Gāndhārī Workshop

This invitation-only workshop will be devoted primarily to advancing research work on a small but significant Gāndhārī fragment of the Samādhirāja, a lengthy, historically important Mahāyāna sūtra of which several Sanskrit versions survive along with Chinese and Tibetan translations, either partial or complete. The comparatively recent discovery of this fragment enables us to assign the Samādhirāja to an earlier date than the one that can be inferred from its oldest extant Chinese translation (mid-5th century), and tells us that it was circulating in Greater Gandhāra around the 2nd century. What is more, the text covered by the fragment comes from what is arguably the most important part of the sūtra, a list of items which occurs, in slightly different forms, in three places in the text. Research into this providential find has been suspended for some years while waiting for this fragment, and many others, to be relocated back to Pakistan to their new home in the Islamabad Museum, thanks to an initiative spearheaded by Mark Allon of the University of Sydney. This work will therefore be resumed at this workshop, with the aim of producing a full-length edition, translation, and study of the fragment. The core research team consists of Mark Allon himself, Stanford’s Paul Harrison, and Andrew Skilton from Oxford, who will be joined on this occasion by several leading Gāndhārī scholars from the University of Washington. If time allows, the workshop will also devote some attention to other Gāndhārī texts apart from the Samādhirāja.

Participants:

     Mark Allon, University of Sydney, Australia

     Collett Cox, University of Washington

     Paul Harrison, Stanford University

     Joseph Marino, University of Washington

     Richard Salomon, University of Washington

     Andrew Skilton, University of Oxford, UK