The Tokharians and Buddhism① Xu Wenkan 1.Introduction:On the Tokharians and the Yuezhi From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning ofthe twentieth,a great number of manuscripts in Indo-Eruopeanlanguages were discovered in northwest China(mainly in Xinjiangand Dunhuang, Gansu ) .It has heen revealed that the languagesin Which these manuscripts were written include G ā rī ndā ,Pahlavī ,Sogdian,Parthian, Khotanese,Tumshuqese,etc.Alsofound were texts in another ancient Indo-European language,different from the Indo-Iranian languages listed above and writ-ten in the Brā script.Two dialects of this hmī language,A andB,have been identified.①Based on the colophons of Maitrisim-it,a famous Buddhist play written in Uighur,F.W.K.Mü ller, E.Sieg,and W.Siegling named this ancient language"Tokharianin their works.One of these Uighur colophons,nr.48,reads: Nakridi ■ ulu ■ ta to γ mi ■ Arya ■ intri bodisvt k■ i acari ntkktilint[in]… To χri tilin ■ yaratms Il-baliqda to γ m ■ Prtanyarak■it k■i a■ari Toχri tilintin Tü rk tili■ virmi■ Maitri…[si]mit nom bitig.② W.B.Henning has translated this paragraph into English : The sacred book Maitreya-Samiti which the Boddhisattvattvaguru ā rya ■ cā ryacandra,who was born in the country of Na-garade■a,③had composed ④in the Twγry language out of theIndian language,and which the guru ā rya Praj■araksita,who was born in Il-baliq,①translated from the cā Twγry lan-guage into the Turkish language. During the decades that followed, many scholars have de-bated hotly on the nomenclature of this language and a series ofrelated historical, geographical and ethnological issues, and es-pecially its relationship to the Yuezhi and Kushan peoples.②Most of them hold that the Tokharian dialects A and B are actual-ly Agnean and Kuchean.① However,many questions about thistheory still need to be resolved, and"Tokharian"as a usefulterm should not be dismissed. The extant Tokharian documents date from the period be-tween the sixth and the eighth centuries.However ,Tokharian it- self is an ancient Indo-European language belonging to the Cen-tum branch, more closely related to Celtic, German, Italian, and Greek than to other languages.②This means that an Indo-European people rather than those speaking Eastern Iranian(theSatem branch)entered modern Chinese territory at a very , earlytime.The British scholar T.Burrow , who studied the Kharosth īdocuments unearthed in Niya , Loulan and Shanshan,pointed out long ago that many grammatical phenomena and the vocabulary ofNiya vernacular were close to Tokharian.③Therefore,the

下一页