Table Of ContentSILK ROAD STUDIES 1
UYGUR BUDDHIST LITERATURE
SILK ROAD STUDIES 1
Edited by
an international committee
R.E. EMMERICK (Hamburg [D])
G. GNOLI (Roma [I])
S. KLJASHTORNYJ (Sankt Petersburg [CIS])
S.N.C. Lrnu (Sydney [AUS])
B.A. LITVINSKY (Moskva [CIS])
R. MESERVE (Bloomington (IN) [USA])
G. PINAULT (Paris [F])
A. SARKÖZI (Budapest [H])
A. VAN TONGERLOO (Leuven [B]), Editor-in-chief
S. WHITFIELD (London [GB]), Director of the Dunhuang Monograph Series
P. ZIEME (Berlin [D])
SILK ROAD STUDIES
1
UYGUR BUDDHIST LITERATURE
Jo han Elverskog
BREPOLS
© 1997, Brepols, Tumhout.
ISBN 2-503-50544-9
D/1997 /0095/43
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................ vii
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1
Abbreviations ..................................................................................................... 16
Non-Mahäyäna Texts .......................................................................................... 17
Sutra ..................................................................................................... 17
Vinaya .................................................................................................. 29
Biographies ofthe Buddha (includingjätakas) ................................... 32
Avadäna ............................................................................................... 42
Mahäyäna Sutras ................................................................................................. 50
Commentaries ..................................................................................................... 74
Chinese Apocrypha ............................................................................................. 86
Tantric Texts ..................................................................................................... 105
Other Buddhist W orks ....................................................................................... 126
Index ................................................................................................................ 149
FOREWORD
Derived from the classical writings of the father of modern geomorphology,
the German scholar Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833-1905), the techni
cal term Silk Road was gradually adopted since the last century as a convergent
reference point which intended to define a complex of unique millennial phe
nomena in the perspective of world history.
The undeniable existence of Eurasian sea and land trails and routes linking
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is permanently evoked in the term Silk Raad. A
multiplicity of economic aspects is subsumed by the perennially trade in silk.
Hence the appropriateness of the term Silk Road. The unavoidable and even vital
economic and military contacts between, on the one hand, Europe, the
Mediterranean world, the Near East, and, on the other hand, Central Asia and the
Far East, led in their turn to more permanent and still perceptive results generat
ed by cultural dialogue and exchange.
The Western world received from China fascinating products of sericulture or
camellias, peaches and roses in exchange for cucumbers or grapes, horses, jade
and lapis lazuli. Nor was it just military techniques and arms that came from
China, but also paper and printing, the revolutionary technologies that ushered in
the modern period in Europe. The oldest dated printed book, the book-scroll (868
C.E.) containing a copy of the Diamond sutra, was found in the sealed room of
the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang.
The notorious harbour and caravan cities along the Eastern Mediterranean
coast and in Asia Minor - Ephesus, Tarsus, Antioch, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos,
Alexandria, to name the most famous - are already multicultural melting-pots of
the Graeco-Roman, Iranian, and Semitic cultures and beliefs. These were the
points of departure for business travel further east. Passing through Palmyra
Tadmor or Dura-Europos, converging points of the Irano-Semitic spheres, the
traveller reaches Nineveh or Babylon-Seleukia-Ctesiphon, cities on the edge of
the Indo-Iranian world. When reaching the Sogdian countries one is adjacent to
the Turco-Mongolian civilisations. In China, departing from Sera Metropolis, the
City of Silk, the terminus of Ch'ang-an, the traveller on the Imperial Highway
would encounter Dunhuang, and thence westward the Sinkiang oases, the sites of
the first amazing discoveries a century__ago. Indeed archaeological teams from
France, Germany, Great-Britain, Hungary, ltaly, Sweden, the USA, Russia, Iran,
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China or the Turco-Mogolian world have explored
buried relics in these places. Finally one enters the famous Pacific port of Zayton,
which itself had links with the Red Sea and thence the Mediterranean world - a
Chinese counterpart therefore of the aforementioned ports.
In these awe-inspiring natural surroundings, heroic emperors are created out
of gods and vice-versa, and legendary heroes or romantic fairy-tale princes(ses)
relive every evening in the tales recited or sung by bards to their audiences gath-
ered eagerly around the twinkling fire. One hears scraps of Rimsky-Korsakoff's
"Sheherazade" when the desert breeze whispers illusory heroic songs and the
dunes become epic warriors or living demons, acting in the chevaleresque shad
ow play of a scenic mirage until the winds create a sandy sea and all anxious
participants must cross the extremely narrow bridge between achieved or future
life and imminent or past death. And still there is more.
The concept of the Silk Road unavoidably has a tinge of romanticism and
exoticism, yet it also expresses a multicultural complex producing not seldom
unfamiliar and sometimes even strange but certainly cohabitationally fascinating
artistic, religious or philosophic phenomena which must be situated on a higher
level than mere syncretism. From these natural meeting places realities evolved
which are greater than a superficial amalgam of divergent cultural expressions of
some inanimate eclectic complex. The philosophico-religious texts from different
systems along these ancient trade routes characterise and illustrate, even in a frag
mentary state, an unparallelled uniqueness. Remnants of churches, graveyards,
monastic compounds, mosques, stupas, palaces, watch-towers or even complete
urban centers await further disclosure in order to complete the picture. An explic
it coherent individual stylistic expression characterizes the best specimina of the
stunning Buddhist frescos or unique Nestorian wall-paintings, the wealth of the
Islamic or rare Manichaean miniatures.
In the wake of diplomatic envoys, soldiers (o f fortune ), warlords or emperors
either on campaign or on flight, there were peddlers, merchants, traders,
scoundrels, traffickers and dealers, robbers and gangsters; we observe emigrants
and refugees, geographers, scholars (and) or spies, artists, prostitutes, preachers,
missionaries or proselytes, religiously inspired collectors or art dealers ... All these
met at distant oases, faraway cities with lights beckoning, or converged at toll
booths, town gates, market squares and created an unmatchable and unforgettable
atmosphere for discussion and dialogue, if necessary through interpreters.
Through the Silk Road evidence we will have to reconsider the contemporary
concepts of historical continuity and discontinuity as well as their imperative
evaluation in the context of the approaching 21 st century.
Persecuted believers tried to escape or to convert people to their esoterically
transmitted illuminative and redemptive knowledges which were often interpret
ed as unorthodox and therefore prohibited. Archaeological findings as well as
written documents unearthed in Central Asia or Sinkiang since the turn of the
century by Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Scandinavian
expeditions bear undeniable witness to these international, intercontinental con
tacts. The study of the archaeological and written evidence b~longing to the
worlds of the Silk Road(s) as the meeting places of religions, languages and cul
tures par excellence is the central focus of this new series.
After pseudo-Lactantius' early 4th cent. poem "On the Phoenix Bird" (De
ave phoenice), Claudian (ob. 404 C.E.) composed a 110-line poem Phoenix, in
which he locates "( ... ) a leafy wood fringed by Ocean's farthest marge beyond the
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