Three Fragments of a Commentary on the Buddhavatamsaka-sutra

Abstract

The transmission of Buddhism to China has been dated to the 1st-century CE. There are two theories about how Buddhism this transmission. The first is that Buddhism came to China from Central Asia and Xinjiang, and the second is that it followed the Silk Route. Although Buddhism started spreading in China during the Huan and Ling periods of Han, it developed significantly during the Tang dynasty. Many schools of thought that did not have an Indian equivalent emerged in China during and after the Tang period. Most of those schools were based on Sanskrit canons. One of the texts was the Buddhavatamsaka-sutra, which is the subject of this study. In China, the Huayan school emerged based on this work. This paper investigates three unpublished fragments of a commentary on the Buddhavata.saka-sutra in Old Uyghur. They are preserved at the Berlin Turfan Collection with archive numbers Mainz 769-3 (fragment b), Mainz 18 and Mainz 758-7 (fragment a), respectively. They form the 20th chapter of a manuscript containing the texts related to the Faxiang school of Buddhism. The fragments in question belonging to chapter 20 have no pagination.