Rethinking Manuscript Reuse: Sino-Khotanese Scrolls from Dunhuang

Several dozen Chinese scrolls from Dunhuang contain Khotanese writings on the verso. The contents of the Khotanese side are relatively diverse, including drafts letters and reports addressed to the Khotanese court, accounts and contracts, writing exercises, narrative works such as the Rāmāyaṇa and Sudhanāvadāna, lyrical poetry, medical treatises and Buddhist texts. By contrast, the Chinese side is significantly more uniform in content and appearance, comprising popular Mahāyāna scriptures copied in an even script, adhering to a regular layout. Although the Chinese sūtras were for the most part copied during the Sui-Tang era or the subsequent period of Tibetan rule over Dunhuang, the Khotanese writings seem to have been added significantly later, during the long tenth century. The reuse of Chinese Buddhist scrolls to write unrelated content—in Chinese and other languages—has typically been explained as the practice of recycling discarded manuscripts. Such explanations essentially see the Chinese sūtras on the recto as waste that was no longer wanted. This paper argues that the repurposing of Chinese scrolls could not have been exclusively motivated by paper shortage and the desire to cut costs. The paper situates this phenomenon within a broader range of reuse practices attested in Buddhist communities across Asia. The central argument advanced here is that reuse often involved a deliberate engagement with earlier textual layers, which retained aspects of their meaning even as new texts were added to the manuscript.