On Tuesday, May 6, 2025, a captivating lecture titled “Everything You Didn’t Know You Ever Wanted to Know about Buddhist Manuscript Cultures in Greater Gandhāra” was delivered by GCBS’s Prof. Charles DiSimone as part of our Permanent Training in Buddhist Studies lecture series. The lecture explored the fascinating manuscript cultures of Greater Gandhāra, an area that once served as a thriving center of Buddhist activity and flourished well into the first millennium CE. This region, which spans modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India, was a pivotal crossroads for the development of Buddhist thought and practices.
One of the key insights shared in the lecture was the use of birch bark, rather than paper, as the primary medium for Buddhist manuscripts in Gandhāra. Birch bark, a durable and flexible material, was ideal for preserving the intricate texts that would define the Buddhist literary heritage of the region.
The lecture shed light on the unique artistic elements found in these manuscripts, particularly the use of arsenic pigments and floral embellishments to highlight rubrics. It also emphasized the use of Bamiyan type I and Bamiyan type II scripts for recording Mahāyāna and Śrāvakayāna texts respectively.
Throughout the lecture, Prof. DiSimone emphasized the importance of several major manuscript discoveries that have enriched our understanding of Buddhist manuscript cultures. These include notable finds in locations such as Gilgit, Bamyan, and Mes Aynak. At the same time, he cautioned against using the cashes found there for making overall statements about the Buddhist tradition of the region, as they represent only a small portion of what originally circulated there. In the final part of the lecture, Prof. DeSimone introduced the recent excavations of in Mes Anyak and the work for digitalization of manusctipts his team carries out within the framework of his ERC project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra. Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium of the common era”.
