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.
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.
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))
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)
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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
