buddhism in the west uyghur kingdom and beyond 221
Pāpaṃkara (P. 3509) may point to the fact that it could easily be carried by its
owner on a journey for private usage.121
Secular documents which mainly belong to the environment of cara-
vanners122 are more explicit in many ways but the religious affiliation of
the people involved is often obscure: One document (P. Ouïgour 2988 and
P. 2909) which was most likely written in the middle of the 10th century
belongs to a mixed (Sogdian and Uyghur) legation from the Turfan area.123
One of the participants seems to be a Christian because of his name Yohnan
(< Syriac Yōḥanan). But they explicitly state in one line “And we stayed in this
saṅghārāma” (OU biz ymä bo s(ä)ŋrimtä tüšt(i)miz)124 which could mean that
most of them were Buddhist visitors from the West Uyghur Kingdom who
brought texts to Dunhuang.125
The reverse flow of Buddhist texts has to be considered as well because
Dunhuang was in all probability the source of some specimens of commentar-
ial literature in the West Uyghur Kingdom. The commentary on the Lotussūtra
by Kuiji (632–682, 窺基) with the title Miaofa lianhua jing xuanzan (妙法蓮
華經玄贊, T. 1723) was very popular in Dunhuang. The Uyghur translation was
based on a Chinese original, which may have been imported from Dunhuang.126
The recently published Old Uyghur commentary on the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa
121 P. 3509, a manuscript which bears on one leaf the name Küsän čor on the margin, was
according to Rong (“Relationship,” 295) copied by people from the West Uyghur Kingdom.
Moriyasu writes “that the Uighur manuscripts discovered at Tun-huang were clearly the
work of people from the West Uighur Kingdom [.. .]” (Moriyasu, “Sha-chou Uighurs,” 36).
Conversely, Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, vol. 1, 175, thinks that most of the “religious
manuscripts” (i.e. his texts 1–12) were written at Shazhou.
122 Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, vol. 1, 176.
123 Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, vol. 1, 83.
124 Line 1’ (ed. Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, vol. 1, 86).
125 As already mentioned, the illustrated leaf of the Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā from
Princeton is likely to be an import from the Turfan region as well. This manuscript was
produced in the late 10th or early 11th century. The transmission of Chinese popular
narratives from Turfan to Dunhuang is attested as well. See Rong, “Relationship,” 296–297
(with further references).
126 See Kudara, Kōgi, “Uigurische Fragmente eines Kommentars zum Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-
Sūtra,” in Der türkische Buddhismus in der japanischen Forschung, ed. Jens Peter Laut
and Klaus Röhrborn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 34–55 (and plates on pp. 102–106) and
Zieme, “Some Notes,” 149–151. Zieme comments in his edition of the leaf Mainz 342 that
the number of the scroll ( juan 卷) is nine in the Uyghur version whereas in the Chinese
it is five (Zieme, “Some Notes,” 150). The Chinese numbering of scrolls can change in the
course of time and the Uyghur version reflects such a different numbering. The name of
the translator is given in the colophon as Širmir Biži T[utuŋ] who translated the text from