Fragment* of a Buddhist work in the ancient Aryan 

 language of Chinese Turkistan. 



1920 



Edited by Sten Konow. V^ 



[With plates xxxiii — xxxv.] 



The six manuscript leaves which are here edited seem to hail from Khotan or 

 its neighbourhood. They were bought by Dr. E. Denison Ross in Calcutta from a 

 Caucasian exile and Russian subject named Kara, who had, in his turn, acquired them 

 from Caucasian Jews, who had gone to Khotan as carpet dealers and bought the 

 leaves there. They now belong to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 



Each leaf measures 51 x 12 cm. and is written on both sides. Each side contains 

 six lines, and each line forms a complete stanza. The stanzas are usually numbered 

 at the end, commonly so that the tens and hundreds are not repeated before the units. 



The leaves themselves are numbered in the left-hand margin, fol. 325 on the 

 reverse and the remaining leaves on the obverse. 



The preservation of the leaves is, on the whole, excellent. The two last ones, 

 numbered 369 and 371 , have become more effaced than the rest and cannot be read 

 throughout with certainty. 



A leaf of the same manuscript has found its way to the Royal Ethnographical 

 Museum of Berlin. 1 



All these leaves were bought in Khotan and have probably been dug out in that 

 neighbourhood. It is perhaps possible to arrive at a definite conclusion about their 

 findplace. A leaf which apparently belongs to the same manuscript was dug out in 

 1905 by Mr. Ellsworth Huntington at Khadalik, a ruined site to the north-west of 

 Keriya. It has been illustrated on p. 206 of Mr. Huntington's book, 9 and seems to 

 belong to the same manuscript as the leaves under consideration. Now Sir Aurel 

 Stein , who excavated the site in September 1906, gives us the following information, 

 which seems to bear on the question about the origin of our manuscript. A certain 

 village official, Mullah Khwaja, had come into arrears with revenue dues to the 

 Ya-men, and he had come to think of selling antiques as a means of getting out of 

 his debts. ' ' By using his local influence he had induced men accustomed to 

 collecting fuel in the desert jungle to the north and east of Domoko to guide him 

 to some ' Kone shahrs' not far off. Scraping among the ruins at one of these small 

 sites, known to the woodmen as Khadalik, he had come upon the hoped-for * Khats.' 



1 See Zwei H andschriftenblatter in der alten arischen Literatursprache aus Chinesisch Turkistan. Von Sten Konow. 

 Sitzunesberichte der kgl. Preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1912, pp. 1127 fT. 



* See Ellsworth Huntington. The Pulse of Asia. A Journey in Central Asia, illustrating the geographic basis of 

 history. London, 1910. 



3 See M. Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay. Personal narrative oi explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost 

 China. London, I9r2, Vol. I, pp. 236 and f. 



