Posted on Friday 10 October 2003 to Story So Far

Scholars decipher a stunning find, an unknown canon in an ancient dialect.

Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts at the University of Washington and at the British Library are confirming a longstanding hypothesis that an ancient tradition of Buddhist literature existed in Gandhari, a dialect of Prakrit, an early Indic language that developed from Sanskrit.They are confident that that canon may soon take its place next to the four other great traditions of Buddhist texts: the living traditions of Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan, and the ancient, fragmentary one of Sanskrit. The Gandhari canon may prove to be a crucial link in understanding the way Buddhism moved northward along the Silk Road, into Central and East Asia, even as it largely died out in India, where it was born in the fifth or fourth century BC.  [link]