British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A HUNDRED YEARS OF DUNHUANG, 1907-2007
Abstracts
Buddhist Sogdian texts and their Chinese originals
Barbara Meisterernst and Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst, Turfanforschung, Berlin
This is a report on Sogdian Buddhist texts in relation to their Chinese sources. The identification of the often well-preserved Buddhist Sogdian texts from Dunhuang as translations from Chinese originals was one of the two keys that opened Sogdian up (the other one was the Christain Sogdian texts available to Müller in Berlin). The work on the texts in Paris and London by Gauthiot, Reichert, Weller amd MacKenzie will be surveyed.. The issues arising from that and from the Sogdian version of the Sutra of the Causes and Effects of Actions and its relation to the Chinese version will be presented. Perspectives for further work will be demonstrated with another Dunhuang text (in Paris) as an example.