Central Asian Buddhism

Papañca is one of the most helpful Theravāda Buddhist teachings used to understand how our thoughts become impure and the most compelling account of this subject is the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta. Since many writers don't utilize papañca when alluding to defilements, many readers discover the setting of mental purification hard to understand. If we seriously want to learn how to keep our mental purification unadulterated from defilements, we should figure out how the mental purification can be tainted through papañca.

In addition, I have examined the association of papañca to kilesa (defilements), upakkilesa (mental impurities), saññā (perceptions) and abhiññā (comprehensions) to find out whether or not the essential components of mental purification begin from managing papañca, or the other dhamma concepts, that can be bold for anyone who struggles to subsume defilements in modern-day life.

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The Krotkov collection from IOM, RAS preserves amount of the Old Uighur manuscripts identified with the Huayan jing in forty scrolls. These manuscripts belong to the same copy set with the manuscripts of the Ōtani collection.
In this paper, I would like to reconstruct the colophon of the Huayan jing in Old Uighur, which explains that Antsang from Beš Balïq translated the Huayan jing in Old Uighur by the order of Arïq Böke.

It is rare to find a recorded lineage of female teachers in either Bön or Tibetan Buddhism, but here thirty heart teachings of Bön Khandro are being made publically available in English for the first time. In fact, this book combines many unique features in one concise volume.
First and foremost, the Dzogchen Yetri Thasel Mogyud, a succession of women from all over Central and Inner Asia who received precious Dzogchen teachings, and went on to achieve complete Buddhahood within one lifetime. These amazing ladies of wisdom practised with perseverance in a variety of circumstances and, gaining insight into the true Nature of their own minds, they obtained miraculous powers and passed on the essence of their experience to a single female disciple. These quintessential pith instructions were collected like precious drops of nectar and written down by the eighth century Bönpo sage Lachen Drenpa Namkha.
Yongdzin Lopön Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, the most erudite teacher of Yungdrung Bön, has taught on this text twice in the West, and the transcripts have been edited and amalgamated here. The book also includes a translation of the root text.
Another major feature of this publication is the specially commissioned thangka of this cycle of Khandro painted by Geshe Mönlam. Images of this female lineage are extremely rare, and Yongdzin Rinpoche consulted various texts to compile a detailed description of each lady. This text is also included here, and the image of each Khandro is printed alongside her heart teachings enabling the reader to invoke her blessings while reading.
The second half of the book is dedicated to the last yogini in this lineage, Chöza Bönmo, who not only fully realized the ultimate meaning of Dzogchen but also played a pivotal role in saving the teachings of Yungdrung Bön from almost certain annihilation during the eighth century persecution in the reign of the Tibetan king Trisong Deutsen. As an inspiration to Western students, Nagru Geshe Gelek Jinpa has compiled her biography by extracting key episodes of her spiritual path – the teachings she received from her two main masters Lachen Drenpa Namkha and Lishu Tagring, how she practised, and her inspiring Song of Experience. This is a path which, with the guidance of the teachings translated here, we can all aspire to follow.
Apart from the transcript of Yongdzin Rinpoche’s teaching, this is a bi-lingual publication in English and Tibetan.

Also included are:
Prayers to Drenpa Namkha and Chöza Bönmo;
25+ colour plates with the images of individual Khandro, Drenpa Namkha, Lishu Tagring etc;
A full colour poster of the Mogyud thangka.

The Yuanduan Guanxin Shifajietu (Illustration of the Ten Realms of Mind Comnemplation in the Perfect and Immediate Teaching), drawn by the Northern Song Tendai priest Ciyun Zunshi 慈雲遵式 was the source for the Kumano Kanjin Jikkai Mandara 熊野観心十界曼荼羅 handed in Japan. This diagram is a schematic of the ten realms, with the heart character 心 in the center, and ranging from the Buddha realm to the realm of hell. This mandala was to be used to reflect on one's own heart.
In this article, we first examine and compare the iconography and text of Zunshi's Yuanduan Guanxin Shifajietu and Khara-khoto work, then we compare the Khara-khoto work and the mural painting from Bezeklik cave, Turfan.

Through the four years of investigations, I could find out 43 Brāhmī Inscriptions from the Mogao and Yulin Caves. Among them, 41 are written in Sanskrit and 2 in Old Uyghur.
These inscriptions could be written by Buddhist pilgrims from the Uyghur kingdom.

В учебном пособии представлена история распространения буддизма среди хори-бурят - одной из крупных составных частей бурятского народа. На основе различных источников освещены вопросы строительства буддийских монастырей, границы их приходов, культурно-просветительская и хозяйственно-финансовая деятельность, книгопечатание.

This paper identifies for the first time the Old Tibetan version of the Kāśyapaparivarta preserved in fragments from Dunhuang. The currently known extant versions of the Kāśyapaparivarta are in Sanskrit in two Central Asian manuscripts, five Chinese versions, Khotanese fragments, and a ninth century Tibetan version preserved among Tibetan Kanjur
collections. The following comparative collation identifies for the first time seven Old Tibetan fragments of the Kāśyapaparivarta found among the Stein and Pelliot collections from the ancient city-state of Dunhuang. Jonathan Silk previously identified an eighth Tibetan fragment, Pelliot tibétain 676. These fragments comprise a version of the Kāśyapaparivarta preserved in Old Tibetan that was previously unknown. This article, Part 1, examines and collates the Old Tibetan fragments that correspond to sections §00–63 of the Staël-Holstein (1926) edition. Part 2 consists of the fragments that correspond to sections §98–135.

The article is devoted to the problem of studying of the manuscript from Nikolay F. Petrovsky Manuscripts’ Collection which belongs to the Central Asian Manuscripts’ Fund of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the RussianAcademy of Sciences. It presents a brief outline of the history of the discovery and the study of two Ajitasena-vyakarana’s versions (Gilgit’s and Khotanese) as well as the manuscript paleographic description and the attempt of genre identification. Author shows the closeness the plot of Ajitasena-vyakarana with that of Ajitasena-vyakarana-nirdesha-nama-mahayana-sutra. Ajitasena-vyakarana is so-called ‘proto-Mahayana’ sutra which was found near Gilgit in 1931.

Труды Международной конференции по истории, археологии и культу ре Центральной Азии в кушанскую эпоху (Душанбе, 1968) освещают важные проблемы происхождения народов Центральной Азии, их мате риальной культуры, искусства, языка и письменности; освещаются архео логические открытия в Средней Азии, Мидии, Афганистане, Иране, Пакиста не. Многие уникальные находки публикуются впервые и несомненно вы зовут живой отклик среди ученых и широких кругов читателей, интере сующихся древней историей и культурой народов Азии. u 10603021 013 (02)75 Ш " 75 © Главная редакция восточной литературы издательства «Наука», 1975.

The "Leipzig Kucha Studies" series is part of the project "Wissenschaftliche Bearbeitung der buddhistischen Höhlenmalereien in der Kuča-Region der nördlichen Seidenstraße", a research project of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. This project is funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Saxony within the framework of the Academies' Programme. The Academies' Programme is coordinated by the Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, held 3rd-14th June 1992, launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which operates through its annual roadshow the UN Conference of Parties (COP) that seeks to establish sustainable management of the global climate system.

The  'Earth Summit' by UN in 1992 brought the problems  in climate to the attention of even some of the world's most remote and isolated nations. One of these nations was the Hopi Nation in Arizona, a non-sovereign nation - which the UN labels as 'indigenous peoples'. In a long chain of events beginning from the League of Nations' decision in 1926 to deny the First Nations of Americas and the small island nations' representation in that international forum, its successor the United Nations, turned down four attempts by the Hopi Nation to raise the issue between 1948 and 1992. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar authorised the Hopi Nation to table the matter to the floor of UN General Assembly 10th-11th December 1992.

The First Nations of Americas Ethnoclimatology Motion and the Tradition-Keepers ('Faith-Keepers') background to that motion is elaborated here in this UNFCCC submission with further points were raised in 1st-2nd October 2018 at CRIAS conference. This contextualises the First Nations of Americas UN General Assembly Investigation Request 101292 which was the Concluding Plea of the World Indigenous Peoples' Joint Summit with the United Nations Parties ('Member States') Delegations to open the first UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) to other ethnoclimatologies appearing world wide. The Geophysical Annotations were discussed at the Cochabamba-Tiquipaya Climate Summit (CMPCC1) in aftermath of the collapsed Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 (2009) with the request from the UNESCO Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia on 7th January 2010 and His Excellency President Evo Morales Ayma.

The key tenents of the Geophysical Annotations being:

(1) A signal noise from a substantial radiocarbon-dilution effect due to major sea level retreats and rises during the Ice Ages that depressurised methane clathrates - releasing copious amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into air from depressurised seabed clathrates and also from thawing terra firma permafrost; this results in regressive, or sideway, 14C  readings in tree rings ("tree rings in a wrong order"). Thus, the Ice Ages era (the last glacial maxium to holocene thermal maximum period) cores of the tree trunks can appear substantially 14C-younger than the tree trunks' latest (outermost) tree-rings which cannot be the case due to the extreme steadiness of the radiocarbon's decay rate.

(2) Methane accumulates to upper troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere: hence any methane signature in the ice cores is only from methane-in-transit. Additionally the global warming episode that ended the ice ages had heavy methane loads that warmed and melted away most of the era's recent ice surfaces, thus obliterating the-then-most recently laid down snow stratum (leaving behind the earlier less methane rich snow layers). This caused incomplete records (time gaps) in the ice cores, and hence "global warming" always appears "before" higher atmospheric CO2 or CH4 levels (hence appearing as if them being 'respondents', rather than the drivers of climate warning).

(3) Noting that the partial melting equations can also be run inverse direction, it is proposed that the Pleistocene glaciations resulted in damage to Peridotite which partially melted producing basalt deposition in a large scale onto the seafloor in vast effusive eruptions with field emission of heat rather than radial spot emission of heat like in modern-day Surtseyan eruptions that have only a minimal heat crossing to sea surface due to small spatial extent of hot subsea surface. The vaporisation of sea water in field emission is vast due to spatial extent of hot subsea surface greatly exceeding the thickness of overlying water column, leading to runaway snowfalls. This caused an inflated size hydrological cycle which effectively washed out atmosphere-generated radiocarbon while geological seabed-associated depressurised carbon-12 was being released en masse leading to negligible carbon-14 readings (the radiocarbon-dilution effect by the Pleistocene's hydrological cycle / sea bed depressurisation).

On these three premises, the First Nations of Americans Ethnoclimatology Motion at the United Nations General Assembly on 10th-11th December 1992 is proposed as a variant possibility to the climate theories advocated aggressively by the Western Group of Nations and their influential academia. Its implications to present-day climate change suggest that the Polar Ice Caps will continue on their much-faster-than-anticipated loss trajectory to violent collapses. This aspect was highlighted in Sea Research Society's Evidence Giving at the UK Houses of Parliament in Environmental Audit Committee evidence giving on 5th and 24th April 2017. The urgency of situation is underlined by the fact that despite world-wide economic shut down by covid-19, carbon dioxide has continued its rapid rise to 417 parts per million indicating that time to act is running out as the remaining North Pole marine ice cap is soon to melt away and then destabilise the surrounding glaciers post Arctic sea ice (most notably the Greenland Ice Sheet).

This article studies narratives related to the topic of women receiving a prediction or declaration (vyākaraṇa) for Buddhahood. The texts in question—in their received form—have their place in the Indian Buddhist traditions of the Middle Period. The first episode taken up is the story of Princess Munī who receives the prediction of becoming the present Buddha Śākyamuni; this is found in the so-called “Scripture on the Wise and the Fool.” The second episode is the story of Yaśomatī who receives the prediction that she will become the Buddha Ratnamati; this is found in the Avadānaśataka. When evaluating these comparatively rare instances of predictions received by women, two aspects come up for special consideration: (a) the textual significance of variations regarding the presence or absence of a change of sex, and (b) the epistemological and soteriological consequences for female audiences of women’s narratives constructed by the third-person perspective of male monastic text transmitters. The variations document that the transmitters did not always perceive the transformation of sex into a male as a categorical necessity. This transformation may not have been integral to these narratives of the bodhisattva path as articulated by the textual communities in which these texts originated and circulated.

On  a  recently  discovered Gandhara manuscript with  a version of  the legal text Pratimoksasutra. The version is  connected  to  the  Mahasamghika  school  or  its  offshoot,  the Lokottaravada school. The incomplete manuscript is  said to be from Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and dates from the 6th or 7th century CE. The text is  more haphazardly, inconsistently  and idiomatically Sanskritized than  the  Lokottaravada  Pratimokasutra text that  was  earlier found  in Tibet.  In order to  modernize the  text,  and  perhaps  out of convenience, the  scribe  appears  to  have  borrowed from  a  Pratimoksasutra of  the Mulasarvastivada school. Despite the adaptations, it retains some Middle Indic forms  and other features  that are also found  in the Lokottaravada version,  and  is  therefore based on the same ancestor text as  the latter. The fact that even an important text with a commentary was adapted suggests that regional Sanskritization and adaptation of Buddhist texts might have been fairly  common in the Greater Gandhara region. A possible reason
for this is that local Buddhist communities might not have related so
strongly to the Indian school identities due to being quite remote from the heartlands of the Buddhist schools and due to  being more syncretically oriented.
This text, and also other regional versions with borrowings from versions of other schools or from other recensions, suggests that the term "hybrid" as  applied to the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit language that they are  composed can,  in  a way,  also be applied to  these texts  themselves.

Edition of the Old Uigur wall inscriptions in the 楡林 Yulin caves, Gansu Province, PRC, to display the mobility of the Old Uigur Buddhist pilgrims of the 13-14. cc.
It is a part of the result of my preliminary research conducted in 2006, though now I am preparing further revision.

Theist religions argue for the pre-existence of self/Atman/ruh based on mentalistic idealism and/or interactive substance dualism frameworks; whereas Buddhism denies this; instead, this atheist religion (i) proposes Karmic theory (impression of karmas/

The commentary to the Yuanjue jing in Old Uigur, which was published by and Zhang -Zieme (2012), includes unique teachings and quotations ascribed to the Great Master SYLW, whose name apparently derives from a Chinese honorific title for eminent Buddhist monks, which has remained unidentified so far. This paper examines the nature of this commentary by tracing the Great Master SYLW in Chinese Buddhist texts.

ARIRIAB-XXI(2018).  This paper continues documentation of the Old Tibetan version of the Kāśyapaparivarta preserved in fragments from Dunhuang identified and transcribed in Part 1 (Apple 2017). The following comparative collation documents fragment IOL Tib J 59, which corresponds to sections §98-101, and fragment IOL Tib J 55, that corresponds
to sections §102-135. The fragments collated in Parts 1 and 2 altogether comprise a version of the Kāśyapaparivarta preserved in Old Tibetan that was previously unknown.

Edition of 283 inscriptions and grafitti in Old Uigur and Mongolian found at the Dunhuang grottoes (Mogao 莫高, Yulin 楡林, Dong-Qianfotong 東千佛洞 , etc.) as the result of our fieldwork for 2010–2016.
Several inscriptions have been further modified in Matsui, Remarks on Buyan-Qaya, a Uighur Buddhist Pilgrim to Dunhuang, in Z. Özertural/G. Şilfeler (eds.), Unter dem Bodhi-Baum: Festschrift für Klaus Röhrborn anlässlich des 80. Geburtstags, 2019.

The science of psychology is believed to consist of objective and meaningful knowledge about a realm of our own direct experiencing with which we are all intimate and familiar, yet about which we also feel we have very little understanding, and no real insight, and so feel inclined to submit to psychology as if it were revelatory and definitive. Society’s default attitude to psychology is one of deferential, if occasionally grudging, respect. The quasi-medical arm of psychology – psychotherapy - is accorded a similar authority even when it appears to employ questionable methods and dubious reasoning. Yet our submissive, compliant attitude to these disciplines is deeply counterproductive to any serious quest for authentic metaphysical knowledge and self-fulfilment, because it effectively neutralises sceptical enquiry and intellectual self-reliance, both of which are essential precursors to, and indispensable features of, any meaningful commitment to metaphysical gnosis. And if one is to achieve clarity of thought and observational accuracy, it is especially important to approach one’s psychological capacities directly – without intermediary - in an independent and self-reliant spirit, free of the misguided and inappropriate interventions of psychology and psychotherapy, however well intended they might be. One should never allow one’s judgement to be distorted by specious theories formulated by people who can never know more about you than you can know about yourself.

This essay presents a snapshot of the year 465 CE. Place: South Asia with the Ajanta Cave 11 in focus. A history is narrated here to describe how the stupa-shrine (naos) of the Ajanta Cave 11 was conceived, and added to what was earlier a dormitory; how the Hunnic disturbance in Eurasia created migrations of people including the one when the Bactrian and Gandhāran people migrated towards Middle India and the Deccan on one hand and the Tarim / Taklamakan region on the other. The war refugees, I argue, introduced the concept of multi-functional or composite architecture in India. It was to bring under the same roof the three major functions of monastic architecture: dwelling, congregation, and worship. It was an experiment that resulted in the creation of Cave 11’s naos. It was a quadrant and flat-roofed naos. The idea was at once accepted across all the contemporary rockcut sites. The article shows how the displaced people the “foreigners” from Eastern Mediterranean, ancient Turkey, Iran, Bactria and Gandhāra, swiftly changed the Buddhism of Middle India and the Deccan from an earlier form of Śrāvakayāna that insisted on the stupa cult to a different one that insisted on the cultic worship of the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures. The latter was a confluence of the traditional Sarvāstivāda and Bodhisattvayāna, which acquired the name of Mūlasarvāstivāda towards the seventh century CE.

It is a well-known fact that at an early stage of the conquests the Mongols recognized the need for a fast and reliable flow of information and commercial goods. This necessity led to the establishment of the postal relay system of the Chinggisid Empire (Turk.: yam, Mong.: ǰam). The empire-wide messenger and postal station system was unprecedented in both size and efficiency, and it became one of the most important institution of the empire. Another well-known fact that the Mongol rulers were highly tolerant towards religious communities and the representatives of the different religions played a very important role in their policy. However, both topics were in the centre of scholarly interest during the last decades of research so far we are lack of a detailed analysis of the relations between these two important agents (the ǰam-system and the religious communities) of the Mongol Empire. Among the Old Uyghur texts from East Turkestan around 70 documents can be connected with the postal system of the Chinggisid Empire, from which amount around a dozen of documents contain information concerning representatives of religions or religious communities. The present article, on the one hand, shall summarise what we know about the relations between the postal system and the religious communities in the Chinggisid Empire in general. On the other hand, the connections between the postal system and the religious communities in the eastern part of the Chaghadaid ulus of the Mongol Empire will be analysed in particular, on the basis of the Old Uyghur documents.

Second issue of new academic journal. Studia Turkica Mongolica Tibetica Manchurica Sibirica Russica et cetera.

Tartaria Magna is a peer reviewed e-journal in Russian. Editors accept papers and reviews in English and provide Russian translation. We may consider publication of the papers and reviews that have been published in other journals within the period of 3 years. More info: www.tartaria-magna.ru

Buddhist Sogdian texts contain about 300 loanwords of Indian origin excluding the ones that are known also in Manichaean, secular, or Christian Sogdian texts. About sixty percent of these can easily be seen to be borrowed from Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. A further twenty percent or so are not so easily recognized as from that source because they also reflect linguistic developments within Sogdian. Another twenty percent are from a Prakrit or show the intermediation of another language, such as Parthian (probably including pwty ‘Buddha’), Tocharian, or Chinese. About one percent has unclear sources. The Indian loanwords in Manichean, Christian and secular Sogdian texts, in contrast, are in the majority from a Middle Indian source. In Buddhist Sogdian, the narrative texts like the Vessantara Jātaka feature more of the less regular loan shapes, which suggests a different path of transmission and probably an earlier date. An appendix discusses the role of Buddism in Sogdiana from finds th...

Due to the extensive territory including the fertile plains and the productive population, the Sasanids could attain the powerful and wealthy situation during the late antiquity. Nevertheless, the vast territory caused some problems regarding threatening the political integration of Iran. The eastern provinces locating far from the capital of the Sassanid government were in a very exposed position to invaders coming from Hephthalites as well-known groups of the invading nomads were considered as the main enemy of Sassanid in the eastern Iran. Hephthalites could occasionally determine the international relationships between Iran and its neighbours. Moreover, they played an important role in the formation of the cultural and artistic practices of the eastern Sassanid. In order to recognise the Hephthalites' influence on the Sassanid Iran, we need firstly to study their ethnical attributes and lifestyles and secondly to know the borders of their territory throughout history. In pursuing these purposes, the paper, while relying on the historical documents, would explain the history of Hephthalites in eastern Iran and describe their material cultures indicating their history and culture. Synchronised study of history, geography, and material culture of the Hephthalites would help us to introduce a new approach to history and archaeology of the eastern Iran in Sassanid period.