Gāndhārī

The practice of relic establishment was the most significant element of Buddhist religious culture in Gandhāra from the second century BCE to the second century CE.  The ritual architecture encapsulated in relic inscriptions pivots around ontological identifications which instantiate the relics as a body of the Buddha which has beneficial efficacy.
The research proposition—that new insights might be accessible through pattern analysis of formulaic sequences—indicated an ambitious infrastructure proposition.  The dissertation is a cascading program of projects to develop the foundational models, supporting platforms and enabling methodologies required to implement formulae structures and formula analysis across the corpus.  The dissertation arc returns, equipped with that infrastructure, to the characterisation of the ritual architecture of relic inscriptions.
The design and development of a platform of the scale of READ—the philological platform developed in consortium—required the deployment of a research consulting framework.  The methodologies, toolkits, and defining role of a research consultant, were exercised in a suite of consulting solutions and corpus projects.
The inherent constraints of a conventional centralised architecture necessitated the design of a corpus development framework.  The encapsulation of the TextBase methodology in READ Workbench—an Open SaaS portal—crystalizes a sustainable solution architecture for collaborative corpus development in the philological domain.
The infrastructure suite was deployed in the development of a reconstituted relic inscriptions corpus, and the implementation of a synthesized syntactic and semantic formula ontology.  The detailed analysis of formulae type, alignment and inflection produced new translations of critical passages, a ritual architecture hypothesis and a novel view of the ontological status of relics and bodies of the Buddha grounded in Gandhāran Buddhism.

This is the fourth volume of proceedings of the Āgama seminars convened by the
Āgama Research Group at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (formerly
Dharma Drum Buddhist College). It comprises nineteen studies, contributed by
eighteen different scholars, on various themes related to the Connected Collections of
discourses (suttas, sūtras) — Saṃyutta-nikāya in Pali, Saṃyukta-āgama in Sanskrit —
transmitted by different early Buddhist lineages of reciters, preserved in their Indic
originals in Gandhari, Pali and Sanskrit as well as in Chinese and Tibetan translations.
This research draws attention to fundamental methodological points posed by the
study of these scriptural collections as windows into the formation of early Buddhist
texts and the organisation of their transmission.

This is the third volume of proceedings of the Āgama seminars convened by the
Āgama Research Group at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (formerly
Dharma Drum Buddhist College). It collects academic contributions on various
aspects related to the Middle-length Collections of discourses (sūtras, suttas)
transmitted by different early Buddhist lineages of reciters, preserved in their
Indic originals in Gandhari, Pali and Sanskrit as well as in Chinese and Tibetan
translations.

A wide range of practices emerged for venerating the Buddha’s embodied presence in textual and visual relics.This article considers ways in which hagiographical narratives of previous births preserved in written and visual media may be considered as embodiments in Dharma (Dharmakāya). The study focuses on Gāndhārī Buddhist manuscripts with abbreviated written summaries of narratives labeled as Avadānas and Pūrvayogas. Results of a survey of images identified as Jātakas in Gandhāran art are also integrated for a comprehensive understanding of the iconic function of rebirth narratives, which were emplaced in the sacralized landscape of the Northwest.

This article examines the documents recovered from the Central Asian kingdom of Kroraina (Chinese Shanshan 鄯鄯), from the third to fourth centuries, as rare records of the way Buddhism was adapted outside of India during the Gupta period. In particular, the evidence for the existence of married Buddhist monks (śramana) is examined, and the reasons why this situation might have developed are explored. The introduction examines in brief the evidence for monastic marriage in other Buddhist cultures, concluding that only in Meiji-era Japan was this situation both widespread and supported by the ruling powers. This is followed by an overview of the sources, documents in Gāndhārī from the archaeological site of Niya, which reveal the existence of śramana with wives and children, and manuscripts in Sanksrit which show that the normative ideals of Buddhism, including the pratimokṣa vows of monks and nuns, were not unknown in this region. Finally, a possible explanation for the state-sanctioned existence of married monks is presented in the context of the Buddhist state rituals described by the pilgrim Faxian in the neighbouring kingdoms of Khotan and Kashgar.

内容提要：以印度本土语言书写而成的佛经原典一直得到海外印度学研究者的高度重视，也日益进入国内佛学研究者的视野。陈寅恪、汤用彤、季羡林、吕澂等先生是国内利用梵语原典研究佛学及中国古代相关文献的先驱。近几十年来，随着印度学和佛学的发展，在国内已有一批梵语巴利语学者沿着前辈学者开拓的道路继续这方面的努力。本文围绕国内外佛教文献研究现状，择要介绍最新出版的梵语、巴利语、犍陀罗语佛典的研究专著并提出自己的思考和见解，以期对国内佛学之发展有所助益。
关键词：梵语佛典，巴利语佛典，犍陀罗语佛典，研究现状，交叉学科

A customized version of Toshiyo Unebe's "EasyUnicode" keymap for Indic transliteration.  My updated version includes characters for transliterating Sanskrit (including Vedic), Prakrit, Dravidian languages, and Old Javanese.  The keylayout file can be downloaded from the second link provided (https://tinyurl.com/lubineasyunicode).
(Updated 18 January 2023.)

This research paper deals with different forms and functions of Kharoṣṭhī wooden tablets of the ancient Shan-Shan.  There are three forms, i.e. wedge tablet (kila-mutra), rectangular tablet (hasta-lekha) and label-like tablet (ganana-pravaṃnaǵa), deeply influenced by Chinese culture, which function respectively as king’s command,  legal documents and officials' private correspondence, and account books. The paper further proves one tablet as a forgery which imitates a genuine one, according to the inconsistencies in form-function, handwriting, ​and semantics.