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Synopsis
Prominent in several Buddhist traditions, the "Rhinoceros Sutra" espouses the virtues of solitude, explaining the dangers of attachments, prescribing a solitary spiritual life, and discussing the nature of friends and friendship. "British Library Fragment 5B" is the remnant of a scroll that originally contained a complete text of the "Rhinoceros Sutra". "A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra" examines in detail the literary and textual background of the sutra, describes the condition of the scroll and its re-construction, analyses the text, comparing it with other extant versions, and presents a literal English translation. Although the original provenance of the "British Library's Kharosthi" scrolls is uncertain, there are strong indications that they came from Hadda in the Jalalabad Plain of eastern Afghanistan, just west of the Khyber Pass. The scrolls were most likely written during the reign of the Saka rulers, in the early first century A.D., making them in all probability the oldest Buddhist texts ever found, as well as the earliest surviving manuscripts in any Indic language. The discovery of the British Library scrolls has brought to light a previously unknown realm of Buddhist literature and scholarship, and revealed that Gandhari was one of the major literary languages of Indian Buddhism. Richard Salomon, professor of Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington, heads the team of scholars constituting the British Library/ University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscript Project. He is the author of "Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments".
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