Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages

Abstract

Rules of page-setting appear, albeit rarely, in Indian inscriptional records dating to the 3^rd c. BCE and reappear, even though not regularly, in the earliest (1^st BCE - 1^st CE) and later Indian Buddhist MSS and their translations into Khotanese, Tibetan, and Chinese. While continuing to be typologically identical, the function of these rules in the economy of the page, and the intellectual practice they reveal may, in some cases, be modified. This paper will focus on the variety of parallel patterns appearing in different historical and geographic contexts. The study of data indicates that at an early epoch religiouses and intellectuals from peninsular India transmitted the rules and principles governing the Buddhist institution in matters of architecture, religious teaching and monastic rules, chancery practice, etc., to the northwestern regions. At the same time, they might have adopted local use and techniques and introduced new elements in their narrative prose. The data gleaned from the study of languages, monuments, artistic production, and artefacts of this period show a common cultural pattern in which foreign and local elements co-exist. The contribution of ‘mountain tribes’ (showing a marked ethnic and linguistic diversity) are found along with Indian, Iranian and Hellenistic components conveyed in the region long before. Practices of textual criticism and biblio-economy that were in use among the scribes of Buddhist texts indicate their concern for the aesthetic and intellectual use of the text, as for the systems of classifying the book in the conspectus of a large organized collection for the use of readers. The case of the Gandhāran use of counting the verses (gāthā-metrics) appears to stay in between the practice attributed to the Alexandrian school of philology, and attested in Greek and Graeco-Egyptian papyri (stichometric), and the practice adopted in Dunhuang, in the case of Chinese (jie- /song-metrics) and Tibetan (bam po-metrics) translations of Buddhist Indian texts. These practices, as the case may be, preserve part of the original prosody, while the graphic disposition and marks, including blank space indicating the unvoiced tune, appear to the modern reader as if they were beating rhythm, if not time, upon the manuscript page. And all this shows the inseparability of textuality and materiality.