The Gandhara Scrolls - déjà vu all over again, Or the Oldest known copies of Buddhist Texts.

       In 1994 the British Library, whatever that may be, since we in America have a lot of libraries ourselves, purchased or otherwise acquired what has been alternatively known as the  Gandhara scrolls or sometimes the birch bark scrolls. The information available on the Internet states that the scrolls were found in clay jars buried under what was most likely the floor of the Buddhist monastery in what was once the country and is now the province of Gandhara.  As might be expected from something that is sometimes referred to as the birch bark scrolls these are scrolls written on birch bark. In this particular instance the scrolls are copies of Buddhist writings and materials. They are written in the Gandhari language and the scrolls themselves have been carbon dated to about the year one CE, what we used to call the year one AD before it became politically incorrect to do so.

     The dating of the scrolls to the year one CE makes the birch bark upon which they are written the oldest known copies of Buddhist religious material. I should be very clear since very few other people have been that this does not mean that they are in anyway the first and original and conclusively and positively the oldest versions of the documents they contain.  Birch bark has been used for writing things down on for centuries there are even birch bark letters written by the victims of the Soviet repressions who had been sent to the Siberian gulags and settlements by Stalin.

            Apparently the British Library realized that they had obtained something very special when they obtain the scrolls. It is my understanding that the first person they contacted about this was a linguist by the name of Dr. Richard Salomon. I would like to note upfront that Dr. Richard Salomon is neither a practicing Buddhist nor an expert on Buddhism or Buddhist history. He it is as far as I can determine a linguist who was one of the few on the planet who could translate the scrolls.  Sometime after this Dr. Salomon gave an interview which I read in which he stated that these documents would not suffer the same fate of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

            In 1946 some people in Israel discovered what has become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. All of these documents were eventually moved and locked up in one Israeli institution, which had a complete monopoly on them between the years of 1946 in 1991.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were shown to only a very small and select group of linguist historians and scholars and their contents were more or less Completely secret until 1991.  In 1991 an American University announced that they had obtained a complete photographic reproduction of all the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The institution which had held a monopoly on them in Israel for decades immediately went ballistic stating that these were stolen documents and should not be released. Of course the fact that the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls was absolutely secret for so long lead to numerous conspiracy theories. Now I will return you to Dr. Salomon and the Kandahar scrolls.

            Sometime after he was brought in to translate the scrolls it was decided to create what became known as the Gandhara scroll project. A select group of linguist and historians, absolutely none of which as far as I can determine are actually Buddhist, was picked by the library to have the sole access to the scrolls. That was 22 years ago.  In those 22 years one would have expected that at some point given the great Dr. Richard Salmon’s profession that the scrolls would not suffer the same fate as the Dead Sea Scrolls, a public and complete index and translation of the Gandhara scrolls should have been made public. But as far as I can determine that has never been done.

            This is not to say that some translations of some of the content of the scrolls has not been printed. The scholars involved in the project have over the decades certainly published excerpts from the scrolls and scholarly journals around the world. But as far as I can tell they have not even gone so far as to release an index of the full content of the scrolls.  I thought perhaps this would change when the good Dr. Salomon published a nice big fat paperback book entitled the Gandhara scrolls.  You can purchase a copy of this book I believe there’s one left on Amazon.com for $50 and shipping. But if you expected to find a complete translation of the contents of the scrolls in this big expensive book you’re going to be very disappointed. If you’re interested in the bark they were written on or the ink that was used to write them you’re going to be a happy camper.  If you wish to read at length a discussion of the handwriting of the scribes that wrote the scrolls then this book is for you.  But if you’re a Buddhist wanting to find out what they say exactly, you’re still more or less out of luck.

            I don’t mean to be too cynical here but it appears to me and I would like to emphasize this is just an opinion that the scholars involved in the project have used the content of the scrolls simply for the sole purpose of advancing their own careers.  There is an old saying in the halls of the greatly educated that a tenured professor must publish or perish and so over the decades some things have been published and I’m sure the members of this small group of select scholars have benefited greatly from these publications. 

            If you go on the Internet you can certainly access the Wikipedia article on the subject. The article will tell you that the scrolls contained versions of the Dhammapada, the Rhinoceros Sutra, and  text  from the Avadanas, and  Abhidharma. They’ll even tell you what sect somebody or other believes that the scrolls were transcribed by and what language and dialect they were written in. But it will not direct you to a full translation of the documents.  If you go to the website of the British Museum you will find a webpage on the scrolls and on that webpage at the very bottom there will be a header that says “what do the Gandhara scrolls say?”  And beneath that header you will find a paragraph of scholarly gibberish that basically says in plain English a bunch of Buddhist stuff.

            So apparently if you have a year or so to track down the various articles in which the members of the group have published excerpts from the scrolls and to travel to various universities to attend lectures by various scholars you might get some idea of the content of the scrolls and you might not. Apparently a wonderful lady by the name of Linda Heuman did just that.  And she wrote an article on the scrolls for tricycle magazine. The article was basically paraphrasing a lecture she attended by the good Dr. Richard Salomon. And she of course is totally willing to accept his translation and his interpretation of the scrolls since he’s certainly not going to actually release pictures of the scrolls or an exact and total translation of the scrolls.  He has however come up with a wonderful theory which he claims to have revolutionized the understanding of Buddhist history in which he is certainly not an expert.

            Basing my opinion solely upon what Linda Heuman states in her article in tricycle magazine, charts included, the good doctor has discovered that Buddhist in Afghanistan and Gandhara some 500 years after the death of Buddha and maybe 300 years after King Ashoka made Buddhism the state religion of the entire Indian subcontinent and ordered that all known Buddhist text be collected and written down in his version of Sanskrit,  had written the scrolls based upon various translations of those same documents that we already have copies of. The good doctor has given assurances that there is no fifth noble truth or any other shocking revelations in these documents, sort of.

           It is my understanding that this project is being run out of the University of Washington in the United States.  And although I have never found the document stating precisely who’s in charge of this project it would appear that at least too a great extent Dr. Salomon is.  Considering that there are millions of practicing Buddhist in the world who would probably very much like to read an accurate translation of these documents and judge for themselves the variations and differences in them they to are simply out of luck. To say that this not only disappoints me what makes me somewhat angry would be I suppose an understatement. Of course one man’s religious text is very clearly another man’s path to tenure.

           The traditional story of how the words of Buddha were originally recorded in written form comes to us from  what is called the Pali Cannon.  It goes something more or less like this. About a year after the Buddha died a king Ajasattu, who was King of the Haryanka dynasty of the kingdom of Magadha in North India, sponsored what has become known as the first Buddhist Council. According to the documents we have this council was chaired by the great Buddhist monk Mahakassapa,  who many believe was the direct successor to Buddha in the teaching and the running of the Buddhist monastic movement.  Then of course we are told that Buddha,s cousin Ananda who just happen to have a photographic memory recited and had transcribed for the councils approval all the teachings of the Buddha.

            I have always had a problem with this because India at the time was a very literate country. The two upper caste of the different countries and kingdoms of Nepal and India had had a written language and a profound literature for probably 1000 years the day Buddha was born.  His first followers were almost certainly of the upper caste as was Ananda and Mahakassapa. In Fact Mahakassapa was known to have been an extremely well educated Hindu scholar before he converted to become a follower of the Buddha.  So it has always been very hard for me to believe that these men,  dozens maybe even hundreds of them,  followed Buddha around for 60 years or more and never wrote down a single word that he had uttered. Let us just say that while I believe the event probably occurred, I just don’t believe that none of the monks had ever written anything Buddha said down until that meeting, of course I don’t believe Buddha could fly either.

            I also find Dr. Salomon’s statements that Buddhist scholars have up until his revelations believed that there was somewhere out there this document X from which all other Buddhist text were derived as rather sophomoric. This might have been true of none Buddhist in the west in the 19th century, but not since then. Please believe me when I say  I’m very aware of sectarianism in Buddhism.  Virtually every school of Buddhism claims to have the real form of Buddhism and know exactly what Buddha did say and what he didn’t.
        Mr. Stephen Bachelor is at this very moment making a very good living claiming that he can read the thousands of Buddhist text and through some mental acuity known only to him determine what the real Buddhist teachings are and what they are not. There is no word in the English language that summarizes the phrase just tell people what they want to hear;  no one term that describes this however it is a successful model for getting your books published in modern day America.
        Mr. Bachelor observed that modern Buddhist have a real problem with the idea of rebirth and karma so naturally using a special power of observation he has authoritatively   made the observation that despite 2000 years of traditional Buddhist teaching the Buddha never really believed in either of those two things and they were simply cultural artifacts left over from his original religion Hinduism.  Now don’t you feel better that you don’t have to believe in nasty old karma or rebirth to be a Buddhist.
        Mr. Bachelor wrote a now famous book concerning his revelation that there is no God I think it was called something like confessions of a Buddhist atheist. Mr. Bachelor of course knows that the majority of his audience will not be familiar with Akkineni Nagarjuna’s essay on the subject of God and his quite logical argument as to why no such creature could exist.  Since most of his audience are Western people who follow Zen and are probably the most poorly informed and concerning Buddhist teachings and history the most ignorant of the western Buddhist community I am sure he feels safe in claiming he discovered this idea of the Atheist Buddhist.

            In the same vein Dr. Richard Salomon is apparently willing to say that he’s the first person or scholar to realize that the monks that went down the silk Road were probably carrying with them Buddhist documents written in numerous different languages from the original Sanskrit to Chinese. His observation that determining which exact Buddhist text may have actually flowed from the mouth of the Buddha was virtually impossible is about as original as a pancake.

            A Japanese monk born on 19 January in the year 1200 AD,( oops sorry CE) in Kyoto Japan made this observation when he was about , oh I don’t know 30 years old.  In fact he was so dissatisfied with his form of Buddhism and this very issue  that he left Japan and went to China in order to do what he later called "settle the great matter".  He came back to Japan and if I have read his various writings correctly he determined that the only thing that anyone could be absolutely certain of was that Buddha taught sitting meditation.
              Interestingly enough he wrote thousands of words on Buddhism and was perhaps one of the greatest Buddhist scholars to ever live, while at the same time during his life condemning Buddhist scholarship. Well that’s Zen for you.   The great Tibetan scholar Tsongkapa and his predecessors certainly address this exact same problem themselves.

            I find it interesting that the modern Buddhist scholars  and for that matter the thousands of Buddhist students that followed these two great Buddhist scholars seem to have been completely incapable of adhering to their solution to the problem.  While Dogan was alive there arose in Japan a controversy over a certain Sutra and its authenticity. It seems there were two versions of the Sutra one with a few more verses than the other one.  Since most people knew even in his lifetime that Dogan was in fact a great Buddhist scholar they came to him and ask him which of the two versions of the Sutra were the authentic Sutra.  Dogan replied to them that if the Buddhist teacher could teach you Buddhism with a stick he picked up off the ground it was the authentic stick. Once again that’s Zen for you.
       Tsongkapa’s solution was a little more complex. In his writings he observed that the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma, that is to say Buddha's first teaching of  the four noble truths and the eight fold path was actually presented in the form that a doctor’s diagnosis and prescription much as would have been done by a doctor in Buddha’s lifetime. He saw Buddhism as a medicine and observed that the variations in the teachings of the Buddha the contradictions of the teachings and the different schools of the teachings were simply the result of each person and each society having different problems that needed to be dealt with by different  medicine,  that is to say the different  schools and texts of the Dharma.  He advised that none of these teachings these  be discarded or ignored rather that they be kept in your pharmacy for use when the need arose. Of course neither the gulag school nor the Soto Zen sect in Japan followed their founder’s advice. They are just as sectarian as anybody else in Buddhism or religion. When the 14th Dalai Lama tried to follow the founder of his schools advice on this issue fanatics in his own  school murdered 8 of his close advisers. After all those advisors were from other Tibetan schools so why not butcher them, if you don't believe this happened look it up.

                 

              It would be a great joy to me personally if the Gandahar documents were to be released so that anybody who wanted too could translate them; and if  a  complete English translation of all the documents in both the British Museum and elsewhere were either made available on the Internet to anyone who wanted to read them or at least published in an affordable book where Buddhist would have easy access to them. But I’m not get a hold my breath.