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)
Activity
Title
Véronique Madeleine Kremmer (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), France) - The Tocharian A Saundaranandacaritanāṭaka
Date
September 15, 2022
Place
34. Deutscher Orientalistentag Freie Universität Berlin 100 Jahre.
Description
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.)
