The Senior Manuscripts: Another Collection of Gandhāran Buddhist Scrolls

In 1994 the British Library acquired a collection of twenty-nine fragments of birch bark scrolls containing various Buddhist texts written in Kharosthi script and (Prakrit) language (Salomon 1997). At the time, these were virtually the only known specimens of what must have been a very extensive Gandharan Buddhist literature, with the exception of one other manuscript, namely the famous Gandhari Dharmapada, which had been discovered in 1892 near Khotan in what is now the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. In 1996 the British Library/University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was constituted to study and publish this new collection. To date four volumes of studies of the British Library scrolls have been published (Salomon 1999, Salomon 2000, Allon 2001, Lenz 2003), and several further volumes are in progress. Since the project was inaugurated in 1996, a large amount of additional related material has come to light. Most of this new material is contained in three major collections. The first of these is the Sch0yen collection of Buddhist manuscripts, which includes, in addition to several thousand fragments of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and Brahmi script, 238 small fragments in Kharosthi script and a sanskritized variety of the language (see Salomon 2001), written on palm leaf in folio or pothi format. Study and publication of the Kharosthi portion of the Sch0yen collection has been begun by members of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project in cooperation with Professor Jens Braarvig of the University of Oslo, who is supervising the publication of the Sch0yen collection as a whole (Braarvig 2000; Braarvig 2002; Allon and Salomon 2000; Salomon 2002a). Another collection, smaller but still significant, of manuscripts on palm-leaf folios is the eight fragments in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, which were found by the Pelliot expedition in the northern Tarim Basin (Salomon 1998). The third additional major collection of manuscripts (the fourth in total, including the British Library collection), and the one which is the subject of this article,1 is the