Our Dictionary of Gāndhārī has reached 4,000 articles with a total of 18,617 references. Article four thousand is dhaṃmadana, attested in Aśoka’s Rock Edict XI at Shahbazgarhi (and Mansehra): nasti ed[i]śaṃ danaṃ yadiśaṃ dhramadana dhramasaṃstav[e] dh[r]amasaṃvibhago dh[r]amasaṃba[ṃ]dha

Last week, at the XVIIth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies in Vienna, I presented the paper “Manuscript Growth and Episodic Composition: Commentaries and Avadānas in Early South Asia” in which I argue that several of the Gāndhārī scrolls containing scholastic texts and narrative sketches show signs of having been compiled and added […]

We completed coverage of all published Gāndhārī manuscripts in our Dictionary, including the Khotan Dharmapada, the recent manuscript discoveries published in the Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, the various published samples from the British Library, Senior, Bajaur and Split Collections, and some Central Asian manuscript fragments on palm leaf, silk and paper. The total number of […]

A new volume on South Asian Buddhist manuscripts (From Birch Bark to Digital Data: Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research) has just been published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It brings together papers from the 2009 conference ‘Indic Buddhist Manuscripts: The State of the Field’ at Stanford University and provides the most comprehensive and […]

This Monday, at the 224th Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society in Phoenix, I presented the paper “Preliminaries to a Grammar of Gāndhārī: Sound System and Morphological Categories.” After an overview of the main varieties of literary Gāndhārī, I proposed a chronology of sound changes between Old Indo‐Aryan and late Gāndhārī. I then discussed […]

At the international symposium “Humanities Studies in the Digital Age and the Role of Buddhist Studies” at the University of Tokyo last week, I presented the paper “Collaborative Research Tools for Gāndhārī and Sanskrit Buddhist Manuscripts.” After an overview of the field of Gāndhārī manuscript and epigraphic studies and the particular challenges of its source […]

Over the last few weeks, we collected all word instances in the Gandhari.org text collection that currently have Sanskrit parallels associated with them (3,404 items). We arranged these under 1,960 separate lemmata, and I associated each lemma with a standardized Gāndhārī spelling. The result is now available from the Dictionary → GD submenu, while the […]

In the spring of 2010, as I began making plans for using the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines to encode and process the source texts on Gandhari.org, I produced an annotated sample TEI document that illustrates the encoding of a manuscript using two verses from Richard Salomon’s edition of the British Library Anavataptagāthā (Salomon 2008: 204–207): […]

At the Seventh Biennial International Conference on Buddhist Texts (“Critical Edition, Transliteration and Translation”) at the Somaiya Vidyavihar in Mumbai, I presented the paper “Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra: From Birch Bark to Digital Editions.” After an overview of the Gandhāran manuscript tradition, I propose a new digital research environment for the study and publication of […]

We are pleased to announce the availability of a digital version of the Pali Text Society’s Pali‐English Dictionary as part of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī system. This valuable addition now makes it possible for users of this website to compare both Sanskrit and Pali lexical information while consulting the Dictionary of Gāndhārī. The PTSD remains […]