The Silk Road: A New History (50 page)

15.
Buddhist scholars debate the relationship of two Buddhist schools: the Sarvāstivādins and the Mūlasarvāstivādins, with which many fewer texts from Kucha are associated. See Ogihara Hirotoshi, “Researches about Vinaya-texts in Tocharian A and B” (Ph.D. diss., École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2009).

16.
Chu sanzang jiji
[Collected notes on the formation of the Tripiṭaka], text 2145, 79c–80a; Walter, “Tocharian Buddhism in Kucha,” 8–9.

17.
Silk, “What, if Anything, Is Mahāyāna Buddhism?” 355–405.

18.
This was the Korean monk Hyecho, whose Chinese name was Huichao.
Wang Wutianzhu guo zhuan jianshi
[An annotated edition of Record of travels to India] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), 159.

19.
Li Fang,
Taiping yulan
, 125:604, citing
Shiliuguo chunqiu
[The spring and autumn annals of the Sixteen Dynasties]; Trombert,
Les manuscrits chinois de Koutcha
, 11.

20.
Yang Lu, “Narrative and Historicity,” 23–31.

21.
John Kieschnick,
The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 19; Bernard Faure,
The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 26–27.

22.
E. Zürcher, “Perspectives in the Study of Chinese Buddhism,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
2 (1982): 161–76.

23.
The Essential Lotus: Selections from the Lotus Sutra
, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

24.
Daniel Boucher,
Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛchhā-sūtra
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

25.
Edwin G. Pulleyblank,
Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1991), 160, 203, 217, 283.

26.
Victor H. Mair, “India and China: Observations on Cultural Borrowing,”
Journal of the Asiatic Society
(Calcutta) 31, nos. 3–4 (1989): 61–94.

27.
Victor H. Mair and Tsu-Lin Mei, “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody,”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
51, no. 2 (1991): 375–470, especially 392; Victor Mair, personal communication, September 7, 2011.

28.
Douglas Q. Adams,
Tocharian Historical Phonology and Morphology
(New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1988), 1.

29.
Denis Sinor, “The Uighur Empire of Mongolia,” in
Studies in Medieval Inner Asia
(Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997), 1–5.

30.
I have used /gh/ in “Twghry” where other scholars have used the Greek letter gamma (γ). Adams,
Tocharian
, 2, quotes the entire passage; Le Coq,
Buried Treasures
, 84, mentions the find. In 1974 forty-four additional leafs from this text were found in Yanqi: Ji Xianlin, trans.,
Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamiti-Nataka of the Xinjiang Museum, China
(New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998).

31.
Adams,
Tocharian
, 3.

32.
Recently, François Thierry has reexamined and retranslated (into French) all the passages about the Yuezhi. After offering several variant readings of the characters for Dunhuang and Qilian, he raises the possibility that prior to 175
BCE
, when the Xiongnu allegedly drove them out, the Yuezhi populated the entire region between the Qilian Mountains and the Tianshan Mountain range (much of Gansu and all of Xinjiang) and not just the Qilian region near Dunhuang as the histories claim. Thierry, “Yuezhi et Kouchans,” in
Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour
, 421–539.

33.
Christopher I. Beckwith,
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 380–83.

34.
Found at Karabalgasun, the Uighur capital in the Orhkon River valley, the trilingual text was carved on a stele in Sogdian, Chinese, and Uighur.

35.
W. B. Henning, “Argi and the ‘Tokharians,’”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies
9, no. 3 (1938): 545–71. Larry Clark discusses several occurrences of the phrase “Four Twghry” and argues that, contrary to Henning’s view, the four regions included Kucha. “The Conversion of Bügü Khan to Manichaeism,” in
Studia Manichaica: IV. Internationaler Kongress zum Manichäismus, Berlin, 14.–18. Juli, 1997
, ed. Ronald E. Emmerick, Werner Sundermann, and Peter Zieme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 83–84n1.

36.
Nicholas Sims-Williams,
New Light on Ancient Afghanistan: The Decipherment of Bactrian; An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on 1 February 1996
(London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1997), 1–25.

37.
George Sherman Lane, “On the Interrelationship of the Tocharian Dialects,” in
Studies in Historical Linguistics in Honor of George Sherman Lane
, ed. Walter W. Arndt et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 129.

38.
Stanley Insler, personal communication, April 22, 1999; Lane, “Tocharian Dialects,” 129.

39.
Douglas Q. Adams, “The Position of Tocharian among the Other Indo-European Languages,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
104 (July–September 1984): 400.

40.
The different people who spoke languages in the Turkic language family did not refer to themselves as Turks; the label came into wider use following contact with Muslim peoples. See P. B. Golden,
Ethnicity and State Formation in Pre-Čingisid Turkic Eurasia
(Bloomington: Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University, 2001); Golden,
An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-Formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East
(Wiesbaden, Germany: O. Harrassowitz, 1992).

41.
Melanie Malzahn, “Tocharian Texts and Where to Find Them,” in
Instrumenta Tocharica
, ed. Melanie Malzahn (Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 79.

42.
Georges-Jean Pinault, personal communication, April 3, 2010.

43.
Georges-Jean Pinault, “Introduction au tokharien,”
LALIES
7 (1989): 11. See also Pinault’s recent publication,
Chrestomathie tokharienne: Textes et grammaire
(Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2008).

44.
Adams,
Tocharian
, 7n8.

45.
Georges-Jean Pinault both analyzes the story and provides a word-by-word and freer translation of excerpts of it. See his “Introduction au tokharien,” 163–94. A transcription and translation of the text appears in Pinault’s
Chrestomathie tokharienne
, 251–68, with the cited passage on 262.

46.
Lane, “Tocharian Dialects,” 125, discusses the text, no. 394 in Sieg and Siegling’s original inventory of Tocharian A texts.

47.
Michaël Peyrot,
Variation and Change in Tocharian B
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).

48.
Pinault, “Introduction au tokharien,” 11; Emil Sieg, “Geschäftliche Aufzeichnungen in Tocharisch B aus der Berliner Sammlung,”
Miscellanea Academica Berolinensia
2, no. 2 (1950): 208–23.

49.
“The total is now 6,060 numbers, resulting from the addition of the following rough numbers by places where they are kept: 3,480 in Berlin, 1,500 in London, 1,000 in Paris (not counting around 1,000 tiny fragments), 180 in St. Petersburg, 30 in Japan, 50 in China (not counting graffiti and inscriptions).” Pinault, personal communication, April 3, 2010.

50.
The name of the site today is Yuqi tu’er, and the French spelling is Douldourâqour. For a thorough description of the site, see Madeleine Hallade et al.,
Douldour-âqour et Soubachi, Mission Paul Pelliot IV
(Paris: Centre de recherché sur l’Asie centrale et la Haute-Asie, Instituts d’Asie, Collège de France, 1982), 31–38.

51.
The word kuśiññe means “Kuchean.” Pinault, “Introduction au tokharien,” 20.

52.
Éric Trombert,
Les manuscrits chinois de Koutcha
, 25–27. The Chinese and Kuchean documents Pelliot collected are now held in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Ōtani mission from Japan, active in Central Asia in the years before World War I, also purchased documents at Kucha, most likely from the same site. See also Georges-Jean Pinault, “Economic and Administrative Documents in Tocharian B from the Berezovsky and Petrovsky Collections,”
Manuscripta Orientalia
4, no. 4 (1998): 3–20.

53.
Édouard Chavannes,
Documents sur les Tou-kiue (Turcs) occidenteaux
(Paris: Adrien-Masonneuve, 1941); Christopher I. Beckwith,
The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

54.
Wei Shou,
Wei shu
[History of the Wei dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1974), 102:2266; Yu Taishan,
Xiyu zhuan
, 448, 449n136.

55.
Li Yanshou,
Beishi
[History of the Northern dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1974), 97:3217–18; Yu Taishan,
Xiyu zhuan
, 636.

56.
François Thierry, “Entre Iran et Chine: La circulation monétaire en Sérinde de 1er au IXe siècle,” in Drège,
La Serinde, terre d’échanges
, 121–47, esp. 126. The original passage is: Xuanzang,
Da Tang Xiyu ji jiaozhu
, 54. Variant versions of this passage say gold coins, or simply gold, and do not mention silver and copper coins.

57.
Thierry, “La circulation monétaire en Sérinde,” 129–35.

58.
The Kuchean word for coin,
cāne
, is a loanword derived from the Chinese word for “coin,”
qian.
These accounts are translated and discussed in Georges-Jean Pinault, “Aspects de bouddhisme pratiqué au nord de désert du Taklamakan, d’après les documents tokhariens,” in
Bouddhisme et cultures locales: Quelques cas de réciproques adaptations; Actes du colloque franco-japonais de septembre 1991
, ed. Fukui Fumimasa and Gérard Fussman (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1994), 85–113; Pinault, “Economic and Administrative Documents.” The original documents are held by the Bibliothèque Nationale of France in a collection named Pelliot Kouchéen Bois, série C, 1.

59.
Pinault, “Economic and Administrative Documents,” 12.

60.
Georges-Jean Pinault, “Narration dramatisée et narration en peinture dans la region de Kucha,” in Drège,
La Serinde, terre d’échanges
, 149–67; Werner Winter, “Some Aspects of ‘Tocharian’ Drama: Form and Techniques,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
75 (1955): 26–35.

61.
Klaus T. Schmidt, “Interdisciplinary Research on Central Asia: The Decipherment of the West Tocharian Captions of a Cycle of Mural Paintings of the Life of the Buddha in Cave 110 in Qizil,”
Die Sprache
40, no. 1 (1998): 72–81.

62.
Peyrot,
Variation and Change
, 206.

63.
Pelliot referred to the pass as Tchalderang; the modern spelling is Shaldïrang. For the most detailed study of these passes, see Georges-Jean Pinault, “Épigraphie koutchéenne: I. Laisser-passer de caravanes; II. Graffites et inscriptions,” in Chao Huashan et al.,
Sites divers de la région de Koutcha
(Paris: Collège de France, 1987), 59–196, esp. 67n4, citing Pelliot’s January 1907 letter to Émile Senart. Ching Chao-jung is currently finishing her dissertation on the secular documents found at Kucha under the direction of Professor Pinault. My discussion is based entirely on Pinault’s account: passes buried in snow (67); description of the documents (69–71); formula used in the passes (72–74); use of formal numerals (79); closing formula and date (84–85); table of information (78).

64.
No complete examples of the outer case and inner pass survive; see the photos of the extant documents in Pinault, “Laisser-passer de caravans,” plates 40–52.

65.
Pinault, “Aspects de bouddhisme,” 100–101.

66.
Linghu Defen,
Zhou shu
[History of the Zhou dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1971), 50:9123.

67.
Chen Guocan, “Tang Anxi sizhen zhong ‘zhen’ de bianhua” [Changes of “zhen” garrison command in the four garrison commands of Anxi during the Tang dynasty],
Xiyu Yanjiu
2008, no. 4: 16–22.

68.
Beckwith,
Tibetan Empire in Central Asia
, 197–202.

69.
For a very good summary of the complicated political events, see François Thierry, “On the Tang Coins Collected by Pelliot in Chinese Turkestan (1906–09),” in
Studies in Silk Road Coins and Culture: Papers in Honour of Professor Ikuo Hirayama on His 65th Birthday
, ed. Joe Cribb, Katsumi Tanabe, and Helen Wang (Kamakura, Japan: Institute of Silk Road Studies, 1997), 149–79, esp. 158–59.

70.
Moriyasu Takao, “Qui des Ouighours ou des Tibétains ont gagné en 789–92 à Beš-Balïq,”
Journal Asiatique
269 (1981): 193–205; Beckwith,
Tibetan Empire in Central Asia
, 166–68.

71.
Éric Trombert, with the assistance of Ikeda On, a Japanese scholar specializing in Chinese documents, and Zhang Guangda, a Chinese historian of the Tang dynasty, has published the definitive edition of these documents. For a list of all dated documents, see Trombert,
Les manuscrits chinois de Koutcha
, 141.