John Brough

Comments on Third-Century Shan-Shan and the History of BuddhismAuthor(s): John BroughSource: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 28,No. 3 (1965), pp. 582-612Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/612100Accessed: 31/07/2009 09:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

School of Oriental and African Studies and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University ofLondon.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/612100?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

COMMENTS ON THIRD-CENTURY SHAN-SHAN AND THE HISTORY OF BUDDHISM 12

By JOHN BROUGH

1

The early centuries of the Christian era are of crucial importance for the

history of the Buddhist religion. It is customary to ascribe to this period the emergence and development of the Mahayana; and by the latter half of the second century A.D., towards the end of the Later Han dynasty, Buddhism had

spread as far as China, where the earliest of the long succession of translators were beginning to produce Chinese versions of Indian Buddhist texts, both

Hinayana and Mahayana. A detailed and connected narrative of this remarkable

expansion of the religion would form one of the most fascinating chapters in the

early history of Asia. Such a narrative, nevertheless, cannot be written: the surviving information is fragmentary, interpretation is often uncertain, the

problems numerous and intractable. Encouraged by sheer exiguity of primary historical evidence, many modern scholars have consecrated to this period whole libraries of conjecture and controversy, in the attempt to construct a coherent and consistent account. The scanty evidence, understandably enough,

1 This article is based on a lecture delivered in the University of Turin in April 1964. Refer- ences to sources have naturally been added; and while the principal arguments are those presented in the lecture, it has been possible, in preparing the material for publication, to incorporate some additional details of evidence.

2 Principal abbreviations: Chav. 1905 E. Chavannes, 'Les pays d'occident d'apres le Wei lio ', T'oung Pao, Ser. II,

Vol. vi, 1905, 519-71. Chav. 1907 E. Chavannes, 'Les pays d'occident d'apres le Heou Han chou', T'oung Pao,

S6r. n, Vol. vIIi, 1907, 149-234. Chav. Docs. E. Chavannes (ed. and tr.): Les documents chinois decouverts par Aurel Stein dans

les sables du Turkestan oriental. Oxford, 1913. Conr. A. Conrady (ed. and tr.): Die chinesischen Handschriften- und sonstigen Klein-

funde Sven Hedins in Lou-lan. Stockholm, 1920. EGP E. G. Pulleyblank, 'The consonantal system of Old Chinese', Asia Major, NS,

ix, 1, 1962, 58-144; Ix, 2, 1963, 206-65. GDhp. J. Brough (ed.): The Gdndhdri Dharmapada. (School of Oriental and African

Studies, University of London. London Oriental Series, viI.) London, 1962. K. Transcription of Ancient Chinese (Middle Chinese) as in B. Karlgren, Grammata

serica recensa, Stockholm, 1957. Kh. 'Niya documents', with numbers allocated to them in Khar. inscr. Khar. inscr. A. M. Boyer and others (ed.): Kharosthz inscriptions discovered by Sir Aurel Stein

in Chinese Turkestan. Transcribed and edited by A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson, and E. Senart. [Part III, E. J. Rapson and P. S. Noble.] 3 vols. Oxford, 1920-9.

Masp. H. Maspero (ed.): Les documents chinois de la troisieme expedition de Sir Aurel Stein en Asie centrale. London, 1953.

P. Transcription of Middle Chinese as in EGP. T Taish6 Daizokyo. Tokyo, 1924 et seq.

[While there is no theoretical objection to Karlgren's use of a raised dot for initial glottal stop, in opposition to the ' zero initial' which is simply left unmarked, the practical consequence of this notation has been that the distinction between these two initials has usually been ignored by Indologists and others who have had occasion to make use of the Chinese reconstructed forms.

COMMENTS ON THIRD-CENTURY SHAN-SHAN

has often been supplemented by traditions preserved in later texts. But such texts were not always carefully compiled, and are always under suspicion of transmissional corruption: in some cases, seriously so. It is still necessary, unfortunately, to warn the student that these later traditions are at best

hearsay, not seldom fictional, and occasionally, perhaps, perjury. This is said in no spirit of churlishness. On the contrary, we are much

indebted here to those scholars whose labours have resolved many of the difficulties; nor can we fail to admire the resourcefulness and dexterity of others who have applied their talents to the elaboration of hypotheses, seldom

persuasive, perhaps, but frequently ingenious. The present article, however, has no presumption to set right what is out of

joint; nor does it intend to discuss exhaustively even the limited problems under review. The chief purpose is to attempt to fit some of the relevant facts into a historical framework, and in particular to propose for consideration a

hypothesis concerning the dating of the 'Niya documents' which appears to make good historical sense in relation both to India and to China. Many of the

points discussed will be familiar, and some suggestions already made by others are repeated, or adopted in a modified form: I trust that in essentials I have made due acknowledgement of indebtedness. For the rest, I have not even

attempted to compile a complete inventory of modern bibliographical references. The writings in question are voluminous and dispersed, while those of real value are in the minority. Such an attempt would be otiose. A few ideas, nevertheless, have not been propounded before-so far as I know, at least-and it has seemed desirable to place these in context, even when much of the surrounding matter is well known.

2

Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres-familiar words which are echoed, it seems, at the beginning of a modern book on the early history of India,3 where, however, the relevance of such a division is promptly denied: ' Les geographes divisent l'Inde en trois parties.... Cette division ne vaut pas pour l'histoire

politique, qui oppose le Nord et le Sud separes par la Narmada '. In spite of

subsequent qualifications, this dictum is misleading. A simple opposition between North and South is less useful for the history of the subcontinent than the threefold division. Terminology is not in itself important; but it would be

Since this distinction is important, especially in the earlier transcriptions, I have throughout marked both initials explicitly: ?i-, Ci- in place of 'i-, i-. For P. h, h, I have used y, X, as in K. These are purely matters of notation, and in neither case is there any implicit judgment con-

cerning the phonetic values of the symbols. In place of P. a, a, which is typographically incon- venient, I have generalized K. d, a. The oblique tones are marked (since it is desirable that information should not be concealed), using \ and /, as in P., instead of K. ' - ' and ': ' which are unusable in a running text where hyphen and colon must be permitted their normal functions. For clarity's sake, P. j and n are replaced by j and A, to avoid confusion with the entirely different

employment of K. j and A.] 3 L. de La Vallee Poussin, Dynasties et histoire de l'Inde depuis Kanishkajusqu'aux invasions

musulmanes, 1935, p. 1.

583

JOHN BROUGH

serious if such terminology led us to underestimate the distinctive nature of the North-West,4 and to think of it merely as an extension in space, stretching away to the upper Indus and beyond, but otherwise a more or less homogeneous continuation of the country of the Gangetic plain and Madhyadesa. The North-West is different, in terrain and climate, and in numerous other ways, of which two are directly relevant to the present discussion: geographically, the trite fact of its location and relative accessibility from both west and east; and

culturally, its development of a characteristic language. This language, as is well known, shows many features which mark it off from the other Prakrits

(e.g. the distinction of s, s, and s), and is primarily attested in the Kharosthi

script, from the third century B.C. in the North-Western versions of the Asokan

inscriptions, until well into the Christian era. In this region, centred around Gandhara, there was opportunity enough

for the developing civilization of India to meet and to interact with Hellenistic and Iranian culture. Certainly after the incursion of Alexander the Great, a whole succession of Greek and Iranian rulers, over a period of centuries, exercised authority over various parts of the North-West. We must not, of course, think of these conquests and kingdoms in terms of modern political frontiers; and there is no reason to suppose that Buddhist missionaries of the

period would have found it impossible, or even difficult, to travel from one

kingdom to another. They did in fact do so. On the other hand, political control, with its consequent influence on the direction of the flow of trade, must

surely have contributed much to the rate at which the religion could spread. Before the end of the sixth century B.C., Gandhara and Sindh were among

the territories claimed by Darius 5 as part of the Achaemenid empire. Almost two centuries later, Alexander invaded the same region; but again by the third century B.C., the spread of the Asokan inscriptions, as far west as

Kandahar, indicates a time when the chief cultural influences were probably from the east. Still later, the Hellenistic aftermath of Alexander-Greek kings of Bactria-and Pahlava and gaka rulers successively, were able to expand into the North-West.6

Thus Gandhara, with its great centre of Buddhist learning at Taxila, in the heart of the region in which the Kharosthi script was dominant, was well favoured historically and geographically to become the main channel for the further transmission of Buddhism into Central Asia.

4 I do not mean to imply that in the book in question de La Vallee Poussin was himself misled in this way; and obviously he was thoroughly well acquainted with the generalities stated in the present paragraph. Their restatement may nevertheless be worth while, partly because his emphatic words, 'ne vaut pas', could be a distorting influence, and partly because later research has enabled us to understand more clearly the importance of the North-West. On the

language, for example, see in particular H. W. Bailey, ' Gandhari', BSOAS, xi, 4, 1946, 765: 'The preliminary studies of P. Pelliot [and others] ... have hardly realized the importance of this North-Western Prakrit'.

5 Bisutun rock inscr., col. I, 6; Persepolis e; etc. 6 The few cases where later invaders penetrated much further into the subcontinent, and

established their rule, are not directly relevant to the present discussion.

584


3

We are concerned here only with the latest dynasty of the non-Indian kings of this epoch who ruled in the North-West, the Kusanas, considered to be of Iranian affinity. Their earlier history-gleanings from the Chinese annals, and too sketchy in any case to be of much value-has often been retold, and need not be repeated in detail. To the Chinese, the Kusanas (

' - P. kiwai\-sidy) were a branch of the Central Asian people whom they called Yiieh-chih.7 The Chinese tradition is that the Great Yiieh-chih, towards the middle of the second century B.C., migrated from a location east of Tun-huang or thereabouts,8 under pressure from the Hsiung-nu. The story may well be based on real happenings; but there is no independent evidence to enable us to judge how much of it is factual. As in later times, there must have been numerous ethnic groups in Central Asia, many of them nomadic; and it would obviously have been difficult, even a single generation later, to obtain trustworthy information. We should at least be

ready to admit that the traditional story may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a theoretical construct, designed to explain the continuing presence of Yiieh-chih

(distinguished as ' Lesser Yiieh-chih ') in regions to the east of the Pamir. However this may be, the country of the Great Yiieh-chih was undoubtedly

west of the Pamir (approximately Bactria: northern Afghanistan with the

upper reaches of the Oxus, and bordered on the west by Parthia) at the time when the Kusana rulers began to extend their control over neighbouring territories. This deserves to be emphasized. The fact is indeed well known; but so much of the primary evidence comes from the North-West of the Indian subcontinent, south of the great mountain ranges, that it is easy to lose the

perspective : to think of this empire chiefly in relation to its intrusion into the

history of India, while the wider Asian context is either forgotten, or at best considered as somewhat unimportant. This bias is perhaps even encouraged by the prominence in Buddhist tradition of the famous Kusana ruler Kaniska, as a

patron of Buddhism. Yet it is at least as easy to interpret this tradition in an

opposite sense: as an expression of indebtedness of the religion to the secular

authority which, merely by its existence, enabled a more rapid missionary expansion to lands far beyond India.

4

We may hesitate to believe literally the statement that the Han emperor Huan (A.D. 147-67) sacrificed to the Buddha as well as to Lao-tzfi; 9 but the

7 HHS, 118, Chav. 1907, 191 if. The interpretation of the name Yiieh-chih is a vexed question (if the reader will forgive the meiosis) which, mercifully, lies outside the scope of the present article.

8 The precise locality varies in different sources. 9 HHS, 118, Chav. 1907, 194, 219. The latter passage also exemplifies the tendency of

educated Chinese at this period to think of Buddhism as a variety of Taoism. Because of this accidental circumstance, we can hardly hope that Chinese sources might give reliable information on the date when Buddhism first arrived in China.

585

JOHN BROUGH

date is close enough to the earliest Chinese translations,10 and Buddhists must have been present in China before this, even if their numbers were still small. The famous dream of the emperor Ming, roughly a century earlier, which caused him to send envoys to the west for information about Buddhism, is too like a

fairy-tale to be anything else; but it is of some interest to observe that the several versions of this legend are divided almost equally into two groups, in one of which the envoys are said to have obtained the required information from India, and in the other, from the country of the Great Yiieh-chih.ll The notice in the Wei-liieh 12 and other texts, concerning a Yiieh-chih who in the year 2 B.C. gave oral instruction in Buddhist texts to a Chinese, is also worthy of attention. The dates in question hardly deserve credence. Nevertheless, these

pious legends are concerned with the earliest contacts of China with Buddhism. We should not dismiss too lightly the indication that Buddhism was thought to have become known in China through Yiieh-chih mediation in the first place. It is true that the Chinese in due course knew of the extension of the Kusan a

empire into the adjacent parts of India; but it does not seem permissible to

suggest that the term Yiieh-chih could have been used to mean 'Indian ', even if such ethnic names were not always used with precision. In the Asvalgyana- sutra, for example, the version in the Madhyamigama (T, I, no. 26, 664a) agrees with Yona-Kambojesu in the Pali (M, II, 149); but the separate translation of the same sutra (T, i, no. 71, 877a) has instead 'in the country of the Yiieh- chih '. This is an interesting interpretation, which need not be discussed here; but the relevant point is that the Yiieh-chih country, far from being identified with India, is in this context deliberately set in contrast to India.

5

The Kusana empire may, as we have suggested, have assisted Buddhism to

spread into the western parts of Central Asia, bringing it even into contact with Parthia. Naturally, it would not follow that the same type of influence was needed to convey the religion eastwards into Chinese Turkistan, and ultimately to China. The main trade-routes were well established, and these could have allowed Buddhist monks to stretch their missionary efforts to reach China in

10 We leave aside as unproved the excessively early date (A.D. 67 or 75) traditionally ascribed to T, xviI, no. 784. There is still no evidence to contradict Demi6ville's statement,

' Les premieres traductions de textes datees de mani6re relativement sfire remontent A la deuxieme moiti6 du zIe siecle ap. J.-C.' (L'Inde classique, ii, p. 398).

11 H. Maspero, 'Le songe et l'ambassade de l'empereur Ming, etude critique des sources ', BEFEO, x, 1910, 95-130, where the relevant texts are translated and discussed. E. Ziircher, The Buddhist conquest of China, 1959, 22, in citing this, mentions only the country of the Yiieh- chih (perhaps implying that 'India' in the other versions is a later ' correction ', whether by authors or copyists ?). Another passage, from the Later Han Annals, has been held to prove that ' des l'annee 65 de notre ere, le Bouddhisme 6tait d6ja en Chine une religion ayant ses moines et ses d6vots ' (Chav. 1905, p. 550, n. 1); this may be over-optimistic. See also Ziircher, op. cit., 19.

12 Chav. 1905, 546; text in commentary to San-kuo chih, 30 (Peking, Chung-hua shu-chiu, 1962, in, 859). I am admittedly hardly qualified to criticize the arguments which led Chavannes to take seriously the date in question. But, on general grounds, I cannot escape the feeling that such a date may legitimately be doubted. [continued

586


the end. Nevertheless, there are some indications that political factors also were involved in the story.

(a) During the past few decades, several scholars have suggested that some of the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist texts were made from Prakrit rather than from Sanskrit. In the earlier stages of the discussion, there was some reticence as to the identity of the language in question. Sufficient evidence, however, has now accumulated to establish that the originals of these early Chinese translations were mostly, even if not exclusively, texts written in the North-Western (Gandhari) Prakrit. We shall return to this point.

(b) During the period with which we are concerned (approximately, until the end of the Western Chin dynasty, A.D. 316), translators into Chinese included not more than six who were, or may possibly have been, of Indian

origin, while some 16 others are traditionally linked with Central Asia: six Yiieh-chih, four Parthians, three Sogdians, two Kucheans, and, towards the end of the period, one Khotanese.13 Granted that these numbers are small, they are still sufficient to show that the advance of the Doctrine was, on the whole, a

gradual process of infiltration: that a position of some sort in Central Asia had

already been established, from which secondary tentacles could then reach out into China. Indeed, mere common sense would suggest as much.

It may be pleasant, perhaps, to conjure up pictures of heroic monks setting out on the long walk from northern India to China in order to convert the unbelievers; and readers need hardly be reminded that in later centuries many individual pilgrims are known to have made truly heroic journeys across Asia. In these earlier days, it is possible that there were Indian Buddhists of a calibre to compare with Hsiian-tsang and I-ching; but it would be a romantic error to conjecture a priori that, in the absence of such, Buddhism could not have reached China when it did.

(c) The secular Chinese histories, as is well known, are ignorant of even the names of Kaniska and his successors; and, not unreasonably, this fact has been linked with the progressive lack of contact with the west during the last century

The text of the Wei-lUeh seems at first sight to say that it was the Chinese who taught the Yiieh-chih, which would be unbelievable. For a detailed discussion of this problem in relation to the versions in other texts, see Chavannes's note (ibid., 547-8). Whether the story refers to an embassy to China, or, as has sometimes been held, from China to the Great Yiieh-chih, is a question not relevant here. See also Ziircher, op. cit., 24-5.

13 And in addition, some six or seven Chinese. The figures given represent only the traditional ascriptions of translations which have survived, and are based on the information given in the ' Table des auteurs et traducteurs ', H6b6girin, fasc. annexe (Tables du Taish6 Issaiky6), pp. 127- 52. Note also-to take a single example-that Chih-ch'ien A X (ibid., p. 148, s.v. Shiken), to whom some 50 translations are attributed, is said to have been born in a Scythian (Yiieh-chih) family which had already been domiciled in China for at least two generations. Even without regard to points like this, it would be naive to assume that all the ascriptions are equally trustworthy, and it must be made clear that no precision is claimed in this matter. Nevertheless, the tendency indicated seems beyond cavil. A further point which may seem at first sight to be relevant, namely, that apparent ethnic designations could in some instances denote nothing more than the trivial relationship of spiritual or doctrinal ancestry (see Demi6ville, in L'Inde classique, nr, p. 400), does not materially affect the argument.

587

JOHN BROUGH:

of the Han dynasty.14 In conjunction with this negative evidence, we must bear in mind that the Bactro-Indian empire of the Kusanas was in existence before this period; that the Gandhari language, with its Kharosthi script, had been

adopted by them for official use, and was presumably carried by them into their Central Asian territories; 15 and that during this century at the latest, Buddhist texts in Gandhari had reached China.

It is then tempting to supply the missing piece by interpolation, and to

conjecture that the Kusanas, profiting by the inability of the Chinese to maintain control over the Tarim Basin and the territories fringing the Takla Makan desert, sought to extend their own power to the east of the complex mountain country of the Pamir-Muztagh-ata region. It would make a pretty parallel if the secular

power which helped to bring Buddhism to the frontiers of Parthia had also

performed the same service for China.

(d) If we could place any reliance on a source as late as the middle of the seventh century A.D., Hsiian-tsang might seem to offer confirmation of such a

conjecture, when he tells us that, 'according to tradition ,16 Kaniska led his

army to the east of the Pamir ( j ith t); and indeed the text

goes on to imply that the tribes between there and China acknowledged him as overlord. The value of the story is much reduced by the fact that Kaniska is

designated, somewhat oddly, as ' king of Gandhara '. Hsiian-tsang admittedly had the excuse that he had only local informants. But the story is still further weakened as evidence, it would seem, when it is confronted with an earlier Buddhist version,17 the Chinese text of which is dated c. A.D. 472. Here also Kaniska (called king of the Yiieh-chih country), after expanding his conquests in the other three directions, is set on winning the east as well. In order to do so, he attempts to cross the Pamir (Ts'ung-ling), but in this effort (to point a moral, perhaps ?) he is unsuccessful.

14 The key passage is the remark in the Later Han Annals (trans]. Chav. 1907, 167): ' A

partir de la periode yang-kia (132-134 p.C.), le prestige imperial tomba graduellement; les divers royaumes (d'Occident) devinrent arrogants et negligents; ils s'opprim6rent et s'attaqu6rent tour a tour les uns les autres '. And a few sentences earlier (A.D. 127), '.. . les pays occupant les

Ts'ong-ling J S [Pamir] et les r6gions plus a l'Ouest, rompirent (toutes relations avec la

Chine) ' 15 The use of Brahmi in the Kuiana inscriptions in districts such as Mathura was of course

inevitable; but it does not contradict the above assumption. There is no evidence that Brahmi was ever used at this period in Central Asia as an established means of writing, and apart from a few isolated scraps, almost all the Central Asian Brihmi manuscripts known are of the Gupta period and later. The palm-leaf fragments in Kuanva-type Brahmi discovered near Kucha are

only an apparent exception. The use of palm-leaves shows that the manuscript was written in

India, and may have been transported to the region of Kucha at a much later date. (See H. Liiders, Bruchstiicke buddhistischer Dramen (Koniglich Preussische Turfan-Expeditionen: Kleinere

Sanskrit-Texte, Ht. I), Berlin, 1911, p. 3 ff.). 16 So translated by S. Beal, Buddhist records of the western world, I, 56. The original (T, Li,

no. 2087, 873c) has M t = E] l. We should doubtless be slightly less sceptical if it were

possible to maintain that chih ^ indicated written records; but, in relation to India, Beal was

probably right in his interpretation of the phrase as referring only to oral tradition. 17 T, iv, no. 203, 484b ; transl. Chavannes, Cinq cents contes et apologues, in, 85-6.

588


(e) After these traditional and apparently insubstantial accounts, we may feel solid earth again under our feet when we learn from the Later Han Annals 18

that, between A.D. 114 and 119, the king of Kashgar, An-kuo, sent his uncle into exile to the country of the Yiieh-chih; and after the king's death, the Yiieh-chih did in fact send a body of soldiers to escort the uncle back across the Pamir to

Kashgar, and to install him as king by armed force, in place of a nephew. Doubtless only a small military detachment was involved. The earlier expedition of A.D. 90 may have been a more serious attempt to expand eastwards; 19 and

although it was defeated by the Chinese general Pan Ch'ao, the Yiieh-chih did succeed in crossing the Pamir, after an advance of several thousand li.20

6

The evidence outlined in the preceding section gives no very strong support to the suggestion that the Kusana empire played an essential part in the further transmission of Buddhism to China. In favour, there are indications of

probability in general terms-but how strong such probability may be can

hardly be assessed. Important among these indications is the wide geographical extension in Central Asia of the Gandhari language,21 which was also the

language of very many of the earliest Buddhist texts translated into Chinese.22 For the rest, the evidence transmitted in texts is slight, but quite definite:

the Kusanas on more than one occasion made military incursions across the Pamir, but did not succeed in establishing themselves. The only voice to the

contrary is that of Hsiian-tsang, and his report is not only imprecise but is based on a tradition which he heard of only in India.

We must, I think, take this evidence seriously. Unless some relevant information has hitherto been overlooked, we cannot postulate any extensive control by the Kusanas over the countries around the Takla Makan at any period before A.D. 130. Hsiian-tsang's story may be based on a legend; but if it reflects facts, it can hardly refer to a period earlier than about the middle of the second century A.D. It must be said emphatically that the mention of the name of Kaniska here is valueless. This is so whether or not there is a factual back-

ground to the story.

18 Chav. 1907, 205. [Note that on this page, line 6, the date 116, which unfortunately has been repeated in print, is a misprint for 119.]

19 Biography of Pan Ch'ao, transl. Chavannes, T'oung Pao, S6r. ii, Vol. vII, 1906, 232-3. 20 Many of the points mentioned in the preceding part of this article have been noted and

discussed (though often from a different point of view) by earlier writers. Special mention should be made of Sten Konow's 'Historical introduction' to Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, II, 1, Kharoshthi inscriptions, 1929; and L. de La Vallee Poussin, L'Inde aux temps des Mauryas, 1930, 310 ff. These provide a useful conspectus of the bibliography of earlier stages in many contro- versies of this period of history, and much that must still be given serious consideration, even although not a few interpretations of detail must now be adjudged to be mistaken.

21 Apart from its use as such in the Kharothi documents, the very considerable influence of this Prakrit is attested by the numerous loan-words from it which survived in other Central Asian languages.

22 See below, ? 20. VOL. XXVIII. PART 3. 39

589

JOHN BROUGH

7

Among the wealth of manuscript remains recovered from Chinese Turkistan in modern times, the documents written in the Kharosthi script supply the most immediate evidence for the present argument. The birch-bark Dharmapada manuscript discovered near Khotan in 1892 (MS Dutreuil de Rhins) and a

fragmentary Buddhist inscription from Lo-yang 23 are slight but definite traces of the Central Asian journey of Buddhism; and the Lo-yang inscription proves the continuing association of the Gandhari language with Buddhism after China had been reached.

Historically, however, the most important source is the large collection of Kharosthi documents (often referred to, for convenience, as the 'Niya documents') discovered by Sir Aurel Stein during his three expeditions to Chinese Turkistan. Concerning these documents, Stein himself wrote,24 'We are thus faced with the question whether the far-spread use of [Kharosthi writing and an early Prikrit for administrative purposes] was not partly a result also of the political influence which the powerful Indo-Scythian dominion established both north and south of the Hindukush seems to have exercised for a time in the Tarim Basin during the early centuries of our era, or of that even more important cultural influence which must have accompanied the Buddhist

propaganda carried eastwards from the Oxus region about the same period. The time has not yet arrived for attempting a definite answer to this and kindred questions'.

Even with the lapse of years, it would be presumptuous to claim that definite answers can now be given. Nevertheless, though much remains to be done, we can now profit from the work of many scholars who have subsequently added much to our knowledge of the relevant materials; and it does now seem

possible to say that Stein's insight here was remarkable, and that his interpretation appears to be in essentials correct.

8 The Chinese name of the country to which these Kharosthi documents

belonged was first noted on one of the Chinese pieces intermingled with others in Kharosthi in N.v.xv (see below, ? 14), read as = , 3E [j] ' [Edict of] the king of Shan-shan '.25 The name was afterwards confirmed by the discovery, also at the Niya site, of three Kharosthi documents 26 bearing a Chinese seal. This was read for Stein as | 1 jfi1 Shan-shan chiin yin, and translated as 'seal of the [chief official of the] command of Shan-shan '.

23 For the former, see the introduction to my edition, The Gdndhdrz Dharmapada; and for the latter, 'A Kharosthl inscription from China', BSOAS, xxiv, 3, 1961, 517-30.

24 Serindia, I, 243. 25 Chavannes, in Ancient Khotan, I, 538, where the fourth character is noted as conjectural.

We can presumably take the reading of the name on trust; but unfortunately, in the published photographs of the piece of wood in question (ibid., II, plates cv, cxiv), no writing can be distinguished except by the application of more imagination than is desirable in such matters.

26 Kh. 571, 590, 640; Serindia, I, 230, 260, 262, 266; photograph of the seal on the first of these (printed upside down), Serindia, iv, plate xx.

590


It is convenient to note here a correction which is long overdue. The seal, of which a line-drawing is given here, is perhaps not of the highest quality of

workmanship; but there can be little doubt that the last character is not yin, but wei #': hence, 'The (Chinese) High Commissioner for Shan-shan'. The difference is slight; but it may be of some interest to have the rank of chiin-wei attested here.27

Shan-shan is one of the 'Western countries' frequently mentioned in the Chinese histories, and its name is among those which are traditionally listed in Chinese accounts of the routes from China to the West. Along the north of the Takla Makan desert, the way passed through the little kingdoms of Argi (Agni, modern Karashahr) and Kucha, and thence to Kashgar. The southern route went through Lou-lan, and thence to Ch'ieh-mo (Chii-mo), and Ching-chiieh- places which, in the third century A.D. were under the rule of Shan-shan; 28 and thereafter through the separate kingdom of Khotan to the Pamir.

Most of the Kharosthi documents were found by Stein in the sand-buried ruins of a large settlement spread out along the dried-up bed of the Niya river, approximately 55 miles north of the modern town of Niya Bazar. At a second site to the north-west of the dried-up salt-lake which was the ancient Lop-nor, some 300 miles eastwards from Niya, Stein recovered another, though much smaller, collection of Kharosthi documents, which, from their nature and contents, undoubtedly belonged to the same period and to the same kingdom. In effect, these two deserted cities were situated close to the western and eastern boundaries respectively of the ancient kingdom of Shan-shan.

9

On internal evidence, the ancient names of these two places were identified in the documents,29 where the ' Niya site' is Caaota (also written Cadoda), and the Lop-nor site is Krora'imna (also Krorayina). The latter name was readily equated with the Chinese place-name Lou-lan ; rj K. lau-ldn (with an earlier initial cluster 30 such as *yl-); and confirmation is provided by the contem-

27 This appears also to contradict the assertion in modern dictionaries (Tz'i-hai, p. 1347; Tz'i-yian, p. 1493)-which do not give the source-that Shan-shan became a chiin under the Sui dynasty. Presumably the evidence from the ground is to be taken as more trustworthy. But this problem I must leave to specialists in Chinese history.

28 Chav. 1905, 537. For a summary of the Chinese information about Shan-shan/Lou-lan from the Han period until the T'ang Annals, see Stein, Serindia, I, 318-45, and 416-27.

29 See Rapson, Khar. inscr., in, 324-5. 30 cf. EGP, 122. The alternative transcription in which the first syllable is written 5

K.1056 ldu is apparently attested only from later sources, and is not relevant for the original form of the name

591

JOHN BROUGH

porary Sogdian spelling kr'wr'n (Krordn).31 The statement in the Former Han Annals that the name of Lou-lan was changed to Shan-shan in 77 B.C.32 refers to the country; and the occurrence of Lou-lan in a number of the Chinese documents from the Lop-nor site shows that the Chinese themselves continued to use this name for the town of Kroraina.

The identity of Cadota and the Chinese Ching-chiieh was suggested by Stein and by Rapson, although the latter cautiously added 33 that there was probably no connexion between the two names. It now seems almost certain, however, that Cadota does represent the same name which was transcribed into Chinese as Ching-chiieh l E K. tsding-dz'iwdt. The correspondence ts-: c- appears also in Calmadana (see next paragraph). The vowel in the first syllable (Karlgren's Archaic *-eng rhyme) is sufficiently accounted for by the known tendency of Gandhari to show a fronted vowel in the neighbourhood of a palatal consonant

(GDhp., p. 81). In inherited Indian words, the symbol dcorresponds to Sanskrit intervocalic -t-, -d-,34 and it is therefore legitimate to compare the use of Chinese dz- in the Dirghdgama transcription 35 , 3 g lJ P. 'ou-dzdm\-bd-l1ii. This last would then not represent directly Udumbarikd, but the possible alternative form with U.du-. Further, the vowel-correspondence in the second syllable of Cadota can be supported by the transcription of Suddhodana as m Q M 36 K. 'iwdt-d'au-d'dn, indicating a transcription value *-ut, *-ot for the rhyme -zwdt.

The identification of Calmadana with Ch'ieh-mo 37 I 5 P. tshia/-mdt has been generally accepted; 38 and the full name is given by Hsiian-tsang, as

EIf qjS P. czet[*cat]-md-dd-nd. Rapson went on to quote the evidence of the documents for the main stages of the journey between the capital and Khotan (Calmadana, Saca, Cadota, Nina, Khotamna), and on this basis readily agreed with Stein's equation of Calmadana with the modern Charchan.39

Of other places mentioned, Sdca, situated between Calmadana and Cadota, may be the modern Endere, but this remains conjectural; nor is there definite proof that either name denotes the place which the Chinese sources 40 call Hsiao-yiian /1, r. Little more can be said at present beyond the fact that the

31 See W. B. Henning,' The date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters ', BSOAS, XII, 3-4, 1948,611. In view of this agreement, we need not attempt to decide here whether the Kharo$thi spelling reflects a phonetic development or a derivative form with the suffix -ina. (For other examples of the latter, see T. Burrow, The language of the Kharosthz documents from Chinese Turkestan, ? 77.)

32 Chav. 1905, p. 537, n.; Stein, Serindia, I, 325. 33 Khar. inscr., in, 325. 34 Burrow, op. cit., ? 18. 35 Quoted EGP, 231; T, I, no. 1, 47a. [Note that beside the development -mb- > -mm-

Gandhari also has examples where the voiced stop is preserved, e.g., sabudha (Sk. sambuddha): see GDhp., p. 100.]

36 Attested for the second century A.D., T, in, no. 167, 409c (An Shih-kao). 37 This is doubtless to be preferred to the alternative reading ChU-mo, P. tsio-mdt; and if so,

the rising tone here may in some manner reflect the -1- in the Prakrit spelling. 38 Rapson, loc. cit.; EGP, 109. 39 Serindia, I, 219. This seems reasonable on the map, and is not necessarily at variance with

the proposal to derive the name Charchan from the ancient form of Shan-shan: J. Hamilton, in T'oung Pao XLVI, 1-2, 1958, 121, cited in EGP, 109. I am in no position to judge the linguistic acceptability of this etymology; but this is not relevant here.

40 Han shu, 96 (followed by Wei-lieh), cited by Chav. 1905, 536.

592

I

\

Jl z

x ';. a. : i I'

:::: ~:: = I

::

Z

BSOAS. XXVIII]

:

;3 2:

.

!. '.'

d ' tts t , C

l o PP

.: a d

-

'.''' '\ ' : ''

- r


last-named was situated between the same two places. Stein 41 considered that Endere could be identified with the place which Hsiian-tsang called 'the old

country of the Tu-huo-lo l S ,% '. The earlier interpretation which saw in this a mention of the famous Tochari has indeed been put in doubt by the editors of the Taish5 text, where the name is IS j K. tuo-ld.42 The textual evidence for this may be decisive, and if so, there are no Tocharians mentioned here. But if the Taisho reading is less than certain, we may note that the sources

quoted seem to give reasonable support for a reading such as Jt X

K. tuo/-xud\-ld. In this connexion we may note Pulleyblank's proposal to see in the name Ta-yian ); % a transcription of *Taxwdr (Tochari).43 The points mentioned above do not in themselves constitute a positive argument in favour of this theory, but they are undoubtedly compatible with it; and it is tempting to suggest that the name Hsiao-yiian designates the place which Hsiian-tsang called' the old Tu-huo-lo country '.44 An obvious parallel is to be seen in the use of the names 'Great Yiieh-chih ' for those who had migrated westwards (or were traditionally believed to have done so) and 'Little Yiieh-chih' for those who had remained in or near the earlier territory of the tribe.

The name of Niya calls for no special comment: Khar. Nina, Khot. NMia, Hsiian-tsang g JS *nei-naay/ (doubtless to be preferred to the reading t, 4 *ni-na in the Taisho edition, loc. cit.).

Between Niya and Khotan lay the place called Khema,45 which is mentioned several times in the documents. Like Khotan, it presumably lay outside the territory of Shan-shan at this period. The name is to be identified with that which appears in Khotanese documents of as late as the ninth century, where it is written Phema. The identity is proved by tne occurrence of the latter in a bilingual Khotanese-Chinese document, where the Chinese version renders the name as Aj khamv.46 It is of some interest that the Chinese still keeps here the initial kh-, although Hsiian-tsang some two centuries earlier transcribed the name as e ]j phei\-md.47

41 Ancient Khotan, I, 435. 42 T, LI, no. 2087, 945c, where the footnote shows that the reduction to two syllables is a

definite editorial choice. 43 EGP, 90. 44 There are admittedly discrepancies between the sources in the distances given; but no

argument worthy of consideration can be based on figures which were, at the best, very rough estimates in the first instance, and which have subsequently been subject to the risks of accidental corruption and the tampering of interpolators.

45 Recognized as a place-name by Burrow, op. cit., p. 86. On the problems raised by the early Chinese transcriptions of the name of the Keriya region, see EGP, 88-9. The Hou Han shu, which calls the territory ^J ^ P. kiou-mye, gives the name of the capital as $ j. As a possibility for consideration, it might be suggested that the second character here (being a common one in transcriptions) is a corruption, encouraged further by the name of the country, and that the name of the town might be emended to * M( *ner-n,e/ (or *ne-.nei/). This could represent the name of Niya, a town whose strategic importance must have been obvious. That it should sometimes have been held by the kingdom to the east, sometimes by that to the west of the river, would scarcely be a cause for surprise.

46 EGP, 88, and H. W. Bailey, Khotanese texts, iv, pp. 37, 135 ff. 47 T, LI, no. 2087, 945b.

593

JOHN BROUGH

10

In the preceding section we have examined the main evidence which indicates the geographical extension of the kingdom, and confirms that the territory stretching between the Niya river and Lop-nor did in fact constitute a single kingdom. We now summarize the main evidence for the location of the documents in time. An important part of this evidence is provided by the names of

kings and regnal years in a considerable number of documents. Most of those which are so dated are deeds of sale and other legal documents, and the dates

given can therefore be taken as trustworthy. Among the very few Kharosthi documents discovered at Endere, Kh. 661

(a deed of sale concerning a camel) is dated in the tenth year of a king of Khotan. This document has long been recognized to be divergent, both in handwriting and orthography, and undoubtedly stands outside the series of the other documents. There is no means of telling whether it is contemporary, and the

king in question has not been dated up to the present. Some Iranian features have been noted in this document,48 and to these it may be of interest to add that one of the witnesses to the deed of sale is named Nani-vadhagd. This must

certainly be the same name as that borne by the Sogdian Nanai-vandak who wrote a letter concerning conditions in China in the year A.D. 313.49 It would be a miracle of coincidence if the same person was involved in both instances, and the appearance of the name in Kharosthi does not assist in the problem of

dating.

11

The remaining five kings, who must form a series in the history of Shan-shan, were discussed by Rapson,50 who showed from internal evidence that their

reigns were in the following order: Pepiya, Tajaka (although there is a doubt here, and Tajaka may have preceded Pepiya), Amgoka, Mahiri, and Vasmana. In favour of putting Tajaka at the beginning of the series is the fact that the

single document where his name appears (in the third year of his reign) has

spellings such as maharaja-, while Pepiya shares with the other three the

linguistically younger form maharaya-. The first and last of the regnal years of these kings which appear in the documents are:

Tajaka 3

Pepiya 3-8

48 One of the king's titles, hinaza ' general' [in this context, ' commander-in-chief' would be more appropriate] is certain: T. Burrow, BSOS, vII, 3, 1935, 514; Khot. hindysd, H. W. Bailey, in BSOS, VIII, 2-3, 1936, 790-1. The idea that this title 'would most probably have been conferred by the Chinese court' is a guess without foundation, and should not have been allowed to appear in print (F. W. Thomas, BSOS, vIII, 2-3, 1936, 789). The vendor's name, Khvarnarse, has a decidedly Iranian appearance (cf. Pharnerseh, F. Justi, Iranisches Namenbuch, 93b), and Burrow, BSOS, vii, 3, 1935, 515, compared the first part of the name with Av. Xvaranah-, although he later withdrew this in favour of Xvar-, BSOS, vII, 4, 1935, 789.

49 W. B. Henning, BSOAS, xII, 3-4, 1948, 615. 50 Khar. inscr., III, 323 ff.

594


Amgoka 5- 36 51

Mahiri 4-28 Vasmana 3 -11

We cannot be certain that these reigns succeeded one another without interval, nor that the latest regnal year attested is necessarily the last year of the reign in

question. Nevertheless, very long gaps seem improbable, and the total period covered by the documents is therefore probably 100 years, be it a little more or a little less.

It will be seen that the names of these kings have no obvious Indian connexions.52 Nor has it been suggested, as far as I know, that any of them are of Iranian origin, although etymological suggestions might be possible for one of them, or conceivably two. In the case of Pepiya the editors indicate some doubt as to the actual reading of the name. Two of the names, however, invite comparison with names mentioned in the Chinese histories of the period. It is not suggested, of course, that identity of persons is involved. When it is remembered that there is some fluctuation in spelling between t and d (although many instances are only apparent, and are due to the difficulty of distinguishing the two Kharosthi characters in many scribal hands), and that the anusvdra is not infrequently omitted,53 we may compare the name Tajaka with * ;f ̂

*dan-Yak[-ywi] 54 and it j *dan-cak55. Other persons mentioned in the

51 In Kh. 418 (see Rapson, loc. cit.) the editors were uncertain whether the figure written was 36 or 46. In his translation, Burrow read it as 36, and this is provisionally accepted in the present discussion, since it fits better into the chronological schema outlined in the following part of this article. If, on the other hand, the higher figure is correct, this would not disprove the suggested chronology, but would only entail slight adjustments in the later part of the period. In the absence of other information, probability would naturally favour the shorter period: reigns of 46 years or more are by no means unknown elsewhere, but they are comparatively rare. A fresh inspection of the original is desirable, but, with the likelihood of progressive fading of the ink since it was read by Rapson and his colleagues, it would be only good luck if the figure could now be read with complete certainty.

52 It would be mere irresponsibility to suggest that Tajaka is the equivalent of a Sanskrit *Tarjaka ' Threatener ', or to suppose that the existence of varsman- would justify a derivation of Vasmana from * Varsmana ' Possessor of virility ': Indian kings did not use personal names such as these. A Sanskrit verse in an anthology (Subhdsitaratnakosa, ed. D. D. Kosambi and V. V. Gokhale (HOS, XLII), 1957, no. 1448) is ascribed to an otherwise unknown Afigoka-a curiosity, but scarcely relevant here.

53 The spelling Tajaka implies either -jj- or -mj-, in contrast to the use of -f- in the same document for the earlier single intervocalic stop, as in raja.

54 Quoted in commentary to San-kuo chih, 30 (1962 edition, in, 837-8) from a Wei shu. This passage does not permit us to decide whether the third syllable is part of the personal name or a transcription of a title in the indigenous language: cf. also Huai-t'ou aK 9g,, ibid., 838.

55 Wei-lieh (ibid. 859, with i K. tsia\ (*ca\), but this may be a misprint); Chav. 1905, 526, where T'an-t'o is preferred, although the alternative reading of the second character, tche (chih), is mentioned in a footnote. Karlgren, GSR, no. 795, gives only t'dk, but the other reading is noted in the Kuang-yun, spelt , f, i.e. cak (in Karlgren's notation, taidk).

T'an-shih-huai is said to have died between A.D. 178 and 184 (W. Samolin, East Turkistan to the twelfth century, 1964, 45), and is therefore not the same person as T'an-chih, if the Wei-lueh is correct in referring the latter to ' the juncture of Han and Wei' : ' i a Z ,. This is an elastic expression, it would seem, since Chavannes explained it in a footnote as ' entre 200 et 220

595

JOHN BROUGH

Kharosthi documents apparently bear the same or a closely related name:

Tamjaka (Ta.mjaga), Ta.mjika; and possibly such names as Tacgeya are also to be compared.

The name Amgoka is spelt in several different ways: amkvaga, amguvaka, amrnoka, amgvaka.56 The interpretation of this name as representing a Chinese An-chou 57 is impossible (assuming that any of the usual systems of transcription was employed), and it therefore seemed unprofitable to expend time in

attempting to discover a reason for such a proposal. The name Amgoka was

recognized by Konow to be compatible with that of the king of Khotan mentioned in the Later Han Annals (A.D. 152 and 175),58 An-kuo U Pdn-kwak. Since Konow has subsequently been accused of identifying not only the names but also the persons involved,59 it is desirable to draw attention to his explicit denial of this.60 There is a high probability that the name, nevertheless, was correctly identified. We need not be concerned here to attempt to decide whether the rulers in question had adopted a Chinese-style name

(W. Bauer, Der chinesische Personenname, 1959, 281) or whether the Chinese version is merely an auspicious approximation to the pronunciation of an

indigenous Central Asian name. In addition to the king An-kuo of Khotan, we have already had occasion to note a king of Kashgar bearing the same name.61

12

If the names of the rulers are neither Indian nor recognizably Kusana, matters are altogether different with regard to their titles. Thus, for example, Kh. 579, of the ninth year of Amgoka, begins with the exuberant description: maharaya rayatirayasa mahamtasa jayamttasa dharmiyasa sacadharmasthidasa mahanu'ava maharaya a.mkvaga devaputrasa; and various combinations and selections of such titles occur in most of the earlier dated documents. Although some of these designations are used also by pre-Kusana dynasties ruling in

environ ap. J.-C.'. But these matters are outside our province. What is relevant is that in each case the reference is to a leader of the Hsien-pi tribe J,. J ; that the older forms of T'an-shih- and T'an-chih could be transcriptions of the same foreign name; and that the Hsien-pi had at this period extended their territorial control to the south-west as far as Tun-huang and the Lop region-close enough in space and time to admit the suggested comparison of names as at least a possibility.

56 In Kh. 709 the editors presented a further alternative, amgomka, but the published facsimile (Stein, Innermost Asia, plate xvIII) does not seem to justify the second anusvdra. The spelling amgoinka, which appears twice in the edition, is not in any case to be taken as identical in inten- tion, and was rejected by Burrow, Translation of the Kharos.th documents, no. 418. A form of the name with a nasal in the second syllable can thus be considered as unsupported up to the present.

57 F. W. Thomas, in Acta Orientalia, xIII, 1935, 49, 50, quoted by Burrow, Lang. of the Khar. documents, p. 71. Because of the date, the reference could surely not have been to the An-chou

a )J a?n-cju mentioned in Accounts of Western nations in the History of the Northern Chou

dynasty (transl. R. A. Miller, 1959, 8) who attacked Shan-shan in A.D. 442. 58 Chav. 1907, 173 and 171. 59 Or so it would appear: de La Vall6e Poussin, L'Inde aux temps des Mauryas, 371. 60 CII, II, 1, p. lxxiv. 61 See ? 5(e), with n. 18.

596


India, the general arrangement here cannot have been derived from any source other than the Kusanas. The most familiar ' abbreviated title' used of the dynasty in Indian inscriptions, both Brahmi and Kharosthi, is maharaja rajatiraja devaputra N. Konow quoted a similar string of titles from an earlier document of Amgoka's reign (Kh. 581), and added, 'We are at every step reminded of the Indian Kushanas, and we involuntarily draw the inference that the latter had left a strong mark in the administration of Chinese Turkestan '.62

In the passage already quoted (? 7), Stein wrote of the 'political influence' of the Indo-Scythians; and Konow here, by implication at least, also seems to have been thinking in such terms. Yet it is difficult to believe that these royal titles, and the complete adoption of Prakrit and Kharosthi writing in administration, were merely the result of 'influence '-unless the word was intended to carry more than its usual meaning. These things may, against all probability, have occurred. The intelligible explanation is the simple one : that the territory in question was in fact incorporated into the Kusana empire. We can only guess at a date, but as already indicated, the period around the middle of the second century A.D. is probable; and on the evidence at present available, the postulate of any date earlier or later than this by more than a decade or two would seem to encounter grave difficulties. It is true that the Shan-shan kingdom seems to have been independent at the period of the earliest of our documents, and there are no grounds for believing that any links with Bactria still existed.

The weakening of Chinese control in Central Asia, with local insurrections and nomadic disturbances towards the end of the Han dynasty, may well have made it easier for the Kusanas to extend their power far to the east of the Pamir. Later, the same factors would have made it increasingly difficult for them to retain hold of the eastern territories, especially when faced at the same time by the threat from the direction of Parthia on their western borders. The final conquest of the Bactrian Kusanas by the new Persian Sasanian dynasty was certainly prior to A.D. 260, and may have taken place ' early in the reign of Ardashir..., and perhaps even before A.D. 230' (A. D. H. Bivar, BSOAS, xxvI, 3, 1963, 499). If so, the 'embassy of Vasudeva' to China in A.D. 230 requires further consideration.

13

The embassy from an otherwise unknown Po-t'iao ~ g P. pd-deu, king of the Great Yiieh-chih, to the Wei emperor of China in A.D. 230,63 has been mentioned so frequently in print, and in such a manner, that many students of Indian history may by now have been hypnotized to believe that this provides a firm date within the reign of the Kusana ruler of Kaniska's line whose name in Indian inscriptions is Vasudeva. It is not easy to understand the reason for such credulity. The embassy is referred to in a single isolated sentence; no other information from other sources has been added to this scrap; and if the king

597

62 CII, II, 1, p. lxxiv. 63 San-kuo chih, 3 (1962 edition, I, 97).

referred to by the Chinese transcription was in fact called Vasudeva,64 there is nothing to tell us who he was. A name as common as Vasudeva must have been borne by countless kings, and not only in India: indeed, at a much later period, Wdsudewa appears as a king's name in four documents from Tumshuq, near Maralbashi.65

It would make reasonable sense if the embassy of Po-t'iao came from a small

splinter-kingdom, one of the fragments into which the Kusana empire fell apart. At the beginning of the Three Kingdoms, it might well have seemed that a small local ruler would look to the Wei as a better prospect of protection than was offered by the old Bactrian kingdom. The Shan-shan of the Kharosthi documents can hardly be anything other than a similar splinter which had become

independent from the main empire. It is also worth observing that the date of the notorious embassy, A.D. 230, is very close to the beginning of the period covered by the Kharosthi documents.

In outline then, we postulate a period of Kusana possession of the Shan-shan

country, a period which may in fact have been quite short before independent rulers took over control. It must have been long enough for the establishment of Prakrit and the Kharosthi script for government purposes. From this region and period no other forms of writing other than Kharosthi and Chinese are known to have been in common use.

Abruptly, in the year 17 of Amgoka, the royal titles suffer a change. In place of the earlier exuberance of Indian epithets, the two documents bearing this date (Kh. 571, 590) designate the king as mahanu'ava maharaya jitugha Am guvaka devaputra. These titles, and only these, remain the standard official formula for all the subsequent documents dated in the reign of Amgoka and those of his two known successors. This alteration of the royal style can hardly be without political significance. And the nature of the political change involved is beyond dispute: for although the two documents in question are of purely local concern (being deeds of sale concerning transactions at Cadota), they are two of those which are authenticated by a Chinese seal. (See above ? 8.)

The evidence of the royal titles, therefore, suggests that the period covered by the documents divides at the year 17 of Amgoka; and the evidence of the

64 The identification of the name has occasionally been doubted, but the general opinion seems to be that the Chinese form is at least a possible transcription of Vasudeva, or rather, of a Prakritic version of the name, even if it may not be an entirely adequate attempt. (Note that the initial

pd has a parallel in the common transcription ^ V| i pd-ld-ndi\, Sk. Vzrt.nasi.) The real difficulty is not this. Accept that the name Vasudeva was meant; but consider whether, from a comparable (hypothetical) reference in an Oriental text to a Western European king called Henry (who might be Heinrich), and with no more data than we have for Vasudeva, we would dare to guess which person was meant.

65 Texts in Konow, 'The oldest dialect of Khotanese Saka ', Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprog- videnskap, xiv, 1947, 156 if. For the first of these documents, see also H. W. Bailey, ' Languages of the Saka ', Handbuch der Orientalistik, iv, 1, 1958, 153. Konow proposed a date not earlier than the seventh century for these documents (loc. cit., 160): and it is of some interest to observe that, while the royal titles appear in Iranian, the first document includes among them jezdampura, a translation of the old Kusana title devaputra, and so rendered by Konow.

598 JOHN BROUGH


Chinese seal suggests that the country was independent during the first part, and subject to Chinese control (or at least nominally so) from Amg. 17 to the end of Vasmana's reign. This supposition, as we shall see, is consistent with the contemporary Chinese evidence.

It may be observed that the title devaputra regularly comes after the name of the king, and not before it, as is usually the case in earlier examples from India. The point is perhaps of no significance, but there is a slight possibility that our Central Asian kings were aware of the interest shown by the Chinese in the use of the title ' Son of Heaven ' by the Yiieh-chih kings. The Kharosthi documents, by placing this title after the king's name, may have intended to give it greater prominence.

14

The king-pin of the evidence for dating the Kharosthi documents is well known. A single room in one of the buildings at Cadota excavated by Stein (N.v.xv) yielded a large number of pieces written in Kharosthi, intermingled with some 50 in Chinese; and one of the latter contains the date of writing, A.D. 269.66 This date is not open to any argument: it must be accepted as certain, beyond any doubt. The associated Kharosthi documents, admittedly, are not thereby proved with equal certainty to belong to the same period; but any alternative hypothesis raises almost insuperable difficulties. With hardly any exceptions, scholars have in fact accepted a third-century dating, and no proposal for any period significantly different can be taken seriously, unless its author can first provide a convincing explanation of how the Chinese third- century documents might have been embedded in a mass of Kharosthi documents from a different epoch. As Stein suggested, the room in question was not a filing-office, but a place for discarding written materials which were no longer needed-a rather large ancient equivalent of a waste-paper-basket. The simplest explanation, that the Chinese and Kharosthi were contemporary, seems to be the only one which can account for the manner in which the two sets were found, mixed together in a closely compacted mass. And, moreover, this hypothesis is confirmed by the way in which it permits this particular series of documents to fit neatly into a chronology which is also congruent with other available evidence.

In contrast to the Chinese, the Kharosthi materials do not give any indication of an absolute chronology, but only regnal years of kings. From the room in question, only nine documents (from a total of 186 pieces) bear such dates, but these are widely spread: Amgoka, year 23 ;67 Mahiri, years 4, 11, 17, 21,

66 See Rapson, Khar. inscr., IrI, 325; Kh. 213-98; Stein, Ancient Khotan, i, 338 ff., 399 ff.; Chinese documents edited and translated by Chavannes in Ancient Khotan, I, 537 ff. The original of the dated document is clear and unambiguous, ' fifth year of the period t'ai-shih' : ibid., ii, plate cxII.

67 Kh. 327: the name of the king is lost, but, as Rapson showed (Khar. inscr., iII, 326), the document must belong to the reign of Am.goka, because of the occurrence of the name of the kitsa'itsa Varpa (and, it may be added, other proper names).

599

JOHN BROUGH

22; Vasmana, years 8, 9, 9. A scatter such as this would certainly not be inconsistent with a suggestion that we have here the discarded materials (mostly civil service correspondence and records) of a governmental office first established a few years before Amg. 23, which continued to operate until the collapse of the Shan-shan dynasty in Vas. 11 or a few years later.

The period covered would, in effect, be virtually the same as that already noted, which is initiated by the adoption of the royal title jitugha in the year 17 of Amgoka.

15

The new titlejitugha thus takes on a new significance in relation to the history of the dynasty. Doubtless because its political implications had not been given due weight, no serious attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain it. The word has no Indian ancestry as a royal title, and an Indian etymology, even if a possible one could be found, would be suspect for this reason alone. Our foregoing discussion leads us to the near certainty that the word is a

transcription of a Chinese title. The interpretation of the title jitugha (which appears in a variety of spellings:

jituga, jitughi, citughi, jetugha, jitumga, jitu.mgha, citumghi) was greatly facili- tated by a recent proposal by Pulleyblank concerning the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.68 The two initials K. z-, di'-, which later coincided, were

transposed in Pulleyblank's reconstruction; and this transposition has the merit of showing a much closer agreement between the Chinese transcriptions and their Indian originals in very many instances. The forms of the title in Kharosthi which show the anusvdra are important. Apart from a very few instances of accident or analogy, a superfluous anusvdra is rare indeed (except when induced by a following nasal consonant). Its omission on the other hand, although not unduly frequent in these documents, is sufficiently attested, and is especially understandable in this word, where it would be graphically awkward.

In the light of these two points, therefore, it is possible to see that jitumgha is a valid transcription of the Chinese title shih-chung f 4'r K. zii-tiung, P. Ni\-.-tiu (*fi-tuy).

The equation of the Shan-shan royal title with this particular Chinese official designation is given strong support by the occurrence of the same title in one of the Chinese documents from the mixed Chinese-Kharosthi collection in N.v.xv. The piece in question, with Chavannes's translation,69 is as follows:

* ; t ff i i f; Xil/ - * ...*

' (Un

tel, ayant par delegation de la dynastie) Tsin (les titres de) ta-tou-wei exer9ant les fonctions de che-tchong, grand marquis investi par les Tsin, (protecteur ?

de) Chan-chan (au sud du Lop-nor), Yen-k'i (Karachar), K'ieou-tseu (Koutcha), Sou-le (Kachgar)...., allie aux Tsin...'. It is almost impossible to expect complete certainty in the translation of a fragment such as this, which is

600

68 EGP, 67-8. 69 In appendix to Stein, Ancient Khotan, I, 537.


certainly incomplete at the end, and possibly also at the beginning. It seems improbable, however, that so wide a jurisdiction should have been entrusted to a single individual. There is no question here of a Chinese official such as a ' Secretary-General for the Western countries' (Hsi-yii chang-shih N f, :i ). We may then consider the possibility of an interpretation such as, ' ( ... those who) on behalf of the Chin Emperor exercise authority as shih-chung ... allies of the Chin, (the rulers of) Shan-shan, etc.'.

One might expect that this could be part of a copy of a letter conveying instructions to local rulers from a Chinese authority, such as the Prefect (t'ai-shou ; ,-) of Tun-huang, who is in fact mentioned in the dated document excavated from the same room.

Naturally, this document, in whatever way it is interpreted, does not prove absolutely that the king of Shan-shan had the title of shih-chung. Nevertheless, it does attest the use of the title in Central Asia at the time in question. It is a title known to have been conferred by the Chinese on foreign rulers: Chavannes (loc. cit.) quoted an instance of the conferment of the same title on a foreign king under the Wei dynasty, and elsewhere 70 mentioned a reference in the colophon of the MahTsasaka Vinaya to a king who was a shih-chung in A.D. 423.

16 There can then be no reasonable doubt that the adoption of the title

jiturmgha/shih-chung denoted in reality a submission to China, even if the kings of Shan-shan themselves continued to use it as if it were a title of honour. We should observe also that both of the legal documents of the year Amg. 17, in which this new title first appears, are those which bear the seal of a Chinese official. It would seem that the Chinese, on re-establishing their authority in this part of Central Asia, were taking especial care to make an initial impression of firmness.

This having been established, it would seem desirable to see whether it is possible at any point to tie in the relative chronology of the Kharosthi documents with the firm dates of the Chinese official histories. A possible starting- point seemed at first to be offered by the statement that in the eighth month of the fourth year of the period t'ai-k'ang (A.D. 283) the king of Shan-shan sent his son(s) to enter the service of the Chinese emperor (i.e. he was required to send hostages): i tI - A fj .71 The hypothesis that this might be the seventeenth year of Amgoka entails a double improbability: first, that the solitary dated Chinese document from Cadota (A.D. 269) would be 20 years earlier than the first dated Kharosthi document from the same deposit-and 45 years, or more, before the mean date of the same Kharosthi documents, which themselves span only 50 years or slightly more; and second, that the reign of Vasmana would have continued until c. A.D. 342 or later.

70 Cinq cents contes et apologues, ii, p. 336, n. 71 Chin shu, 3 (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed., second ed., 1936-7), Shanghai, Chung-hua shu-chii, n.d.,

32b); mentioned by Chavannes, Ancient Khotan, I, 537.

601

JOHN BROUGH

17 A much more probable hypothesis, then, appeared to be that Amgoka came

under Chinese domination at the beginning of the Western Chin dynasty in A.D. 265 or, as we might imagine, slightly later. This seemed to involve no very serious troubles in respect of the Kharosthi materials, although there was no

striking confirmation either. Without further support, there was little point in

reasserting a dating already recognized as within the possible limits.72 If, however, the associated Chinese documents are also taken into account, their evidence adds quite strong support to a date close to A.D. 265 (and, contrary to our previous supposition, probably earlier rather than later) for the year 17 of

Amgoka. Indeed, the hypothesis which seems to fit best with the available data is the equation Amg. 17 = 263.

At Cadota a relatively small number of Chinese pieces was found inter-

mingled with the Kharosthi : at Lou-lan, in contrast to this, the Chinese documents were more numerous and include a fairly high proportion of pieces bearing dates. Although the Chinese materials from Lou-lan were not found

similarly mixed with the Kharosthi,73 their nature and contents, as well as the

comparison with those from Cadota, make it impossible to doubt that they belong to the same period.

Considerably more than 400 Chinese documents or fragments of this period from Lou-lan have been published, and the date of writing appears on just over 50 of these. Such figures suggest very strongly that the collection can be taken as a representative sample. It is therefore of some importance to observe that 45 of the dated pieces in question belong to the period A.D. 263-70 inclusive,74 while the remaining few are from the early part of the fourth century.

72 In BSOAS, xxIV, 3, 1961, p. 530, n. 2, I remarked briefly that, on the basis of Rapson's arguments, the period covered by the ' Niya documents ' could hardly be earlier than approximately A.D. 180-275 or later than approximately A.D. 230-325. It will be seen that the arguments now put forward are in favour of a dating very close to the later of these. The earlier, it would seem, can now be excluded, since anything at all close to this would imply that Amgoka's acknowledgement of the overlordship of China would have taken place during the last declining decade of the Han dynasty, which would be incredible. Some time ago, Professor D. C. Twitchett kindly informed me of an article by Nagasawa Kazutoshi, in Shigaku Zasshi I * v -ty LXXII, 12, 1963, 1-26, where a still earlier dating was proposed: between A.D. 112 and 264. Unfortunately, the volume in question is not accessible to me at the time of writing. The final date given seems to have been suggested by the fact that the Western Chin came to power in A.D. 265; but such an assumption, and indeed the whole theory of so early a date, would appear to be impossible to reconcile with numerous points of the evidence.

73 The proportions of the two are reversed, Kharosthi documents from Lou-lan being very few in comparison with the Chinese. The site L.A.vi.ii, which produced a small number in Kharosthi as well as many more in Chinese, was a large rubbish-heap measuring about 100 feet by 50 feet (Serindia, I, 381), and is not strictly comparable to the waste-room N.v.xv at Cadota. One paper fragment has Chinese on one side and Kharosthi on the other (Kh. 699; Chav. Docs., 918), but from what little can be read, there seems to be no connexion between the contents of the two sides. The two Kharosthi fragments from Lou-lan found by Hedin (Conr., p. 191) add no useful information.

74 The statement that the earliest date in these documents is A.D. 252 (Conr., p. 5) is misleading. The document in question (Conr. pp. 93-4, no. 16, 1) does in fact contain this date, but in addition the date A.D. 264. The year of writing, therefore, cannot be before 264, and the earlier date is- merely referred to as part of the contents of the letter.

602


This curious distribution of dates has indeed been commented on before; but it is important to emphasize again the quite unexpected fact that the dated series begins more than two years before the end of the Wei dynasty,75 and continues well into the period of the Chin. The initiative may conceivably have come from the central government; but it seems a possibility worth considering that this reoccupation of Central Asian territory was a manoeuvre on the part of the Chin prince to establish a position which would both carry military prestige and also secure control of the trade-routes from the west and food supplies: 76

obviously useful preliminaries to his assumption of the imperial power at the end of A.D. 265. From the point of view of Shan-shan, however, there is no indication that the change of dynasty made any difference to the local inhabitants.

The position of the Chinese in the two principal towns was obviously very different. At Lou-lan there appears to have been an occupying garrison and administration of some size during the first eight or nine years. The evidence is at present insufficient to tell us whether the documents dated after A.D. 270 represent a very much smaller contingent which remained in occupation until about 330, or whether there were breaks in continuity. At the other end of the kingdom, the Chinese in Cadota can hardly have been more than a small detachment to act as a frontier guard or customs control. The intermingling of their documents with those of local officials suggests, though it does not prove, that the Chinese may even have shared the same office buildings. There is nevertheless no hint of any sort of the Chinese at Cadota concerning themselves with local administration. The one point of definite intervention is the affixing of the seal which we have discussed earlier. In every way, it is more probable that action such as this would be taken in the early stages of occupation rather than later.

We thus come back to the hypothesis put forward, namely that the seventeenth year of AmIgoka, the year in which he accepted the Chinese title, may be equated with the year A.D. 263.

We have already seen that the latest year attested for Amgoka is probably 36. Again, it is not certain that Mahiri succeeded immediately; but if in fact he did, we should have the possibility of a synchronism of some interest, since

75 Dated in the last two-year periods of the Wei, e.g., Chav. Docs., 738, ching-yiian 4 (A.D. 263); no. 721, [ching]-yian 5 (A.D. 264); nos. 722, 730, hsien-hsi 2 (A.D. 265). The date in Conr., p. 127, no. 52, hsien-hsi 3 (misprinted in text as j ) is illegible in the published photograph, but the same date occurs also in no. 64 (ibid., p. 129), where the photograph is not subject to doubt. This is an unsolved problem. In spite of Conrady's footnote (p. 127), the situation was not parallel with that responsible for the aberrant style of date in Chav. Docs., 886. (See below, p. 604, n. 77.)

76 In addition to notes concerning grain-rations issued to soldiers and others, the Chinese documents contain frequent references to various officials concerned in the administration of the ' Department of Corn Supplies ', ts'ang-ts'ao t i : Masp., 214; Conr., p. 126, and in many others. (One of the taxes mentioned in the Kharosthi documents is the tsarmghina/tsarmgina tax. This is one of the few words in the administrative vocabulary which may be of Chinese origin, though presumably borrowed at an earlier period. If so, we might translate the term as ' granary- tax', assuming the addition of the adjectival suffix -ina to *tsamgha, as a loan-word from Chinese ft tshad ' granary '.)

603

JOHN BROUGH

this would imply that Mahiri's accession took place in the year in which Shan- shan sent hostages to China (see ? 16). There is no definite indication of the

length of time during which Chinese were present on the western frontier of Shan-shan, but the relatively small quantity of Chinese documents from there

suggests that it was a fairly short period. It would seem therefore that Chinese forces were maintained in some strength

in the country during the first eight years or thereabouts, and by the time the new emperor felt that Amgoka could be relied on as a trustworthy vassal, the

troops were greatly diminished or withdrawn. If our hypothesis concerning the dating is right, it would be readily understandable that when Mahiri succeeded in or about A.D. 283, the Chinese government should feel it appropriate to seek a guarantee of loyalty from the new king by demanding hostages. On the same reckoning, Vasmana would have succeeded in A.D. 311 at the earliest

(the year in which Lo-yang was burned) or a few years later at the most. Since his predecessor had reigned for at least 28 years, there is no particular reason to

suspect that the barbarian turmoils which brought down the Western Chin

dynasty had any causal connexion. The latest of the dated Kharosthi documents would then come in the year A.D. 321 or a little later, and we may assume that such a date must be very close to the collapse of the Shan-shan government which is reflected in these documents. Such a conclusion accords well with the fact that the latest of the Chinese pieces is dated A.D. 330.77

Our original assumption would imply that Amgoka's rule commenced in A.D. 247. (As is always the case in such dating, it is necessary to make an allowance of one year, unless information is available about the precise day and month.) The dating of Amgoka's two known predecessors is much more uncertain, since we have only one document of Tajaka and four of Pepiya. From the dates of

these, the first regnal year of the Shan-shan kings represented must be at least eleven years earlier: A.D. 235-6. But there is no proof of immediate succession, and with so few dates available, there is a rather greater probability that the

reigns were longer than the last regnal year attested. One can only guess, but a

reasonable guess would be not far distant from A.D. 230, a date which we have

already commented on in relation to the embassy of Po-t'iao. Near the beginning of the Three Kingdoms, it is recorded that Shan-shan, Kucha, and Khotan sent tribute to China in the year A.D. 222.78 This is by no means the first such

77 On the later dates in the series, see Chav. Docs., p. iv. In Conr., p. 98, in document no. 20, 1, of the year A.D. 310, the date 330 in the translation is a misprint: cf. text, p. 99 (where A is an

independent misprint for ̂). The date A.D. 330 is in Chav. Docs., 886, where it is written as ' the

eighteenth year of chien-hsing ', which period, however, was in fact A.D. 313-16. In his note on this use of a year-period long since past, Chavannes remarked that the Chin dynasty 'a du vraisemblablement renoncer

X toute visee politique dans les pays d'Occident, [et] il est assez

naturel que le petit poste chinois abandonne a ses propres ressources au Nord du Lop nor ait

continue A se servir du nien-hao dont l'abrogation n'avait pu lui etre notificiee '. This seems to be

the only possible explanation of the anomaly; and it follows as a corollary that these were lean

years for the Shan-shan country also. 78 San-kuo chih, 2 (1962 edition, I, 79), third year of huang-ch'u = A.D. 222. (In Conr., p. 4-5,

the year 220 is doubtless a misprint.)

604


embassy from Shan-shan which is reported in the histories; but it would seem that this decade was a period when a fair number of Central Asian countries were attempting to establish good relations with China. If it is accepted that the Shan-shan of the Kharosthi documents had broken away from the Kusana empire, we have a hint at least from these facts that the consolidation of the

country under its own government began at approximately this time. It would be hazardous to suggest that the earliest of the rulers mentioned in our documents was necessarily the first in this period of the country's independence.

18

No indication has yet been found in the Kharosthi documents themselves of a name used for the inhabitants of the country. It has sometimes seemed a problem to understand why a colony of Indians should have settled in this region. But clearly the use of an Indian language and script carries no such implication, and the foregoing discussion indicates that the question of an Indian colony need not arise at all. At the most, one would assume that the Kusana administration brought into Central Asia a relatively small number of Indian scribes and minor civil servants. The documents themselves contain a very large number of names of persons, and if we exclude those which are clearly the religious names of Buddhist monks, the number of other Indian personal names is almost insignificant. As is well known, very many non-Indian official titles are in common use; and the numerous foreign words in the vocabulary have added considerably to the difficulty of interpretation in many places.

One would not wish to deny the possibility that the writer of one of the Sogdian 'Ancient Letters', when he referred to the presence of Indians and Sogdians together in China in A.D. 313, may well have used the term ' Indian' to designate persons from Shan-shan.79 A reference to trade relationships with China appears in Kh. 35: ... ahono cinasthanade nasti vaniye... yarm kala cinasthanade vaniye agamisyati...'... there are no merchants from China at present ... but when merchants do come from China. .. '. The term cinasthana- agrees with the Sogdian cynstn 80 in the same letter.

The Chinese apparently saw matters differently. Among the passport or identification documents from Cadota, several use the term Yiieh-chih with reference to the bearer: J $ @I !J ' Chih[-N.] of the Yiieh-chih country '.8 Stein observed that in the Chinese Lou-lan documents all the barbarians ' whose nationality is exactly indicated are said to be " [Ta Yiieh]-chih A, i.e., Indo- Scythians " 82, but this adds an entirely conjectural element which confuses the situation-at least if the term Great Yiieh-chih is thought to refer to the old empire centred west of the Pamir. Yiieh-chih mentioned in the Lou-lan documents are for the most part soldiers, mercenary soldiers in the service of the

79 ' Anc. L', ii, 37, 'yntkwt, swySykt: W. B. Henning, BSOAS, xII, 3-4, 1948, p. 603, n. 3, where other connexions between the Sogdians and the Lou-lan country are noted.

80 On the interpretation of the name, see Henning, ibid., p. 606, n. 7, and 609. 81 Ancient Khotan, I, 540. 82 Serindia, I, 411.

VOL. XXVIII. PART 3. 40

605

JOHN BROUGH

Chinese; and the Lou-lan garrison would scarcely have looked as far afield as Bactria to recruit such mercenaries. We refer again to the oft quoted remark that the Yiieh-chih (interpreted as the Lesser Yiieh-chih) were scattered along the northern slopes of the K'un-lun mountains: 83 in other words, an area

largely covered by Shan-shan during the period discussed in this article. There are good grounds for suspecting that the term Yiieh-chih was being used of the inhabitants of this country by the Chinese. This would of course not necessarily carry implications, ethnic or linguistic, relevant to the earlier history of the people or peoples designated by the same name.

A few names of persons in the contemporary Chinese documents may add some support. The soldier (> F j 8) ; 84 k P. kan-cie seems to have the same name as that which occurs several times in the Kharosthi documents as Kamci, Kamciya. Similarly, j I- 85 K. Vi-tak: Khar. Yitaka; and perhaps ]k ~ 86 P. tshiu-iie may represent a shortened form of Khar. Acuniya.

Chavannes suggested,87 though with some hesitation, that J 4 P. ndm-sag might be a man's name; and the Kharosthi documents appear to have the same name, spelt in several ways: Namsana-, Nammsana-, Narmasani-.

19

A single mention of Buddhism has been seen in one of the Chinese fragments; 88 but even if the interpretation is certain, the document in question is too broken to convey any useful information. In the Kharosthi documents, on the other hand, the presence of Buddhism in the country is amply attested. Many individuals are designated as Buddhist monks, sramana (the Sanskritic form being much more frequent than the regular Gandhari sama.na), or novices, samanera (occasionally written sra-). The Buddhist Sangha is frequently mentioned: Kh. 322, cadoti bhighusamgha; 506, 582, etc., bhiksusamgha, bhiksusamrga. Something like an established church seems to be implied by one interesting document, in which the Sangha of the capital (assumed to be Lou- lan) sets forth instructions for the proper behaviour of the Buddhist community at Cadota : Kh. 489, khuvanemci bhiksusamga cadoti bhiksusamgasya kriyakara pranapta. There are also a small number of Buddhist verses in Gandhari- unfortunately in most cases too faded or broken to be identified with certainty- and Buddhist Sanskrit is also represented by a set of verses written in a very fine calligraphic hand (Kh. 511) and a few other traces.

From these facts it is obvious that Buddhism had been present in the country for a very considerable time. The assumption that it was already penetrating into the Shan-shan region 80 or 100 years earlier than the first of our documents

83 Chav. 1905, 527. 84 Chav. Docs., 892, where the word is printed ; kudn/, with a note to say that in the docu-

ment it is written with radical 140, ' comme cela a toujours lieu dans ces textes '. 85 Chav. Docs., 846, ' le tche hou Yin To ', the first character of the name having the alternative

reading ('en (GSR, no. 450). 86 Chav. Docs., 763. 87 In Ancient Khotan, I, 542. 88 Conr., p. 106, no. 28, 2.

606


would be in accordance with the hypothesis put forward in the earlier part of this article concerning Kusana expansion, and with the probable period of the earliest Chinese Buddhist translations.

We have already commented on the attribution of most of the early translations to Parthians, Sogdians, Kucheans, and Khotanese, in addition to Yiieh- chih. If the last of these names is taken to mean ' Indo-Scythian ' in the sense of the Great Yiieh-chih, we are faced with a most curious situation, namely, that the one region from which we have primary evidence in large quantity of Buddhism in Central Asia at this early period, and in the language and script of

many of the Buddhist texts translated, would seem not to be represented at all

among these translators. If the conclusion reached in ? 18 has any validity, this

difficulty vanishes. It would then be necessary, in any individual case, to reserve judgment as to whether a person described by the ethnic prefix Chih was of Bactrian or of Eastern Turkistan affinity, unless there were evidence in addition to the name.

20

The Chinese versions of Buddhist texts are traditionally classified as' archaic translations' (ku-i -t , fourth century and earlier), 'old translations' (chiu-i -

X), and, from the period initiated by Hsiian-tsang and I-ching, ' new translations ' (hsin-i ji a). Occasionally the first and second are grouped together as chiu-i, sometimes implicitly (Hob6girin), sometimes by the explicit statement that the terms ku-i and chiu-i can be used as synonyms (Mochizuki). In the new translations, it has been recognized that 'les transcriptions phone- tiques sont plus rigoureuses ', ' les transcriptions sont strictes et methodiques ', in contrast to the archaic translations, in which, it is commonly held, 'les transcriptions sont approximatives '.89 This is not an exclusively modern prejudice, but reflects to some extent at least the attitude of the Chinese themselves after they had become better acquainted with Sanskrit. Thus, in Hui-lin's I-ch'ieh-ching yin-i 90 the name ~6 X 91 K. kau-Ciak (representing a Prakrit form such as *Ko4ika, *Kosikga) is explained by the Sanskrit form

fA P B_ K. kiau-si-ka: Kausika ; and the familiar j p^ 92 sa-man (Gandhari samana) provokes the comment t ] HEt ]ji r : e ' Corrupt

89 See Demi6ville, in L'Inde classique, ii, p. 411 ; H66bgirin, Supplement au premier fascicule, p. xv; Mochizuki ShinkS, Bukkyo daijiten, I, 729c.

90 Completed in A.D. 807: Mochizuki, op. cit., vi, 182. 91 T, LIV, no. 2128, 675a. On the initial (fi- (P. y-) see EGP, 115, where a transcription value

of a voiced palatal fricative [i] is accepted for early Buddhist transcriptions. This is readily justified in many instances: e.g., a Kharosthi spelling *kosika doubtless implies a pronunciation such as [koziya]. (It may be prudent, nevertheless, to leave open the possibility that in other instances i/-, was used to represent the actual value of the Indian ' semivowel' y.) The same Chinese initial, however, also represents a voiceless Indian s- in the transcription of Suddhodana already quoted (? 9), where the expected voiceless fricative is confirmed by the Khotanese spelling Ssddutana. Against this, a few transcriptions are cited (EGP, 68) where an unexplained initial Chinese z- (K. dz'-) occurs instead of the regular and frequent Chinese s- for Indian initial s-. There is a problem here which awaits further investigation.

92 T, LIV, no. 2128, 420a.

607

JOHN BROUGH

form of a Sanskrit word: the correct Sanskrit pronunciation is sramana '. It would be easy to collect hundreds of similar examples; but these two are typical, and will suffice as illustrations.

As long as it was taken for granted that the earlier Chinese translators were working from Sanskrit originals, it was inevitable that their transcriptions should seem to be very rough approximations at the best, and on occasion careless almost beyond belief. It is only during the past few decades that it has become possible, thanks to the work of scholars in various fields, to arrive at a better understanding of the situation, and to see that these early transcriptions are not vague and impressionistic reflections of Sanskrit. When it is realized that the originals were Gdndhdri Prakrit forms, and that conventions of trans- scription were not always the same as in later usage, a high proportion of these early Chinese transcriptions are seen to be as strict and systematic 93 as the Sanskritic transcriptions of the later translators.

The following examples are selected to demonstrate phonological features which are specifically Gandharl.

(DirghJgama) 94 13a, , ~ cia-lu (caru); ~ 1l : bad-ca-lu (vayaru): Sk. CSru, Upacdru. For G va- (alternating with uva-) : Sk. upa-, see GDhp., p. 87.

18a, )SJ J ciu-na (ctnna) : Cunda. For-nd- > -nn-, GDhp., p. 98; frequent in the Shan-shan documents, e.g. chimnita, chinida. The Chinese text is not always consistent: 80a, jj4 [ J *cian-da-na: Candana. The Kharosthi sources would lead us to expect variations of this nature.

80b, f iJ, mie-sa (missa): Pali Missaka, Sk. misra- shows the regular Gandhari development r > ss, in contrast to 80a, bJg ] U * ka-md-sei'-ti (kamasesti) : Sk. Kdmasresthah. This is strikingly in agreement with the language of the Dharmapada, where earlier sr is represented by s almost invariably (if we exclude a few Sanskritic spellings such as s'ramana besides the regular form samana), except in the word setha [transcribed thus, but probably to be read sesta]: GDhp., pp. 75, 103, 104-5; and on nom. sg. -i, 116, with additional note on p. xxii.

93 Naturally, this is not always so. One would expect considerable variation between individuals both in aptitude and in the degree of importance which they attached to accuracy in this matter. Some 'transcriptions' in the editions are so fantastic that they must have suffered serious corruption in the textual transmission. Other reasons for divergent transcriptions include such factors as regional differences in the pronunciation of Chinese at the time (see for example EGP, 214), and the not infrequent tendency of copyists and editors to make adjustments in order to give a closer approximation to the practice of later periods. Some transcriptions, imprecise if from G&ndhari, would be regular if they represent some other Prakrit; but only sporadic examples of this have been observed so far, and would seem to depend on loan-words within Gindhiri texts: cf. suyi (Sk. huci), more frequent than suyi (see GDhp., p. 101). Further research will be needed before a more confident answer can be given to this question.

94 It is to some extent a matter of accident that the Dfrghdgama has figured somewhat prominently in discussions of this question. E. Waldschmidt, BruchstiLcke buddhistischer Sutras, I, pp. 231 ff., compared some of the transcriptions with the language of the Dharmapada; but the position remained unclear, since, alongside the reconstructions based on Kar]gren, he printed a conventional approximation to the underlying Indian forms, but with frequent use of t for d, for example, and other inconsistencies (op. cit., 166 ff.). See also GDhp., pp. 50 ff.

608


In this connexion, it is probable that the Vinayas would repay detailed

study,95 the more so since the principal texts of four of the schools represented were translated within the first quarter of the fifth century, and thus promise interesting comparisons, not only between themselves as a group, but also with the older translations as well as with the Sanskrit Vinaya of the Miula- sarvastivadins translated by I-ching. As in the Agamas, a tendency to introduce more Sanskritic forms appears in varying degrees; but a preliminary sampling suggests that this was little more than a flavouring, and certainly many proper names still remain in Prakrit. To take a single example : the name Upananda,96 transcribed byDharmaraksa in the third century as D1 D yud'-ndn (i.e. vananna), is regularly written in the earlier Vinayas as I t i bdt-nan-dd (i.e. vananda): cf. Upacdra and Cunda, discussed above. As in the examples cited previously there is no question of 'transcriptions approximatives' : these are precise renderings, no less faithful to Gandhari than is I-ching's iMS ~ H RE ou-pa-nan-dd to the Sanskrit of his original.

It is not altogether unexpected that some Mahayana texts also should first have reached China in a Prakrit form, although the versions which we now possess are highly Sanskritized, except for verses in the 'Buddhist Hybrid Language'. The three earliest extant versions of the Sukhdvati-vyuha,97 all

approximately mid third century or earlier, show unmistakable traces of Gandhari. The name Dipa.kara (Sk. edition, p. 5) is transcribed in T, 362, as -I , t ,f dei-yud-gidt-ld, indicating an original divagara, which agrees exactly with the phonology and orthography of the Dharmapada. For Cunda (Sk. p. 2, no. 19) T, 360 has the same transcription as that quoted above from the Dirghdgama (cunna), and for Pdrdyanika (ibid., no. 29) gives not a

transcription but a translation, for which the Taisho editors accept the

improbable reading Vf 'fruit-cart' (phala-ydna ?), although the variant H recorded in their footnote can obviously be justified by the Sanskrit. We should indeed be loth to believe that the translator was rash enough to set down the

meaning 'other chariot' (paraydna) if his Indian manuscript showed him a form similar to that of the modern Sanskrit text, such as Pardyana-. But the Kharosthi script (which seldom indicates double consonants, and in many places does not write the anusvdra) does not indicate vowel-length at all until quite late in its career, and even then the diacritic stroke invented for this purpose was very rarely used. Our translator's interpretation, then, either results from an abysmal ignorance, or else, much more probably, shows that he was working from a manuscript in the Kharosthi script. His translations of the

95 The comparative studies of parallel versions of passages from these and other texts, in Przyluski, Le Concile de Rdjagrha, and Hofinger, Stude sur le Concile de Vaidali, were of course written with other problems in view; but they contain a number of names where the earlier texts can be seen to transcribe Prakritic forms, while the later tend more towards the Sanskrit.

96 For references to the texts, see Akanuma Chizen, Indo Bukky5 koyu meishi jiten, s.v. 97 T, XII, nos. 360, 361, 362. If the traditional ascription of T, 361, to the Yiieh-chih ' Loka-

keema' is correct, this would be roughly a century earlier than the other two; but the attribution has been doubted.

609

JOHN BROUGH

names of the first three sthaviras in the same list prove that the second alternative is correct.

(i) Sk. Ajniita-Kaundinya (Pali Anna-Kondaii a): T, 360, ~ * t

(T, 361, gn * i) ' He who has understood the Ultimate, the beginning and the end'. This interpretation is intelligible on the basis of a Gandhari form of the name, ko(rm)dinna, written in a Kharosthi manuscript as kodiina, which has then been analysed as a compound of which the Sanskrit equivalent would be

koti-jna-.98 For the form, cf. Khot. dginana-kautuMa (H. W. Bailey, Khotanese Buddhist texts, 93). In the Lankdvatdra, the renderings , koti and z | purva-koti have been noted.99 The translator has thus taken the name to mean that this famous disciple was quite the opposite of a person of whom it is said that he 'knows nothing ': nev' antam na kotim jdntti ; Sinh. agak mulak no ddka 'not seeing a beginning or an end ; 100 cf. also Sinh. ak-mul as a dvandva

compound. (ii) Sk. Asvajit (Pali Assaji) : T, 360, iE li ' one whose desires are proper '.

Corresponding to asva, both aspa and asa are attested (GDhp., p. 103). Here a Gandhari form asayi, appearing in normal Kharosthi orthography as asayi (or asa'i), was reinterpreted as dsayi-, or perhaps as a form connected with dsa. The former, however, might suggest a better motive for the addition of IE 'upright, proper, samyak ', since dsaya, unqualified, might seem in Buddhist terms to be decidedly uncomplimentary.

(iii) Sk. Bdspa (Pali Vappa) : T, 360, IE g ' one whose speech is proper', the first syllable of the name being presumably induced by the preceding name. In the Madhyamdgama, the transcription Id Ai yudi-pha\, would seem to imply a Prakritic form vappha. The word 'speech' in the present version shows that the translator thought of bhdsd. The analogy of pusa, puspa (GDhp., p. 104), and occasional fluctuations between aspirated and unaspirated stops, as in

bhatsadi, batsadi (ibid., p. 100), indicates that a form equivalent to Sk. bdspa could be written in a Kharosthi manuscript as basa or bhasa. The aspirated initial in the same name is directly attested in Khot. bhasma (Bailey, KBT, 93), bhassd (Konow, Saka studies, glossary, s.v.).

98 Professor E. Lamotte has suggested to me in a letter that the sense of ' knowing, under-

standing' may be due rather to the prefix Ajndta-, and has kindly drawn my attention to later

renderings of the full name (Akanuma, op. cit., 43) where a transliterated version of Kau.ndinya is preceded by W T or Tf J, i.e. by a translation of Ajndta-. It could then be suggested that

J or 7[ are parallel to these. This is of course a possibility, but it would not affect the essence of the argument presented above. It would indeed imply that the element 'knowing' was

doubly represented, for I can see no way in which a form corresponding to Kaundinya as a whole

could give rise to * F. Either, then, the Chinese translators in question merely ignored the

final syllable, or were content to understand the whole of this part of the name as koti, or else

they ignored Ajndta-. I suspect, however, that the parallelism is only apparent. It may be noted that T, 362, which transliterates in full many longer names, gives here only ^J |, and this

suggests that all three of the early translations had a recension of the text in which Ajndta- was

missing. 99 Suzuki, Index to the Lankdvatdra Sutra. 100 For references, see Critical Pali dictionary, s.v. anta,

610


These few examples of the translation of proper names are valuable. They permit us to arrive at a conclusion which is certain: since they can be explained only on the basis of Kharosthi orthography, they establish beyond doubt that Buddhist texts written in Kharosthi were in use in China at the period to which the Shan-shan documents belong. In contrast, transliterations have made it possible to construct a very strong case for the language of other texts; but we cannot as yet consider it proved that texts of the period of the DTrghdgama were still being transmitted in Kharosthi manuscripts, probable though this

may be.

21

The kingdom of Shan-shan which has left for us the Kharosthi and Chinese documents discussed in this article can be considered as, in a sense, a stage of the journey of Buddhism from India to China. This assertion naturally does not mean that it was unique, and indeed the countries along the northern edge of the Takla Makan desert undoubtedly played their part also in the process. But the collapse of the kingdom after the reign of Vasmana does appear to mark a definite break, a dividing point in Central Asian history. It is true that the name Shan-shan continues to be mentioned by the Chinese at later periods; 101 but it is virtually certain that the breakdown, presumably under barbarian

pressure, resulted in a severance of the two parts of the kingdom, and the desertion of the principal towns of Cadota and Lou-lan. The so-called southern route appears never to have recovered completely. We know that at a later date the king of Khotan considered Niya as marking his eastern boundary; but the route towards the east became increasingly difficult. In the neighbourhood of A.D. 400 a fairly large number of Buddhist monks travelled from India and western Central Asia to China; and with hardly any exceptions, those whose routes are known travelled by way of Kashgar, Kucha, and Karashahr.

From the point of view of Buddhism and the influence of India, the disap- pearance of the older Shan-shan which is the subject of the present article, also marks a break in cultural continuity. Prior to this, Gandhari and the Kharosthi script held the position of dominance. Naturally, it is not to be assumed that they disappeared overnight; but we can see from the fourth century onwards the increasing use of Brahmi writing, which was also used to write languages of Central Asia, Khotanese, Agnean, and Kuchean, as well as texts in Buddhist Sanskrit. So far as is known, the Kharosthi script was never employed to write such indigenous languages. Gandhari left its trace in the form of loan-words, and also influenced orthography in many Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts written in Central Asia. And it is possible, if not proved, that Kharosthi manuscripts still reached China as late as the fifth century.

101 For example, Fa-hsien (T, LI, 857a); Sung-yiin (T, LI, 1018c). I am indebted to Mr. S. Weinstein for a reference to T, L, 331b, and Chin shu, 114 (K'ai-ming edition, II, 301c: Shanghai edition, 901b), which mentions the kings of Shan-shan and Chien-pu in the year A.D. 381. By this date, Shan-shan must have designated a country of very much smaller extent than that of the period of our documents-presumably only the eastern portion of the old kingdom.

611

612 COMMENTS ON THIRD-CENTURY SHAN-SHAN

But the old Shan-shan did not recover its position in Central Asian Buddhism. The southern route had become altogether too difficult, and travellers on it were few. One of them was the intrepid Hsiian-tsang, who chose to return from India to China by this route. But after he had passed the marshes around the town of Niya, he entered upon a desert of such fearsome difficulty that he could hardly bring himself to describe in detail the horror of the journey.

Documents

John Brough