Ingo Strauch

The project will investigate the beginnings of Buddhist exchange across the Bay of Bengal based on the inscriptions of Vijayapuri (modern Nagarjunakonda) in India and Sriksetra (near modern Pyay) in Myanmar. Combining the expertise of five leading scholars from Europe and the United States, it will produce a state-of-the-art digital publication of these documents, and a volume of articles dealing with early Buddhist networks and the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asia. Crossing the academic divide between South and Southeast Asia, it will make a key contribution to the decipherment of the Pyu language, address the challenge that early Buddhism in Myanmar poses to the notion of a ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, and refine current models of the diffusion of Buddhism across Asia.

The project will bring to fruition the study of five important birch-bark manuscripts of the “Bajaur Collection”:
1. A Gāndhārī version of the Dakṣiṇāvibhaṅga-Sūtra from a Madhyamāgama (fragment BC 1)
2. A fragment of a Gāndhārī Prātimokṣasūtra (BC 13)
3. A manuscript with two Gāndhārī Karmavācanā formulae (BC 7)
4. A protective text featuring the nāga king Manasvin (BC 3)
5. The “Bajaur Mahāyāna Sūtra” (BC 2) (in collaboration with Andrea Schlosser)
All texts will be published for a first time in the form of a critical edition, accompanied by a translation, a detailed evaluation of their relation to parallel texts in various languages of the Buddhist transmission (Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese) and a
commentary. The project is carried out under the auspices of the project “Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhara” in Munich. The results of the project will be published in the series “Gandharan Buddhist Texts.”