sample manuscript for publication

HisTochText - History of the Tocharian texts of the Pelliot Collection

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 788205)

Conferences, Seminars, Symposia

Title
Emilie Arnaud-Nguyêñ defended her doctoral thesis entitled "Study of Central Asian papers stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Pelliot collection): ​ History, manufacturing process(es) and conservation issues​"
Date
Octobre 04,2023
Place
Paris
Summary
The project « HisTochText » (History of the Tocharian texts of the Pelliot collection) comprises macro and microscopic analysis of archaeological papers from the Pelliot Collection stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (national library of France). This collection, little looked at, shows many conservation problems (chemical, mechanical and biological). Research was undertaken to trace the history of restorations with the main purpose of understanding the papers’ current state of conservation and set up a restoration protocol. This process proved to be complex and time-consuming. The multitude of archiving locations and the lack of indexing renders their localisation difficult. The help from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s staff is an indispensable asset. To this day, a lot of information has been updated (restoration campaigns, materials used …). However, many documents have yet to be found, leaving some questions unresolved.
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
TEZ lecture series winter semester 2022/2023 Religious places in Turkey: change, change, continuity
Date
November 9, 2022–February 8, 2023
Place
Asia-Africa Institute, room 221, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, east wing, Hamburg
Summary
November 9, 2022–February 8, 2023, Wednesdays, 6–8 p.m. ct Asia-Africa Institute, room 221, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, east wing, Hamburg access link (ZOOM) , meeting ID: 647 3740 5662, identification code: 78035594 In the winter semester 2022/2023, the lecture series of the TurkeyEuropeCenter is dedicated to religious places in Turkey. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the lectures deal with the historical changes in and of places of worship, saints' tombs and pilgrimage sites, some of which extend to the present day. The phenomena to be addressed include the takeover of religious places by other faith communities, changes in their use and their structural and decorative transformation. The lectures are intended to convey a picture of the religious diversity of Turkey in the pre-Ottoman and Ottoman times as well as in the epoch after the founding of the republic, with state religious policy also being discussed again and again. The series focuses on religious places that Muslims and members of various Sufi orders, Alevis and Yazidis, as well as Christians of different denominations used in the past and sometimes still visit today. Some of these sites are so-called Shared Sacred Places, as they serve different communities to carry out their religious practice. We offer our lecture series as a hybrid event, which means you can attend in person or online via ZOOM. If you are present, we ask you to wear an FFP2 mask. Since the University of Hamburg is constantly updating its corona-related hygiene rules, please find out about the current status on our homepage, where you will also find further information about the program.
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
The Tocharian Lexicon from an Abhidharmic Perspective: Recent Findings
Date
September 12-17, 2022
Place
The Freie Universität Berlin
Summary
In this talk we will show how an Abhidharma perspective can clarify some aspects of the Tocharian lexicon. We will introduce findings from our study on the Tocharian A manuscripts 384–386, a commentary on the Abhidharmāvatāra-prakaraṇa. Among the many new proposals we make are masal-yamtsune ‘causality’ as a partial calque of Skt. pratyaya; tkāllune ‘elucidation,’ translation of Skt. vicāra, from the root tkälā - ‘illuminate;’ yulā as an adverb used to calque the Sanskrit preverb ava; and the meaning of the root rätk- ~ ritk- ‘raise, arouse’. We will also address Abhidharmic elements in other texts, especially in the Udānālaṅkāra. This text helps to demonstrate that TB waräṣṣälñe and TA wrāṣlune, the translations of Skt. bhāvanā ‘ development, cultivation’, are based on the Abhidharmic explanation of this term as vāsana ‘perfuming, infusing’. (Adam Alvah Catt (Kyoto University), Athanaric Huard (EPHE, PSL), Yuima Inaba (Kyoto Kōka Women’s University))
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Title
The literary making of the Maitreya-avadāna-vyākaraṇa and the Maitreyasamiti-nāṭaka
Date
September 12-17, 2022
Place
The Freie Universität Berlin
Summary
Our contribution aims to explore the connections between two Tocharian A works on Maitreya, the Maitreya-avadāna-vyākaraṇa (MAV) and the Maitreyasamiti-nāṭaka (MSN). Since Lévi (1925), it is admitted that the MSN bears close connections with an Avadāna collection related to the Sūtra of the Wise and the Fool (Xián yú jīng 賢愚經). We argue that another important source for the composition of the MSN is the MAV. This conclusion can be reached from linguistic and literary arguments. Most importantly, both texts are very close to each other and share exclusive similarities, as shown in recent literature (Chamot-Rooke 2022 and Huard 2020). This opens a new angle for interpreting the composition of both texts in the broader perspective of Maitreyan literature. Chamot-Rooke, Timothée. 2022."Back to the Caustic Lye Stream: A Revision of the Tocharian Fragment A 226 from the Maitreyāvadānavyākaraṇa." Tocharian and Indo-European Studies. Huard, Athanaric. 2020. "The End of Mahākāśyapa and the Encounter with Maitreya: Two Leaves of a Maitreya-Cycle in Archaic TB." Tocharian and Indo-European Studies 20: 1-82. Lévi, Sylvain. 1925. "Le Sūtra du sage et du fou dans la littérature de l'Asie Centrale." Journal Asiatique 207: 305 - 332. * Timothée Chamot-Rooke, Athanaric Huard (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris / ERC HisTochText)
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
The Tocharian A Saundaranandacaritanāṭaka
Date
September 12-17, 2022
Place
The Freie Universität Berlin
Summary
A non-negligible portion of the preserved manuscripts in Tocharian A, especially from the Berlin Collection (Tocharische Handschriften Turfan, THT), have been identified by Sieg & Siegling (1921) as a retelling of Aśvaghoṣa's Saundarananda, a Sanskrit kāvya work detailing the life of the Buddha's handsome half-brother Nanda. The Tocharian work, presumably based on Aśvaghoṣa's epic, is a poetic campūcomposition alternating prose and verse. Its title could be restored as Saundaranandacaritanāṭaka, indicating that it was intended to be performed in front of an audience, possibly in the form of a recitation rather than a dramatic reenactment. Almost a hundred years after their initial publication, the subsisting fragments have remained largely untranslated due to their poor state of preservation. Recent discoveries of parallel texts and manuscript joinings have made it possible to interpret and translate some portions. The findings seem to suggest that the Tocharian work, while certainly presenting clear parallels to Aśvaghoṣa's Saundarananda, also significantly expands on it and draws from various sources. This paper will present the results of an in-depth philological study of the fragments usually attributed to the Tocharian Saundaranandacaritanāṭaka (THT 89 - 143, parts of THT 144 - 211). The aim of this project is to restore as much as possible of the text and plot, as well as establish the exact relationship of this Buddhist drama with Aśvaghoṣa's epic and other Buddhist texts known in Central Asia at this time. (Sieg, Emil, Siegling, Wilhelm. 1921. Tocharische Sprachreste. I. Band. Berlin / Leipzig: Walter De Gruyter.)
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
New findings in Tocharian literature and language
Date
September 12-17,2022
Place
University of Berlin
Summary
Since the Vienna conference (June 2013, edited in 2015), the Tocharology has enjoyed advances based on the study of Tocharian texts in their religious, i.e., Buddhist, cultural and historical contexts. The HisTochText (History of the Tocharian texts of the Pelliot collection) project (supported by the European Research Council. Advanced Grant. Action number 788205, 2018-2023), aims to investigate the manuscript culture of Buddhism in the Kucha region, through crossing of several relevant parameters: materiality of the manuscripts, formatting of Buddhist books, paleography, genres of Tocharian (A and B) literature, Buddhist phraseology, etc. This multidisciplinary approach leads to significant results in the identification of Tocharian manuscripts. A case in point is the series of leaves PK NS 1-6, belonging to a manuscript found in Subashi, but in Tocharian A, not in Tocharian B, as expected in the Kucha region. A new edition is in preparation by A. Huard, K. Laclavetine and G.-J. Pinault. The interpretation has much benefited from new images and their treatment through several filters, in the frame of the HisTochText project. This rare manuscript provides a Tocharian parallel to the Bower manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford), 5th/6th century CE, written in Sanskrit, which has been found in Buddhist ruins, also near Kucha, edited and translated by A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (Calcutta, 1912). The content of the TA manuscript is heterogeneous as well: first, a magical text (mixed with Sanskrit formulas), and second, part of a book of omens through wooden sticks, which has further parallels in Central Asia.- Georges-Jean Pinault (EPHE, France)
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Title
The characters that shaped the silk road
Date
February 2018 – 31 January 2021
Place
University of Vienna
Summary
From the 2nd century CE on, Buddhist communities and monasteries developed along the trade routes of the ancient Silk Road in and around the Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. These were centers of writing, copying, translating, and transmitting texts similar to the monasteries in medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Saka were the major languages of the monasteries in the Tarim Basin. The most important writing system these languages were written in a special Central Asian variety of the Indian Brahmi script. The earliest material written in this Tarim Brahmi is among the oldest attested Buddhist texts. Most of the material written in Tarim Brahmi is scattered over different editions and not digitally searchable. It is the goal of this FWF START project to encode all texts written in Tarim Brahmi available following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, to link the text witnesses to their digital facsimiles on the character level and to publish this material together with a TEI-encoded dictionary in an online database. For the first time, this will allow the comprehensive paleographic investigation of this writing system. For this, all quantifiable features of all characters, ligatures, and words will be extracted and compared using software tools. This will, for the first time, make it possible to identify scribes, scribal schools, as well as regional and diachronic variants of Tarim Brahmi. In the XML database this linguistic, philological, and paleographic data will be combined and published through a web application. The cooperation project with the university of Vienna is carried out by linguist and Central Asian scholar Hannes A. Fellner; the ACDH-CH is responsible for data modelling, development of the database and the text technological stack for enriching and analysing the encoded material.
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
"Material Culture in Central Asia".
Date
February 10, 2020
Place
Paris
Summary
Workshop "Material Culture in Central Asia". Paris, INHA, Monday February 10, 2020
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
First Day of Vedic and Pāṇinean Studies
Date
June 12, 2019
Place
INHA, 6 rue des Petits Champs 75002 PARIS
Summary
This day has the same title and is part of the heritage of the famous series of studies by Louis Renou on Vedic poetry and the grammatical literature of ancient India,series, the first volume of which inaugurated, in 1955, the collection of “Publications de l’Institut of Indian Civilization” from the College de France.
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
Indian Worlds Seminar
Date
February 13, 2019
Place
New Sorbonne University - Paris 3, centre Censier 13 rue de Santeuil, 75005 Paris
Summary
The Indian Worlds seminar, organized by the UMR Iranian and Indian Worlds, proposes to present current or recently published research on the Indian and Indianized worlds — essentially corresponding to the present-day countries of South Asia and South Asia. Is , carried out by teacher-researchers, confirmed researchers and doctoral students from the UMR or by guest speakers.
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Goal of the Buddha path
Title
Tocharian Literature and Buddhism on the Silk Road
Date
October, 2018
Place
E.P.H.E Paris
Summary
The project is funded for five years. It associates philologists (post-docs and doctoral students) from the EPHE - PSL with researchers from the Center for Research on Conservation (USR 3224, National Museum of Natural History). It calls on international experts in the fields of paper (Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg), the philology of Buddhist texts, and includes collaborations with researchers who work on comparable holdings of other libraries and museums around the world.
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Goal of the Buddha path
erc european commission-project manuscript tocharian