One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas
by Richard Salomon
Library of Congress
November 15, 2018
Dr. Richard Salomon (University of Washington) will discuss the Library's unique buddhist birch-bark manuscript, which describes the parallel lives of fifteen Buddhas of the past, present and future eons.
About this Item
Title
One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas
Summary
Richard Salomon discussed the Library's unique Buddhist birch-bark manuscript from the ancient region of Gandhara in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. This text is one of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts ever discovered, dating from around the beginning of the Common Era. Salomon explained the manuscript's significance in Buddhist literature and history.
Event Date
November 15, 2018
Notes
Richard G. Salomon is emeritus professor of Sanskrit and Buddhist studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to being the director of the British Library and University of Washington's early Buddhist Manuscript Project, he is the author of many publications on early Buddhism. His most recent book is "Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara: An Introduction with Selected Translations."
Running Time
1 hours 15 minutes 3 seconds
Highlights:
[T]hese manuscripts date between the first century BC and the third century AD...they are clearly the oldest manuscripts of any manifestation of Buddhism…
[S]ometimes the front and the back are completely separated and it's not always...obvious where and how they go together…
[T]he title...would've been at the top of the back and that's the part that we don't have…we're missing the beginning and the end of the text…
Gandharan Buddhist sculpture...In the Freer Gallery, there's this very amazing set of four friezes illustrating the four major events of the Buddha's life…
But...these are not mentioned at all in that text because the...biography that I'm going to be talking about is not a conventional biography…
The Gandhari language is...almost always connected with the Kharosthi script...The Kharosthi script is of Western...Semitic origin derived or connected with the Aramaic script…
[T]he "Many Buddhas Sutra" - I would describe it as a combined comparative biographical summary of the lives of 15 Buddhas beginning with Dipankara, who lived many billions of years ago, and ending with Sakyamuni or Siddharta or "our Buddha" as he's sometimes called. And then going on one more to Maitreya...Number 14 is Sakyamuni who actually is Sakyamuni the second, surprisingly…
There are seven points of information which are enumerated for each of the Buddhas. So it starts out with the predictions…made by each of the 15 Buddhas…The lifespan tells you how long each Buddha lasted. So it's not a narrative presentation. It's a summary of information…
[A]nother polytext called Buddhavamsa...lists 25 buddhas…the Mahavastu...has a...long list, 331,140,263 buddhas from the remote inconceivable past down to the present time of Sakyamuni….
I have a larger vision or fantasy of original Indian Buddhism as an ocean with many icebergs, each representing the local textual traditions...of the different parts of the Indian world. Those icebergs are mostly gone...We have the Pali canon...the partial Sanskrit canon...They had a common core but they had many different texts in and around that basic commonality... and... there's no hope of finding them mainly for a simple physical reason, the climate of...India proper is such that organic materials...never last for more than a few hundred years. There are really no really old manuscripts in India proper. You only get the ancient manuscripts from the borderlands of India, in this case Gandhara which has a more moderate climate…
Q. [S]ay something about how...we get manuscripts…
A. Yes, that's a little bit complicated. The problem is that in nearly all cases we don't really know where the manuscripts come from...Almost all of the manuscripts of this type have come up through private collections or antiquities market and that is frankly a murky place...most of them come from eastern Afghanistan, maybe some from northwestern Pakistan...that's all we really know. There are no cases where we have any of these manuscripts and know specifically...where they came from…
I talked about that list in the Mahavastu of 331,140,263 buddhas. What I didn't say is that out of the...331 [million], 300 million were named Sakyamuni. And according to that text, there were...30 million buddhas in a row that...all had the same name… Buddhas are...more or less the same and...you see sets of buddhas like the seven buddhas...and they're all almost exactly the same...and they can be very similar and sometimes they are absolutely identical.
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>> Qi Qiu: Okay, so I am literally in the spot. Okay, this is the first experience for us to host such an event here in the Asian Reading Room. So my name is Qi Qiu, Head of Scholarly Services at the Asian Reading Room. So on behalf of the Asian Division, I welcome you to this afternoon's event and to our reading room. I especially appreciate your coming out this afternoon on such a, you know, snowy, rainy day. It's not the best day but we do appreciate your efforts. So for this afternoon's program, after my welcome remarks, Dr. Jonathan Loar, who is our South Asian librarian, he will give an introduction of our South Asian collection and will also introduce our speaker, Dr. Richard Solomon from the University of Washington. So, as you have already seen, this is a beautiful reading room. And if you haven't had a chance to know more about it, here are some highlights of our facilities and services. I know many of you. I see some familiar faces. Some of you are very familiar with our services. So pardon me for the repetition. I will just take a few minutes. So this reading room is home to multilanguage reference materials on Asian studies. It is also where users can access both physical and digital materials in Asian language and get research assistance from our reference specialists. We started collecting Asian language materials as early as the late 19th century. And today, the collections have grown to represent one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian studies in the world, that is more than four million physical items and numerous digital resources. These items are in over 190 languages and include most subject fields covering in the area ranging from the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia to East Asia. So our reading room, the Asian Reading Room opens Monday to Friday from 8:30 to 5:00 p.m. Any users 16 years old or older can come to use the library reading rooms. All you need to do is to bring a photo ID and get a reader registration card, which is also located on the first floor of the Jefferson Building. Of course, it's always a good idea to check out our website and library catalogue before you come to the library so that you can find the materials that you are looking for and make better uses of your time in the library. On our website, you can use a link marked "Ask a Librarian" to ask research questions, to request materials and to make appointments with librarians to use rare items. So "Ask a Librarian" is an important phrase for you to remember. It is actually the tour to find answers to almost all of your inquiries. Also on the website, you can find information on our collections, databases, digital collections, research guides, and blogs. And yes, we do have social medial representations. We have blogs and we have a Facebook page of all of the international collections in our library. So since Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship for this year just opened, I would like to raise your attention to this fellowship that funds researchers to come to our reading room to conduct research. You can check out the application information on our website or on our Facebook page. The deadline for application is the end of January. So we would encourage you to spread words among your colleagues, friends, and students who are interested in coming out to DC and to use our collection materials for their research projects. So with that, I will hand it over to Jonathan Loar for a brief introduction of our Southeast Asian collection. Thank you.
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>> Jonathan Loar: Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress. My name is Jonathan Loar and I'm the reference librarian for the South Asian collection, which contains materials for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. So before we get started, I just wanted to give a very, very brief overview of our South Asian collection, which contains approximately 330,000 monographic volumes, more than 1000 journals, and over 68,000 titles on microform in over 100 languages of the South Asian region. So that means we have substantial holdings in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and many other languages. Most of this acquisition comes from the library's two overseas offices, one in New Delhi established in 1962 and one in Islamabad established in 1965. On the countertops here in the reading room, you'll see some samples from our collections, books about Buddhism in general and about the ancient region of Gandhara, in particular, both in English and also in Asian languages. We invite everyone to come and spend some time here with our collections in the Asian Reading Room. And as Dr. Qiu just said, if you have a question about our collections, we have our "Ask a Librarian" service to answer anything pertaining to your research or general curiosity.
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I would also like to remind everyone here today that today's program will be recorded and later released as a webcast. So please turn off or silence your mobile phones and other devices and also place hold your questions until the end. And please be advised that any questions you may ask during the Q&A will be recorded and the act of asking a question constitutes permission for us to record and broadcast later as part of our webcast. For South Asia at the Library of Congress, I believe you could call the subject of today's lecture a top treasure, namely the birch bark scrolls from the ancient Buddhist region of Gandhara. And to get to know this treasure, there is no better resource than the experts on the history, language and culture out of which this manuscript came to be. Dr. Richard Solomon is emeritus professor of Sanskrit and Buddhist studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to being the director of the British library and University of Washington's early Buddhist Manuscript Project, he is the author of many publications on early Buddhism, many of which are on display here at the Asian Reading Room today. His most recent book, his fourth on Gandhara manuscripts, is titled "Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara: An Introduction with Selected Translations." Translation number eight in this book is "The Many Buddhas Sutra," which is the scroll here at the Library of Congress. And now for more on this scroll, I'd like to welcome Dr. Richard Solomon.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Richard Solomon: Can you hear me okay? Is the microphone on? I don't have a good projecting voice. So I want to be sure you all can hear. So first of all, thank you, thanks to John for the very nice introduction. Second, I want to thank you all for being here. When I saw the weather this afternoon, I had the concern that I was going to just be speaking to an empty room this evening but I see that you've all braved the nasty weather to come and I thank you for that and I will try to make it worth the effort. So I'm going to start my presentation with a description of the physical characteristics of the manuscript. Contents and significance will come later. So the manuscript is called, as you see here -- Next slide. The title of the manuscript or, to be accurate, the title which I attribute to the manuscript is "The Many Buddhas Sutra," which is my translation of the conjectural title, original title. It's not actually there on the manuscript, "Bahubuddha-sutra." Please note the asterisk. Scholarly convention means that that's a reconstructed title. I didn't make it up totally. I borrowed it from a related and somewhat similar text which exists in Sanskrit as part of the Mahavastu. So it's a conjectural but pretty likely title. The actual title of the manuscript would have been on some of the part that's incomplete, that's missing. So that's why I have a hypothetical title. And I'll show you the details of that a little later. First, briefly, the big picture. This is one of several hundred manuscripts discovered within the last 20 years from the ancient region of Gandhara. And I'll show a map later if you're not familiar with Gandhara and where it is. I'll get back to that. But we now know of several hundred manuscripts, almost all of them like this one, a birch bark scroll and written in the Gandhari language, which I'll describe a little bit later on, and in the Kharosthi script, which you'll also see some illustrations of. And these manuscripts date between the first century BC and the third century AD. So they are clearly the oldest manuscripts of any manifestation of Buddhism. And they're also the oldest South Asian manuscripts in existence.
^M00:10:39
So here, you see the scroll as it was delivered to the library. The main piece is at the bottom, rolled up piece of birch bark, and the piece on top is actually would've been an adjoining piece but it had already broken off. You might notice, I don't know if you can see from where you're sitting but the two look quite different and the reason is that they're in a different handwriting. And the reason for that is that when the scroll was unrolled and examined, it turned out that one scribe, I could just call it scribe A, had written the front and then he'd handed it off to another scribe, I'll call scribe B, and the back is in a quite distinctly different writing. So that's what you're seeing here. This is from -- The top upper one is from the recto, that is the front side, and the lower one is from the verso or the back side.
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Looking at another angle on this manuscript, this is how it looked before it was unrolled and preserved, looking at it from the end and you can see pretty clearly how the scroll is rolled up and you can see how delicate and fragile this material is. If you've probably seen a piece of birch bark, you can, if nobody's looking, you can pull it off a tree and a beautiful white durable and very flexible and very nice looking material when it's new, when you pull it off the tree. When it's 2000 years old, it's extremely fragile and delicate and you can see all its little bits falling off of it no matter how careful you are. Another extra problem, I've boxed in an example of what we call delamination. So actually, birch bark consists of constituent layers. There're usually three layers that you can't see when it's fresh. You wouldn't notice. But again, when it dries out, those layers sometimes pull apart and sometimes they completely separate. That causes all kinds of problems when you're trying to reconstruct the manuscript because you not only have the manuscripts itself is broken into component parts, as you'll see, but the component parts are sometimes the front and the back are completely separated and it's not always at all obvious where and how they go together. So anyway, this is what came to the library some years ago. And the first problem is what to do with that. It has to be conserved and unrolled and here they are. This is on the left is Holly Krueger of the Library of Congress and at the right is Mark Barnard who was imported from the British Library as a special consultant because he was the most experienced person. He had unrolled two premier groups of similar types of manuscripts discovered again in the fairly recent past. So we have really an A-team conserving this difficult manuscript and here's just a detailed shot of how they do it. In a word, very carefully. Sorry. I'm going to wrong way. So here you see the implements that they use and how they are working together carefully. And this is the result or at least the preliminary result. So this is the recto side unreconstructed. In other words, that's how it actually looks and how it looks in those facsimile images in the back of the room, which you can look at later, as it came apart. Several changes had to be made. Particularly, there were these three pieces, loose pieces at the top, and you saw one of them in the first image and two others came apart.
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And the conservators had no way to know exactly where they belonged and the scroll as it was unrolled was placed on a sheet of glass and when they were finished, they put another piece of glass on to seal it and that's a permanent disposition of it. But some of these pieces are not actually in their correct position, particularly those three at the top. So I'll show you. The next image is the reconstructed version and you'll see those pieces are reversed and flipped over like that and that. So this is photoshopped. All the reconstruction is done on screen with Photoshop. The original, as you'll see it back there, remains as it was unrolled. And this is what a typical problem. We have these problems almost always with birch bark scrolls. When they get unrolled, they don't come out all nice and neat and clear.
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You'll notice in the reconstructed image the wear pattern and this is again very typical of birch bark scrolls. The best part is the bottom. So you can see clearly the farther up you go, the worse the condition gets and that's not the original top. At the top, there were some more lines missing, apparently probably not too many. So this is actually, believe it or not, one of the best preserved birch bark scrolls. A lot of them were worse than this. But there is something missing at the top and those spaces between the pieces are intentional and planned. So they represent places where the intermediate text was lost. But as I said, this is very typical. The bottom is always the best part. Why? Because when they'd finish the scroll, they would roll it up and they'd roll it up from the bottom. So when it's rolled, the bottom is on the inside and it's protected and the top is on the outside and it's most subject to wear. So it's very rare that we actually get the top of the manuscript. And that causes plenty of problems because, well, that's one of the reasons that I don't really know the name of the title of the text because in Indian books, the title is written usually at the end, not at the beginning. Seems strange to Western way of doing things but that's the typical pattern. So the title, the colophon containing the title would've been at the top of the back and that's the part that we don't have.
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This is the verso and you can see it's just the same thing turned around and you can see how they do it. They write from the top to the bottom and the flip it over the long way and write from the bottom to the top. So that means we're missing typically, in this case and typically, we're missing the beginning and the end of the text, which are parts that you most want to see when you're trying to analyze it but usually we don't have it. So we look at similar related texts. We extrapolate. We make up a title. We do the best we can. Now I've -- I don't know if it's clear. I've boxed in a portion of the top of the verso, at the top of the back side, and that's going to be shown in detail in the next slide. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of a closer look at part of it relatively well-preserved part of the text. It's not as well preserved as it looked because if you look closely, I don't know if you can see from there, but actually there are many little bits, sections of the bark that have delaminated and they're actually misplaced. So if you look closely, you'll see some of those lines are jagged and interrupted and that's delamination. So this is what I'm going to be doing tomorrow is trying to figure out where those lose bits actually correctly belong. This is -- And just an example of the text, I'll explain a little more later on. But it's talking about when the life in Buddhist cosmic time, the lifetime of the various buddhas, and also it's explaining in a kind of punning way the name of the Buddha. His name is Padmottara because he is pure like a lotus padma. So that's a typical rhetorical device. So that's about the manuscript itself. Now I'd like to give you a little bit of background on the date and chronological and historical context of the manuscript.
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So this manuscript has been tested by radiocarbon dating twice in two different labs and the results are here. And the results are a little disturbing because they should be the same, theoretically but they're not and there's been some discussion of that and probably there was some contamination. These things were packed in cotton wool when they were shipped here and that may have contaminated and damaged the accuracy of the test. So there's really no way to know which is the more accurate result, the one in Australia, number one, or the one that was done in University of Arizona, number two. So all in all, we have the big possible span from 206 BC to 1, what does it say, 133 CE. But that's not -- It's not a major problem because it's all in the ballpark and since then, quite a few other manuscripts of similar types have been tested and they all fall in period between first century BC to third century AD. And for specific reasons that I'm not going to take the time to explain now but I'm pretty sure that this manuscript is either first century BC or first century CE. So we have a pretty good idea of where we are historically. And that fits right in pretty well, quite well with what we understand of historical circumstances or historical context of this manuscript. So let's talk for a few minutes about the ancient region of Gandhara in the period in question, end of BC, beginning of CE period. So Gandhara, I've learned from speaking about this many places that some people know where Gandhara is and a lot of people don't. So I'll tell you in case you're in the later category. So this is a detailed map of Western and Northwestern India. And the area -- The rather small area circled in green, I hope you can see that at least where it is, is what we call Gandhara proper. The city, you can't read it on this map, but the modern city that that's surrounding is Peshawar in Northwestern Pakistan. So the valley, called the Peshawar Valley or the area of the Peshawar River, small area, 120 miles from east to west, is the Gandhara and region proper but there's also much bigger surrounding region I call Greater Gandhara, which is the cultural region which in the period in question that I was talking about was under the influence or within the cultural sphere of Gandhara itself. The reason that happens, the reason you get a thing called "Greater Gandhara" is in the period in question, again first century BC to second, third century AD, Gandhara was very much a political and cultural center, major political and cultural center in India and adjoining regions as well. In this period, there were a series of invasions or immigrations or movements, whatever you want to call it, by peoples from the north, from Central Asia, from the west, from Iran and from other places as well who came into this sort of what some historians call the funnel that leads immigrants and movements across Asia into India through particularly the Khyber Pass that's the most famous site in that pattern. So these immigrants came into India, set up a series of kingdoms and eventually The Great Kushan Empire in the period in question and they on one hand imposed their power but they rapidly assimilated into an Indian cultural milieu and the best and easiest way to do that is to become Buddhists because Buddhism is open to all. So what happened is that these barbarian conquerors very quickly became the great patrons of, well, generous, wealthy and generous patrons of Buddhist monasteries and institutions and that led to a great flourishing of Buddhism in Gandhara in the period in question. And this textural material we are dealing with is one manifestation of that flourishing period of Buddhism.
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These foreign invaders, as they might be called, are known to us from the manuscripts but also from a very large number of physical remains, including inscriptions recording their donation. So this is just one example, a fairly typical example, from the first century of a reliquary dedicated by a member of the royal family of these Scythians or Saka, Indo-Scythian rulers of Northwestern India with a beautiful inscription around the top. And I don't know if you can see there are a few letters that are in gold. So actually originally the whole inscription was inlaid with gold wire and most of them disappeared but for some reason, two or three of the letters still have their original gold, sort of emblematic of the generosity of their patronage. So in the period that I'm talking about, Gandhara became a major center, in some senses even the major center of Buddhism in the South Asian continent and this had even greater historical consequences because we now know and it's gradually becoming clearer how Buddhism actually left the motherland of India and went into Central Asia through Gandhara. And we are now getting very clear evidence of that that Gandharan travelers went into Central Asia, brought Buddhism. And from there, Buddhism spread to China, to Korea, and Japan. So Gandhara is really a critical node, not just in Indian history, but in the entire history of Buddhism.
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The other best know manifestation of Gandharan Buddhism is in its very abundant school of sculpture and other arts. And I find that in general audiences, that's what people are aware of if they have any acquaintance of Gandhara. And Gandharan Buddhist sculpture and again just about the same period, time period that I'm talking about, first to third century AD, you can see specimens of that in most major museums anywhere in the world, including right here in Washington, DC. In the Freer Gallery, there's this very amazing set of four friezes illustrating the four major events of the Buddha's life. So if you're not familiar, I definitely recommend a trip over there. Quite worth it. So I'll just show you these as a local example.
So the first of the great events is, of course, the miraculous birth of Buddha coming out of the right side of his mother.
And this is the enlightenment Buddha in meditation and all around him are the army of Mara or the anti-Buddha attacking him, trying to scare him, trying to distract him. And of course, they can't. You have that sort of called a force field around Buddha and they're all coming at him but there is this blanket area where they can't penetrate. And at the lower left is Mara in dejection because he sees that he's losing the battle.
And then the third is the first sermon in the Deer Park in Sarnath and you can see the two deer at the bottom of the chair and that's the, the bottom of the seat, that's the emblem of this great event.
And then finally the Parinirvana, the final passing away of Buddha. So these are absolutely basic to the biography of the Buddha. But what might seem odd is that the text that I'm here to talk about, which is about the life of the buddhas, these are not mentioned at all in that text because the kind of, the biography that I'm going to be talking about is not a conventional biography, at least in modern terms. It works quite differently and I'll explain that in a few minutes.