Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

G
GANDHA RA. See India; India, Northwest
GA NDHA RI, BUDDHIST LITERATURE IN
Gandhar, formerly known as Northwestern Prakrit, is
a Middle Indo-Aryan vernacular of the ancient region
of Gandhara in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent
around modern Peshawar in northern Pakistan.
Gandhar is closely related to its parent language, Sanskrit,
and to its sister language, Pali. Gandhar was
written in the Kharosth script, running from right to
left, unlike all other Indo-Aryan languages that were
written in Brahm script and its derivatives, which ran
from left to right. In the early centuries of the common
era, Gandhar was used as a religious and administrative
language over a wide area of South and
Central Asia.
For many years, Gandhar was attested primarily in
Buddhist inscriptions, coin legends, and secular documents.
Only one manuscript of a Buddhist text, the
Gandharl Dharmapada, discovered near Khotan in
Chinese Central Asia in 1892, was known. But in the
1990s, many fragmentary Gandhar manuscripts on
birch bark and palm leaf came to light. Most of these
now belong to three major collections: the British
Library scrolls, the Senior scrolls, and the Schøyen
fragments. These texts are still being studied and published,
so that knowledge of Buddhist literature in
Gandhar is at a preliminary stage. But the texts clearly
show that, as previously suspected, Gandhar was one
of the major Buddhist languages, with an extensive literature
that probably constituted one or more independent
canons or proto-canons.
The Gandhar manuscripts date from about the first
to third centuries C.E. They include the oldest surviving
manuscript remains of any Buddhist tradition and
present a unique source for the study of the formation
of Buddhist literature. Although the circumstances of
their discoveries are not well documented, most of the
manuscripts apparently came from Buddhist monastic
sites in eastern Afghanistan, such as Hadda and
BAMIYAN, where they were buried in clay pots or other
containers.
The twenty-nine British Library scrolls constitute a
diverse collection of texts and genres written in various
hands and formats. The most prominent genres
are legends (AVADANA or pu rvayoga), sutras, scholastic
and ABHIDHARMA texts, and commentaries on groups
of verses. The Senior collection, consisting of twentyfour
scrolls, is more unitary in that all of the manuscripts
were written by the same scribe and most of
them are sutras. The Schøyen fragments comprise over
one hundred small remnants from miscellaneous texts,
very few of which had been identified as of 2002.
Gandhar sutras include versions of well-known
texts such as the Rhinoceros Su tra (Pali, Khaggavisanasutta)
and the Saṅglti-su tra, both in the British Library
collection. The same collection also includes a fragment
of a group of short sutras arranged on a numerical
basis, like the Aṅguttaranikaya of the Pali canon
and Ekottarikagama of the Sanskrit canon. Among the
many sutras in the Senior collection are Gandhar versions
of the Samaññaphala-sutta, which is part of the
Dlghanikaya in the Pali canon, and of the Cu lagosiṅgasutta
of the Pali Majjhimanikaya, as well as several others
that correspond to Sam yuttanikaya suttas, such as
the Veludvareyya-sutta and Parilaha-sutta. The Schøyen
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