^B00:00:12 >> 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. ^M00:04:29 ^M00:04:33 >> 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. ^M00:05:59 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. ^M00:07:26 [ Applause ] ^F00:07:31 ^M00:07:40 >> 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. ^M00:11:37 ^M00:11:47 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. ^M00:15:04 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. ^M00:16:04 ^M00:16:08 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. ^M00:17:40 ^M00:17:44 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. ^M00:20:01 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. ^M00:25:18 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. ^M00:27:15 ^M00:27:19 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. ^M00:30:07 ^M00:30:15 I want to add a little more background information on the nature of Buddhist canons. Buddhist canons are not like the canons of say Islam or Judaism where you have a single, clearly-defined invariable unilingual text or corpus of text. Buddhist canons are multiple. They exist in different forms, in different languages from different parts of the Buddhist world. Basically, the best known and most important Buddhist canons are in Pali Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. The Sanskrit is an incomplete canon known from fragmentary remains, mostly from Central Asia and from China. Buddhism in a way you can compare more to Christianity in terms of its approach to language and text and canon because like Christianity, Buddhism is a religious tradition that encourages translation, again in contrast to Islam and Judaism where if you read the Quran or you read the Torah, you read it in Arabic or Hebrew, respectively, because that's the essence of it. And if you translate it, it's just some pale imitation. That's not the idea in Buddhism. And the Buddha was said to have explained to his followers in a famous passage, speak, explain the dharma to people in their own language. So right from the beginning, there was the desire, preference for translation. So that's relevant to what I'm discussing here because we now have an increasingly large body, several hundred manuscripts, almost all fragmentary, in the Gandhari language, which I will explain in a moment. So I am willing to go out on a limb and say that there was a complete Gandhari canon in antiquity. It disappeared until recently. Why? Well, simply because Gandhara ceased to be a part of the Buddhist world or Buddhism died out at least 1000 years ago in Gandhara and it was completely forgotten until recently. So I would make the case that we're actually rediscovering an unknown canon of Buddhism and that's the canon that has been translated into Gandhari language. And the Gandhari language was in its day just the local vernacular language of the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. So it's linguistically related fairly closely to Pali and Sanskrit. And so I just have a quickie comparison chart for those of you who are familiar with or interested in this sort of thing. So the same verse in Gandhari, Sanskrit and Pali and I tried to clarify it by, I picked one word, in boldface, which is the word for a man or a human being. So you can see the relationships of manocie [phonetic] in Gandhari, manuoyaci [phonetic] in Sanskrit and manusso [phonetic] in Pali and so forth. You can make what you will of that. ^M00:33:49 ^M00:33:54 The Gandhari language is always or almost always connected with the Kharosthi script, which looks something like this. Kharosthi script, which is written from right to left, although not in this example, is unlike the Gandhari language, which is of Indian origin. The Kharosthi script is of Western, that is Semitic origin derived or connected with the Aramaic script. So this is the alphabetical order or the character set of Kharosthi script but it's written in Western way, left to right. And that alphabet is called Arapacana at the top. Why Arapacana? Well, that's why just the first five letters. So as we say "alphabet," we call it alphabet just by citing the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, same principle was common in many other scripts or language groups. So that's the Arapacana alphabet. And this is a chart which shows the, illustrates the relationship between the Aramaic script and the Kharosthi script and I just circled some examples where it's relatively clear the derivation and connection with the Aramaic prototype. It's actually a complicated and controversial and interesting topic but I won't go into it here. ^M00:35:29 So that's all more or less by way of background. Now I'll come to the main point, context and significance of the Library of Congress scroll. What's it about? Well, I call the "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 or Ajita who is the next Buddha. So those 14 Buddhas in the past and one Buddha in the future. So these are the 15 Buddhas involved. Start with Dipankara. Number 14 is Sakyamuni who actually is Sakyamuni the second, surprisingly. And then on to Maitreya in the future. But this biography is not the kind of biography that you saw in those four sculpted images that I showed you before. In fact, those four great events, the four prime events of the Buddha's life are not mentioned at all in this strange kind of biography. So what it is about? Well, I've summarized that in this chart. There are seven points of information which are enumerated for each of the Buddhas. So it starts out with the predictions. I'll explain the significance of that a little bit later. And the predictions made by each of the 15 Buddhas and so forth. So for example number three, I'll show later. The lifespan tells you how long each Buddha lasted. So it's not a narrative presentation. It's a summary of information. And that has its own significance, an importance, which I'll try to clarify as I go through. So the next slide I'm going to show you the specific, the full information, I've picked item five, social class, the varna it's called in Sanskrit, which of the four classes of society each of the Buddhas and I picked that, I showed that one because it's short and I can fit it all in one slide So if we read, Dipankara went forth, that means, you know, became a Buddha approximately from a brahman family, Sarvabhibhu from ksatriya family. Padmottara was a brahman. Atyuccagamin was ksatriya, on and on and on. Maybe not the most exciting reading to the un-initiated. This is the part that I don't show my undergraduate students. You can imagine their eyes glazing over. But it has considerable interest and significance. I'm not going to go into this example here although it implies something about the social views of ancient Buddhism. But I want to show another one. This is another category, category three and the seven points of information, which is the lifespans of the Buddha. And I couldn't fit in all 15 Buddhas, so I just give approximately the last half. And here, you'll see a clear progression. Vipasyin Buddha number eight lived for 80,000 years, Buddha number nine 70,000 years, et cetera, et cetera, down to number 13, who is Kasyapa the immediate predecessor of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni. He lived for 20,000 years. And I -- And this is Sakyamuni. By the way, this whole text is, of course, being recited, told by Sakyamuni. He predicts that he will live only 80 years. So you see it's very, it's a pronounced drastic downward progression in the lifetime of the Buddhas. ^M00:40:00 And this is a matter of concern because a year in the life of the Buddha or a day or an hour in the life of a Buddha is a very precious thing. So it gives you a sense of the world getting somehow deteriorating. Well, the world is always deteriorating and so it always seems. But when you look at the next item, which is category four, the periods, the historic periods in which the Buddhas lived, you actually get a different message or a different picture. So here, we have -- I was able to fit all 15 on. So this is the historical progression, the sweep of history when these earlier Buddhas lived and when the future Buddhas will live. So Dipankara, which is actually the same as Dipankara, lived in an uncountable eon before the present eon. I'll try to explain briefly Buddhist cosmology. It's a little different than what you might be used to. An uncountable eon is a technical term. It doesn't mean you can't count it. It means it's so huge. So an uncountable eon is, I believe, the best calculation I've been able to find is 10 to the 154th power number of years. So virtually uncountable. The next Buddha, Sarvabhibhu, 10 million eons, the third 100,000 and so forth, 1000, 500. So you see a different kind of progression. You see for instance in number nine and ten, you have two buddhas, Sikhin and Visvabhu, who lived in the same eon and then the 11th through 15th are all in the same eon and that's the eon that we're living in now. And that's called the bhadrakalpa because Bhadra means good, happy, fortunate, because it's the era in which many buddhas are living. So you get -- There's a kind of balance between the decrease in the lifetime of the buddhas, in the lifespan of the buddhas but they're getting more frequent in history. ^M00:42:23 ^M00:42:27 There's another related text which contains these lists of buddhas and their times and their characteristics. It's called the Bhadrakalpikasutra. Some of you might be familiar with it. And Bhadrakalpika means it talks about the bhadrakalpa, kalpa means eon. And it's a list of buddhas but not from the past but looking ahead in the future. So it actually starts with the first Buddha in the bhadrakalpa that is Kakusandha and goes through Sakyamuni, our Buddha, and Maitreya and then 996 more buddhas are still to come within this Bhadra era. So this is very important for Buddhist practice or philosophy or soteriology because the point is to give encouragement and comfort that Buddhas will although we have missed the Buddha, we living now, we're not during the lifetime of the Buddha but there will be buddhas to come and in future years if we pursue the Buddhist path, we might get the blessing of actually some day a million years form now or a billion years from now actually see and be the presence of the Buddha. So there's a balance of the downward trajectory of the world in general but the increasing promise of increasing numbers of buddhas. Let me turn to my next topic which is how many buddhas are there. So at this point, you might be wondering the text that I'm primarily concerned with contains 15 buddhas. I mentioned another one that enumerates 1001 buddhas and there are many other numbers. There's a famous early sutra, the [inaudible] sutra, which has seven buddhas which seems to be the original number. There's another polytext called Buddhavamsa which lists 25 buddhas. And significantly in that case, it lists 25 buddhas but it begins with Dipankara and that's particularly an important moment within the history of the buddhas plural, Dipankara has a special importance which I will explain in a few minutes. Just I'll mention one other number, the Mahavastu which is a Sanskrit biography of the Buddha, also has a list of buddhas. It has a long list, 331,140,263 buddhas from the remote inconceivable past down to the present time of Sakyamuni. ^M00:45:23 So how many buddhas are there? Well, let me come back to the point about Dipankara. Why is Dipankara special in these lists? Why do -- Why is he stressed in most of them and in at least two important cases, including our manuscript, it begins with him? Well, because he's the Buddha who produced our Buddha Sakyamuni. And by produced, I will try to say he inspired the person who would eventually be reborn as the Buddha. He inspired him to become a Buddha and he actually predicted that that being would become a Buddha. So let me explain. I'll show how that happened. Here, I've just given you the basic list but I've emphasized Dipankara and Sakyamuni because they have this special connection. And this is the famous scene where it all started. This is where a young man, a very handsome young man named Megha or Sumedha, different names, in extremely remote past, in the time of Dipankara, was walking down the street and he saw the Buddha Dipankara. And he was overcome with power and radiance of the Buddha. And the Buddha was walking along the road and maybe it was like today, the road was wet and muddy and he didn't want the Buddha to get his feet dirty. So he undid his -- He had this beautiful long thick hair and he threw it over the road for the Buddha to walk on, to keep his feet dry. And the Buddha seeing that said, knew that this man Megha was special and had a special destiny and predicted that he would in the future become a Buddha and Megha was inspired to pursue the path. And eventually after millions and millions of lifetimes, he in fact became the Buddha and that's what we see here in this Gandharan sculpture. So the point is where do buddhas come from and how many are there? The answer is buddhas come from other buddhas. A buddha predicts and produces, inspires the attainment of Buddhahood by another person or by other people in the long future. So how many buddhas are there? I finally come back to the question. Infinite number. Why infinite? Because time is infinite in the Buddhas conception both in the past and the future. There is no beginning. There is no end. And throughout history, buddhas are either present or most of the time in the process of forming at some time. And that's why the Mahavastu can say in all seriousness that there are 331 million et cetera buddhas. There're actually much more than that. There are an infinite number. But these different texts or these different presentations, usually by the Buddha himself, simply address the issue or explain the issue in a limited scope because you can't, well the Buddha can talk about, understand eternity but we can't. So it takes -- These different texts are really slices of history, slices of Buddha history, which is infinite from beginning to end. Some of them talk about the recent past. Some of them talk about a little farther in the past. Some go into the future. Some are concerned mainly with the future. But they're all just pieces of the big picture. I call them slices of history. ^M00:49:18 ^M00:49:22 Let me turn to my penultimate topic, which is to step back and try to give you some idea of the importance of this text and the position of this text within Buddhist literature more broadly. I think I've already -- Excuse me. I hope I've already made it clear that this text is new. It's text we've never seen before but it's by no means totally unprecedented. We have similar texts or texts of similar theme in other parts of the Buddhist literature and that's why I borrowed the title "Many Buddha Sutra," Bahubuddha-sutra, from another Sanskrit book that has a similar portion. And that's interesting, now I'm speaking in terms of the history of Buddhist literature, what this is showing us. We find similar descriptions of the buddhas in other Buddhist literature. It's Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese. But they're usually incorporated into much bigger text like the Mahavastu or the [inaudible], these enormous multivolume texts. What we have here are we are finding the actual component parts of some of those massive texts. So it's beginning to become clearer that there was a process, for lack of better term I call it the clumping process, in the history of Buddhist literature that individual, what were originally individual texts have tended to get squished together into these sort of encyclopedic long works. There are other texts which are more or less familiar. We have for instance Gandhari versions of texts that were known in essentially a similar form in other languages, usual Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese or combinations thereof. So these are not new texts but they are new versions of previously known texts. So it's less spectacular but to the specialists, it's extremely interesting because you can do all sorts of textual comparisons of the details and relationships. So, you know, to us, it's exciting as if someone discovered the putative Aramaic original form of the Gospels, New Testament Gospels known only in Greek. So that's a big deal for us. And then there's a third class of material in this Gandhari literature which I haven't talked about and I don't have time to introduce but I just wanted to say there are texts which are completely new for which we have no parallel or no approximately similar material in any of the other several Buddhist literatures and these are great eyeopeners. They give us views, new dimensions of Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist literature that we had no idea of in many cases. So what do we have, couple hundred scraps of partial texts which are clearly part of what was originally a much larger literature. I think Gandhari Buddhist literature in its day, there must've been thousands of different texts in existence. So it's very much tip of the iceberg situation but, you know, you can look at the tip and if you look closely enough, you can sort of extrapolate the picture of the whole iceberg. I have a larger vision or fantasy of original Indian Buddhism as an ocean with many icebergs, each representing the local textual traditions or the local canons of the different parts of the Indian world. Those icebergs are mostly gone. They've melted away. We have a few of them. We have the Pali canon. We have the partial Sanskrit canon. But I have the feeling now that there were many local canons. All had a common core. I don't mean to give the idea they're completely different. They had a common core but they had many different texts in and around that basic commonality. Those other Buddhist literatures or canons most of them are gone and I would say there's no hope of finding them mainly for a simple physical reason, the climate of India, of India proper is such that organic materials, manuscripts 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 and more conducive to the survival of organic materials of manuscripts. So extrapolating and I'm going out on a limb a little bit. From the tip of the Gandharan iceberg, I try to see the shape of the whole iceberg and from that I try to guess the shape of all the other icebergs that theoretically existed and never will. But the details of this are gradually become clearer as we, myself and my colleagues and collaborators in this Gandharan enterprise, work through the materials we have and that's why I'm here. ^M00:55:33 So I just want to conclude with a few words on specifically on what I and my colleagues are doing with these manuscripts. Jonathan mentioned already in his introduction that I have published a translation, really it's a kind of preliminary translation, of this text and it's in my book "Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara," which is on the table and actually obviously open to the appropriate pages where I translate this whole thing. But that's actually just the beginning. The translation with this sort of material, this sort of work, translation is not the main part. So what I'm working on and why I'm here, other than of course to speak to you, but to do some of the detailed work towards the production of a complete scholarly detailed philological edition, that more for the specialists. So that will eventually take the form of one of those black books that you see on the table there. That's a series called "Gandharan Buddhist Text." So that's the academic presentation of this material. My other book is meant more for the general readership. So one of these years, I don't dare be more specific on that, I do commit myself that there will be a black book in the Gandharan Buddhist text on this manuscript and hopefully tomorrow I'll begin making some progress towards that. But for the meantime, you can feel free to consult my translation and this is the book in question. This one already actually exists. So thank you for your attention. Be glad to answer questions. ^M00:57:38 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:44 >> Jonathan Loar: So we'll open it up to questions if anybody has any. ^M00:57:49 ^M00:57:54 >> Richard Solomon: Please. Yes. >> I have a question. Could you just say something about how the manuscripts, I mean how we get manuscripts, how [inaudible] manuscripts? >> Richard Solomon: 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 and that's why I didn't talk about that. Almost all of the manuscripts of this type have come up through private collections or antiquities market and that is frankly a murky place. The people who have possession of them may or may not know where they actually came from and they may or may not tell you or may or may not tell you the truth. But what we do know fairly certainly is that some, probably most, maybe all of them were originally in clay pots and we actually have not here but in the British Library we actually have one of the clay pots in which they came. And these pots were buried probably under stupas or near stupas in a monastery. So they put the manuscripts in the pots, sealed it up with a kind of, I think probably with beeswax, put a lid on it and sealed it, and they buried it in the stupa. At least some of those came from Hadda, in Afghanistan if you're familiar with that. They all come -- They probably -- All of most of them come from eastern Afghanistan, maybe from some northwestern Pakistan. And so that's -- Unfortunately, that's all we really know. There are no cases where we have any of these manuscripts and know specifically definitely exactly where they came from but we have some general knowledge about the provenance. ^M01:00:10 It's a problem. Yes, please. ^M01:00:18 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:00:49 Yes. You may be referring to in Buddhist literature they, in [inaudible], they talk about Taxila, which was the great city of that area, and they call it the university but that's actually kind of an anachronism and that's something that modern scholars, modern translators have used that term but really it was just kind of center of learning but not in a formal sense of a university. But in terms of propagation, well we don't know very much about that but there's one very important point that we do know and that concerns what I mentioned briefly before, the transmission of this material, I mean Buddhist literature in general, into Central Asia and into China. So there's something called the Gandhari hypothesis which I didn't talk about but I will for a minute because it's relevant to your question. This is something that actually goes back to I think the 1930s. It was first noticed that if you look at some types of Chinese Buddhist texts and, of course, Chinese Buddhist texts are, the [inaudible] are all translated from Indian originals. And this was a huge enterprise that went on from the second century BC for, I'm sorry, second century AD for a thousand years. It was this enormous project of translating the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. It's actually the biggest and most impressive translation project in the history of the world. I'll go out on a limb and say that. Very few people outside Buddha circles know that but it's a major achievement in world civilization I would say. Now concerning that, there was this idea called the Gandhari hypothesis and what happened is that certain text scholars, philologists were looking at the early Chinese translations, second, third, maybe fourth century, and looking at how they rendered the Indian names. And this was a problem because Indian names and Chinese names are extremely different in the structure of the language and the sound system are so different and the writing system, everything is different, so they struggled with representing Buddhist Indian names in Chinese but some of these early scholars noted that there were maybe oddities in the way that the names were presented which made them question what had been assumed, which it was assumed that the Chinese translations were made from Sanskrit but certain of the features of the names actually didn't line up with Sanskrit but they do line up with the corresponding Gandhari pronunciations, like that slide I showed you where you'd see the different sound systems. So the Gandhari hypothesis then was that the Chinese Buddhist texts, not all of them but the early phase, were actually based not on Sanskrit originals but on Gandhari originals. And one of the question marks about that theory was at the time and for decades afterwards there were no Gandhari text. Now to make a long story short, there are and so this new material definitely supports, I would say proves the Gandhari hypothesis. So that's really, coming back to your question, the propagation, the historically important propagation is that these were brought by various people into China and translated. They probably wasn't propagated in India proper because in India proper, the other regions had their own corresponding sets of texts in their own local languages and dialects. ^M01:05:09 I hope I answered your question. Yes, please. >> Thank you very much for the wonderful [inaudible] research. Do you know the approximate dimensions of the original scrolls? >> Richard Solomon: Oh, I didn't mention that. Is the facsimile their actual size? >> Jonathan Loar: Close. >> Richard Solomon: Yes. In the back, you can look at it afterwards. About that long. Does that seem right? So the original would've been somewhat longer. The dimensions of these scrolls vary a lot. This is one of the shorter ones. Ah, yes. Thank you. That long. This was probably, as far as I see, it was made from a single piece of birch bark. But, of course, you're limited by the size of -- So there are -- We have some much longer scrolls, some that are several yards long but, of course, they're put together. We call them composite scrolls. They're sheets of bark, you know, typically not longer than this but there might be 10 or 15 or even more put together. I'm having some doubts because there's a, you can't see it from there, but there's a blank strip here and I wonder whether that's actually a juncture and whether this was made, put together from two separate pieces. So that's -- I'm going to be checking that tomorrow. The range, very wide range. There are some -- The smallest ones are about this high. The longest ones are yards and yards long. ^M01:06:52 ^M01:06:56 Yes, please. ^M01:06:58 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:07:05 I'm sorry. I'm not hearing. ^M01:07:09 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:07:14 Oh, yes. That's -- I've wondered about that. I'm not sure I understand it. In the list of 15, there's Sakyamuni the first and of course it doesn't say the first. I just put together those numbers. He was number eight. I don't know. I'm not sure. And then Sakyamuni the second. But there's another point about that which I didn't mention. I talked about that list in the Mahavastu of 331,140,263 buddhas. What I didn't say is that out of the 300 million, out of the 331, 300 million were named Sakyamuni. And according to that text, there was a stretch of 30 million buddhas in a row that were all had the same name. And I have thought about and failed to understand what that, why that is and what that means. But there is -- You know, buddhas are and by impression, they're more or less the same and their images, I don't think I have one here, but you see in Gandhari and other sculptures, you see sets of buddhas like the seven buddhas or sometimes eight buddhas and they're all almost exactly the same. So there seems to be a range of possibilities that buddhas are always similar and they can be very similar and sometimes they are absolutely identical. But I'm still pondering that. It is hard to understand that. ^M01:08:59 ^M01:09:05 Yes, sir? ^M01:09:07 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:09:27 Yes. It's hard to give exact numbers. Let me explain the problem. There are groups of manuscripts. There are six or seven major groups. And typically, one of these groups will typically have, take two or three dozen manuscripts but there's one group which comes from a place called Bamiyan, which people have heard of because they were, everybody knows they were giant buddhas and the Taliban blew them up in 1999 or whenever it was. What the public general doesn't know is that they were also thousands and thousands of manuscripts found there. And most of those manuscripts were later manuscripts in Sanskrit but there's an early phase of Gandhari manuscripts similar to what I've been talking about. Now that contains -- That consists of 300 or so fragments and most of them are -- When I say fragments, I mean like this. So it's very hard to say, okay, what is that? Is that 300 manuscripts or are they part and how many manuscripts were they actually parts of and in most cases they're so small that's it's hard to be sure. So there might be 300 fragments but there might've been 50 or 60 manuscripts at a little more than a guess. So that's why the numbers are very fuzzy and that's why I've been a little bit vague. But I would say we have -- Well, I said 200 -- We have partial remnants of at least 200 manuscripts and we have possibly more than that. In terms of complete manuscripts or texts that are complete or more or less complete, you know, say 90%, very few, maybe three or four. This thing, I think I actually calculated, I don't remember. We have maybe 75 to 80% of the original of this and that's much, much better than usual. So it's a little hard to say exactly how much we have but we do have a lot of material, enough to really begin to get a glimpse of the big picture. Yes, please. ^M01:12:08 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:12:23 The answer is almost all are Buddhist texts, not necessarily sutras but Buddhist texts of any kind clearly Buddhist content. Sorry, I broke your microphone. There are two exceptions in all of these 200 or whatever manuscripts, there are two exceptions but they're really interesting. One of them is a kind of legal document. The other, which was just discovered very recently and is about to be published by my colleague Mark Allen [assumed spelling], you might know who he is. And it's actually just little fragments of what would've been a very interesting text but it's enough to see what's going on. It's actually a record of the monastery's record of donations. And not only that, it lists the names of the donors and the primary donor was [inaudible], who's a well-known figure in Indian history of around 100 AD. So this is really a great thing for us because it clarifies and confirms the historical context within that period that I talked about, that so-called foreign ruler period, and he was previously known but [inaudible] his relationship to Buddhism was not clear and now we have it. He was mentioned several times in this text. So it's not a Buddhist text in the sense that the others are but it's monastic business and it's a real eyeopener. And this is going to be published in a few months. So really change the picture. But that's all we have so far of that type. >> Jonathan Loar: I think we have time for maybe one more question. Are there any burning questions? Otherwise, we'll be here around the reading room for [inaudible] afterwards but I feel incredibly fortunate to be learning so much about the scroll. Thank you so much, Dr. Solomon. >> Richard Solomon: My pleasure. Thank you. ^M01:14:52 [ Applause ] ^M01:14:57 And thanks again to everybody for braving the rain and wind.