyasu, Takao 森安孝夫, “Uiguru to Tonkō ウイグルと敦煌 [English
title: The Uighurs and Tun-huang],” in Kōza Tonkō 2: Tonkō no rekishi 榎一雄(編) 講