PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

102Pacific Worldeast and the west. Behind the establishment of the Mongolian Empire wasthe great contribution of knowledge and information by the Uigur people.Due to those contributions, the homelands of the Uigurs were protected bythe Mongols—very exceptional treatment for a minority ethnic groupunder the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1260–1367). Uigur people were grantedthe status of second rank in the empire’s ethnic hierarchy and playedsignificant roles in politics, economics, culture, and religion as the leadersof “people of colored eyes.”For example, the Mongols, who did not have a writing system, firstborrowed Uigur scripts to eventually develop Mongolian scripts. MostUigur civilian officers working in the Mongolian capital city Dadu (modernBeijing) as officers of the “people of colored eyes” were Buddhists. Theyused blockprinting, the most advanced printing technology of the time, topublish great numbers of Buddhist texts and sent them to the people livingin their homeland in the Turfan area. Many printed texts discovered in EastTurkistan were texts published during the Yuan Dynasty, and most of theprinted materials are Buddhist texts. They are printed not only in Uigur butinclude texts in Sanskrit and Xixia language. It is known that the peoplewho printed and bound these texts were Chinese because the page numbersare in Chinese characters.Here I would like to point out the number of languages from whichUigurs were translating Buddhist texts into their own, as shown inChart A. 6 Furthermore, the Uigurs followed the tradition of theirpredecessors to restore the cave temples, add balcony temples, andrepaint Buddhist wall paintings at such sites as Bezeklik.Uigur Buddhism was the last of the Buddhist cultures that flourishedin East Turkistan and came to the end in the mid-fourteenth centurytogether with the destruction of the Yuan Empire.III. Results of the Philological Studies on Central Asian Buddhist TextsIn the beginning of the twentieth century, the major powers in Europeand Japan began sending expeditions to excavate Buddhist sites in easternTurkistan. The Japanese Otani expeditions and German expeditions wereboth focused on the area between Turfan and Kucha. Their collections are,therefore, related to each other. The textural material collected by theGerman expeditions reportedly includes twenty-four writing systems inseventeen languages, a fact which stunned the academic circles of OrientalStudies of the early twentieth century. A part of the collections from theOtani expeditions 7 is stored at Ryukoku University—where I am currentlyaffiliated—and I have examined the existing text materials and discoveredthat they include thirteen writing systems in fifteen languages. 8