Why would it? Early writings had a context, a specific reason. The Gandharan findings were not in ancient libraries but in vessels where the birch bark scrolls were ritually placed, as dedications or donations. In order to produce a full collection a specific reason is necessary. It’s an undertaking where for example a royal patron would have commissioned a good part of elders and bhanakas of a big monastery for this purpose. So, realistically, there would be out there what was already found: small sutta collections up to a dharmapada, very little vinaya, and heterogenous abhidhamma material.
1 Like
I’ve been watching Keneth Harl’s The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes on the Great Courses channel here in the US. He does a good job of covering the major events in detail without bogging down too much. The Kushan empire was centered on Bactria and the Silk Road trading cities in modern-day Afghanistan, and they eventually brought the Indus Valley and the upper Ganges River valley under their control. For several centuries, there was this amazing cosmopolitan mashup of Greek, Persian, and Indian culture ruled by a Hellenized steppe tribe. It was during the first few centuries CE. The extraordinary thing about the steppes tribes was that they were cultural chameleons who adopted the languages and civilized practices of the places they conquered and settled, and they consider all religions valid. If you were a holy person, they respected you. Of course, Kanishka was the most famous of their kings who patronized Buddhists.
4 Likes
Yes! But only a couple of fragments. Most of the known documents are letters, legal deeds and suchlike.
Here is document zb (probably 5th cent.). It starts off with a wish that the merit accrued from copying the text be shared by the owners’ mothers, fathers, sons, daughters etc etc. It then pays homage to various Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
The scholars who were engaged in translating these texts for the first time happened to be my teachers and PhD advisors. It was good fun to be reading these newly discovered texts with them, often before they had even been published.
7 Likes
A large stash of Sanskrit texts have been found in Afghanistan, too. At some point the Kharosthi script was abandoned in favor of Sanskrit. If memory serves, birch bark was also abandoned and palm leaves were used in the Gandharan Buddhist world. It seems that by this time it had become more common to have written versions of more than just individual, or even partial, sutras. So I think it’s possible that there are (or were) at least one whole Tripitaka written down.
Wasn’t Gandhara already going into decline by the time Faxian went there? I believe it definitely had by the time of Xuanzang.
Richard Salomon says that because of the humid climate of South/Southeast Asia, palm leaf manuscripts have little to no chance of surviving for several hundred years. They would just rot away. I think the oldest palm leaf manuscripts that have been found in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, or Thailand are from the 17th century. The extremely dry climate of Northern India, though, is fairly good for preserving texts. Humans are the major problem there.
1 Like
The whole canon might take up a lot of space, albeit rolled up birch bark scrolls may be more space efficient than ola manuscripts.
I can see why human memory can be a better storage device. 
4 Likes
I’ll settle for a full set of Agamas then. No biggie
2 Likes
Wow. Where are these?
1 Like
Not entirely Buddhist manuscripts, but this would be how 50 k or so of them would look like.
2 Likes
While most of the manuscripts, including all those on which our modern editions are based, are from 17th century or later, there are a few manuscripts that are older than this. The oldest is from the 13th century, and SuttaCentral is currently transcribing it for the first time.
However, this doesn’t affect the point: there are thousands upon thousands of manuscripts throughout Sri Lanka, yet among them there is not a single complete Tipitaka in manuscript form. Or at least, so we were told: the Sri Lankan government is engaged in a survey to discover and collate manuscripts, and having surveyed the bulk of the monasteries they had not found any complete Tipitaka. So there may be one out there, but it seems unlikely.
This is the state of affairs currently, and there is no reason to think it was ever any different. Manuscripts were copied and stored one at a time, and monasteries had a scattering of different manuscripts. The physical evidence of the Gandharan texts reinforces this. Given the sheer logistics of doing it all at once, it’s quite possible, I think, that no single, unified Tipitaka in manuscript form existed until the advent of the printed book.
4 Likes
It’s interesting that in only two places (China and Myanmar) did Buddhists commit (or try to commit) their whole cannon into a more permanent form, like stone. In China there are the stone steles at Yinjun Temple. In Myanmar we have the stone tablets at Kuthodaw Pagoda. I suppose the enormity of the task simply made it too difficult for most Buddhists to attempt.
The carved woodblocks used in China and Tibet to print sutras onto paper might also count. A quick internet search shows that the oldest sutra created using this method is from the Tang Dynasty. It was a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed on paper, and it was found in Dunhuang (which is probably why it survived for so long).
Interestingly, it seems that there were other places within China where individual sutras were carved into boulders and mountainsides, some of which weren’t discovered until the 1990s! This book is part 1 of research documenting these.
1 Like
Phutthamonthon says hi!
And there is a mostly-completed project in Colombo, too. It’s kept deliberately quiet, but I’ve visited a couple of times, and the chief monk there is doing an excellent job. He’s creating a stone carved tipitaka from the Buddha Jayanthi edition, which he is editing and correcting as he goes.
Tripitaka Koreana is feeling left out of this conversation!
7 Likes
About Indian tripitakas, it seems that the library at Nalanda must have had many texts. The library at its largest had three multi-storey buildings, the tallest of which was said to be nine storeys tall. I’m not sure if the manuscripts were grouped into tripitakas, per se, but it seems reasonable to think that the major Buddhist works would have been represented.
For Chinese canons, I think there were several early canons compiled in the 6th century, which were just hand-copied. The oldest extant canon is printed, which I think is the Jin Tripitaka (12th century), which is about 7000 scrolls. For scale, one agama is about 50 scrolls. There were a lot of canons copied to build merit.
Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu! Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Indeed. My bad! Amazing!
1 Like