The great significance of the scriptural manuscripts written on the bantam tree in Gandhara.VIETNAMESE TRANSLATE ENGLISH BY=VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST NUN=THICH CHAN TANH. From the last century, people have found scattered the oldest Buddhist manuscripts (manuscripts) written by Kharosthi script buried in Buddhist monuments in Gandhāra, northern Afghanistan. The ancient sutra originated in Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist area in the north of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The ancient sutra originated in Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist area in the north of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it was not until September 1994, after the Taliban rebellion destroyed two great Buddha statues at Bamiyan Gandhāra, that an anonymous guest sent three terracotta stalks containing 27 scrolls of Buddhist scriptures written in Kharosthi writing on the bark of bhoja trees. -patra to the British Library, Buddhist researchers have just discovered the importance of these manuscripts. Early Buddhist Manuscripts Poject (EBMP) quickly established the "The Bristish Library / University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Poject (EBMP) Project." Ancient documents written in this Kharosthi script. Not only research and publishing, EBMP also trains a class of graduate students and postdoctors to prepare the continuation of a long-term research program. After twenty years of operation, EBMP has become a prestigious site where international scholars can collaborate and share their research efforts on ancient Buddhism. The first is to share the source of Buddhist scriptures in Gandhāra written in the ancient Kharosthi script that many years ago spread around the world. Summarizing, in addition to the British Library Collection, The Senior Collection is a collection by British researcher named Robert Senior. Compared with the British Library Collection, this collection, although also made of birch bark and put in terracotta racks, is newer. Salomon said it was written a little later than the Library of London (that is, around the end of the first century) (1). The good thing about this collection, however, is that instead of including many texts, the Senior Collection contains intact sutras. Senior has more than 20 Gandhāra tree bark texts also written in Kharosthi in terracotta loaf and is probably buried in antiquity close to the British Library Collection. Salomon introduces “While the British Library Collection is written in many free-form styles and by many writers, the Senior Collections seem to use only one brushstroke because it is written by only one writer. If the British Library Collection is fragmented and appears to be incomplete, the Senior text shows perfect before being buried ”(2). Last and foremost, Salomon reports that most of the texts in Senior look like they are in Theravāda's Saṃyutta Nikāya and Theravāda's A-function. This shows that the Sanskrit Jabhana hypothesis does not translate from Sanskrit as many people think before, but from the local language called Gandhārī Prākrit (remember the texts Brahmi and Kharosthi used to write the common language Prākrit. Gandhāra (called Gandhārī Prākrit) before and then used to write Sanskrit - deducing that many Sanskrit texts may be older than Pāli and Sanskrit because Pāli was at the same time as Sanskrit but after the time of Ashoka (reigned 272). -236 BC) people recently used the script Kharosthi and Brahmi to write Sanskrit and Pāli (3). 2. Collections Schøyen The Schøyen Collection is originally a collection by Martin Schøyen who was a Swedish collector of a number of Buddhist scriptures written on bark, palm leaves and leather dating from the second to the eighth centuries, from the Bamiyan Gandhāra caves. Most of these Buddhist sutras were bought by Schøyen, with the rest bought by other Japanese collectors. The language of the sutras is the common language Gandhāra (Gandhārī Prākrit) but there is also a part of the Sanskrit scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism. Most of this collection is written in Brahmi, only partially written in Kharosthi (Brahmi was at the same time as Kharosthi and was the forerunner of Tat-đàn / Siddham) (4). A special part of the Schøyen collection is that in the Kharosthi writings identified as belonging to the Dharmaguptaka (Dharmaguptaka) of the Six-Brahmin Dharma (ṣādpāramitā) is the basic dharma of the Bodhisattva. of Mahayana Buddhism (5). Currently the Mahayana disciplines are studying the four parts of the law (四分 律) - translated by the Buddha-da-da-amnesty and the Buddhist Mindfulness Architecture - that is also the canon of the Dharma. 3. Collection of Washington University After the establishment of the "Early Buddhist Literature Study Project" (EBMP), the University of Washington also attempted to purchase more ancient Buddhist literature for this project. In 2002, the University of Washington Library also bought a collection of Buddhist scriptures written on birch bark written between the first and second centuries. This is the treatise of the monasteries of the 18 sectarian tradition. The content of this collection is the discussion of the Abhidharma lecture on Suffering (Duhkha) in the Four Noble Truths. the Library of Congress also bought a birch-bark scroll but was broken up and put in a fountain pen box so the head and end were lost. only 80 percent of the content remains - the document is likely to be chopped up to be hidden while the Gandhāra region is a black market for international archaeologists and antiques traders and artifacts. neck. This is a sutra called the Bahubuddha Sutra, a sutra like the "Mahāvastu" about the Buddha's past life as well as the practice of the Bodhisattva of the Lokattara-vāda. ) one of the 18 sects of the A-Pi-Talk period. The prime content is an introduction to the history of the Vinaya teachings. The remainder are the same sections as the Jātaka (6) teachings on Karma and the Buddha's past incarnations are contained in the Small Sutras and the Avadana. This is an important sutra as the hyphen between Hinayana and Mahayana. 5. Collect "Split" Another very important collection of Buddhist scriptures written on the birch bark by Khagosthi is called "Split Collection". This is an important collection of Buddhist scriptures related to early Mahayana Buddhism but has not been fully collected because some parts are still in the hands of a few unnamed collectors. According to Harry Falk (7) the only person who wrote about this collection, this document was seen in Peshawar Gandhāra in 2004 but then lost track of its owner in addition to belonging to the government. According to Falk, this collection was found in a cave in the Gandhāra region, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2012, Harry Falk and Seishi Karashima took from this collection, edited and published the manuscript of the very familiar Prajñā Sutras of Mahayana, "Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) (8). According to the carbon test, this manuscript was recorded very early, around the year 75, and thus will be the oldest Prajñā sutta we can see. Its content is similar to that of the Sanskrit translation of Chi-long-ca-thunder (Lokaksema) (9) translated around 180. Comparing this bark sutra to the familiar traditional Sanskrit text contained in the Great Bodhisattva we can see that the traditional sutra is merely a translation of this sutra because the evidence that there are many words and expressions in the traditional text is not in the Gandhāra language. And this bark manuscript is a transcription from an earlier text, The Kharosthi collections have been exploited Here we also need to recall the collection of famous Kharosthi texts in the past but dated later than the six that we introduce above. The first is the collection of Prajñā sutras discovered in Gilgit, Gandhāra (Gilgit Buddhist Manuscripts) edited by Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra in 1959-1974 (10), introduced by Edward Conze in “The Gilgit. Manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā ”(Orientale Roma XXVI series, Ismeo Rome 1960) (11) and I have repeated it in studies on Nagarjuna. The second is the manuscript of the Dhammapada of the common language Gandhāra (Gandhārī Prākrit) also written in Kharosthi. This Dharma Sutra is very important and suffers a rather long fate, so it should be brief here. First, a part of the "Gandhārī Dharmapada" was found by the French traveler Dutreuit de Rhins in 1892. It was also during this time that the Russian consulate bought several other pieces. Through many separate studies, until the 1960s Sanskrit professor of University of London John Borough synthesized both texts and published under the name The Gandhārī Dharmapada also published by Oxford University in 1962. The value of the Buddhist scriptures in Gandhara After twenty years of operation, Professor Richard Salomon has successfully run the organization "Research Project on Primitive Buddhist texts" (EBMP). As a researcher, Richard Salomon and colleagues published important classic works on this topic from EBMP. As a good administrator, Salomon successfully operated a center of international stature, both in terms of close contacts between researchers around the world, and good relationships with sponsors. and sponsoring the program. Most importantly, he also has a foresight to the future, so as not to forget the task of training successors to a very unique but also very limited study of ancient Buddhist texts. in Kharosthi. For twenty years, Salomon has also trained two classes of doctoral and postdoctoral students to prepare for that future (12). In 1999 Salomon published the first book introducing a general introduction to the purpose and activity program called “Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments”. Twenty years later (in 2018) Salomon introduced the second volume, reporting on achievements after twenty years of hard work “The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhāra: An Introduction with Selected Translations”. The book was warmly welcomed and applauded by the majority of readers and researchers in the EBMP program. However, there are still criticisms. It is not personal criticism or questionable content of published works. But this may also be a criticism of overly willing people who require EBMP to do more and more deeply. Criticism of those who admire but still criticize for not seeing the importance of many difficult problems of the researchers in the process. Here we can re-ask the question and find ways to respond in a more positive way. I need to say right here that the problem is not a mistake or Salomon's responsibility. He did his job, as a cook, the food was done. How to eat, add spices, or eat with something is part of the user of the material he and his team have completed. However, I do not think Salomon and its fellow researchers will stop the work of artifact collectors. They know that importance and sooner or later come to deeper and broader exploration. First of all, almost all researchers on Mahayana Buddhism believe that there is no document on the stage of the beginning of the Mahayana scriptures. Until the twentieth century, researchers found the connection between Hinayana and Mahayana in a number of sutras. Thich Minh Chau's 1962 dissertation "Comparing the A-function Sutras and the Pāli Sutras" (The Chinese Madhyana Āgama and the Pali Majjhima Nikāya: A Comparative Study); then the research of the scholar Analayo "A Comparative Study of the Majjhima-nikaya" in 2011; both volumes of Abhidharma and the Prajñā (Abhidharma and the Prajñā). -pāramitā Sūtras) (13) is a typical representative for the direction of studying literacy. However, today with these Kharosthi manuscripts, we have for the first time concrete documentary evidence to prove that some of the Sino-Buddhist texts have been translated directly from the Kharosthi text, not from the common. from Sanskrit (Sanskrit). So here the importance of exploiting the Kharosthi text documents will help us to study more deeply the studies of Thich Minh Chau, Analayo and An Thuan on three fields of continuity: (1) Studying Buddhist literature "pre-Sanskrit" means that in the first documents, the head of the Buddhist scriptures are written down in writing before being used to write Sanskrit or Pāli (14); (2) Studying the Chinese scriptures translated directly from the Kharosthi script (or through the oral language predating the writing period); (3) Research on the development of Mahayana Buddhist scriptures (on specific texts other than theory or myth or faith as before). These three research steps I think Salomon and the researchers of Buddhism are not ignorant. Also note here, as already introduced, in addition to the British Library Collection, there are many other collections of Gandhāra literature scattered in many major libraries and museums around the world as six collections that I have just introduced above (in these collections there are both earlier archaeologists from the British Library Collection, and are more related to Mahayana texts). So the current international scholar is not only limited to the British Library Collection, which is being focused on by the University of Washington, but also studies other collections as can be seen in the two papers “Kharosthi Manuscript Fragments in the Pelliot. Collection, Bibliotheque Nationale de France ”(Parts of the Kharosthi text contained in the Pelliot Collection in the National Library of France) by Salomon published in Bulletin d 'Études Indiennes 16, 1998 and "Fragments of a Gandhāri Version of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra in the Schøyen Collection" (Parts of the master Gandhāra in the Schøyen Collection) by Mark Allon and Salomon in volume 1 of the collection. Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, Oslo Hemles Publishing. So even though I have not read the contents, I read the names of the books to be published by GBT such as Mahāyāna Sūtras in Gāndhārī in the Schøyen Collection: The Bodhisattvapiṭaka- and Sarvapuṇyasamuccaya-sūtras (Mahayana sutras of Gandhāra in the Schøyen Collection); The Gāndhārī Bahubuddha-sūtra: The Library of Congress Scroll found that they were probably following the three-step research path that I just outlined above. 8 sets of Buddhist scriptures often chant and the basic meaning of each (*) Please repeat the Sanskrit and Pāli Buddhist scriptures only appear after the time when the Māgadhī Buddhist scriptures were written in Kharosthi, typically during the time of King Aoka (as king 268-232 before the calendar). write Buddhist scriptures in writing. The word on the Dharma Pillars of King Asoka (Edicts of Asoka) has two important points: First, the word Kharosthi or Brahmi on the Dharma Pillar is used to write the Māgadhī language, not the Sanskrit language. Second, the Dharma Pillars, even though they use one or two Buddhist nouns (such as "superior lady" upāsaka) and mention the name of the Buddha "Shakyamuni", never mention Buddhist teachings or referring to Buddhist scriptures. From the Quy Suong dynasty (50-300), people often used texts to write Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. So Professor Salomon, In short, to say that Salomon or his associates did not pay attention to research on the importance of the Kharosthi manuscripts is only too early criticism of those wishing to know the origins of the Buddhist scriptures. The Mahayana that I have presented in the book "Buddhist scriptures: Origin and Development".ENDS=NAM MO SHAKYAMUNI BUDDHA.( 3 TIMES ).GOLDEN AMITABHA MONASTERY=VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST NUN=THICH CHAN TANH.AUSTRALIA,SYDNEY.19/2/2021.