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Almost 2,000 years ago monks in ancient Gandhara (what is now northwest Pakistan) rolled up 29 birch-bark manuscripts containing the teachings and poetry of the Buddha, written in Kharosthi script. They stuffed the sacred scrolls into clay pots, sealed them, and buried them. Fast-forward to 1994, when the British Library acquired the scrolls, suspected they might be significant, and called in a scholar from the University of Washington to evaluate them.
Indeed, according to Richard Salomon, professor of Sanskrit in the University of Washington's Department of Asian languages and literature, these are the oldest Buddhist scrolls ever discovered. Today, digital publishing tools are helping Salomon and his colleagues study, translate, and preserve the manuscripts. "The beauty of this is that we don't even touch the actual scrolls, but we use Adobe® Photoshop® to get information that we couldn't out of the original," says Andrew Glass, Salomon's research assistant. "The full implications of this technology might not have been understood when the project began, so it's very exciting."
The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, a collaboration between the UW and the British Library, began in earnest in 1996, and the first fruit of the scholars' labour, "Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara," which is an overview of the manuscripts and their significance, was published last summer. Beginning this October, project members hope to publish four additional volumes at the rate of one every six months. Eventually the entire collection will be translated into English and studied.
Salomon and Glass have already finished the first volume of the translations, and they've begun work on several other manuscripts as well. Reconstructing the texts is a laborious process, because some of the scrolls are badly fragmented. The British Library mounted the fragments, which range in length from just a few words to several hundred lines of text, in 57 glass frames, and initially provided the university with black-and-white photos of the frames, the traditional medium that the scholars use to study ancient texts.
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| When he receives a digital file with multiple manuscript fragments, Glass places each fragment on its own layer, selecting them using the Lasso tool. It can be difficult to select the fragments automatically because they were photographed against a yellow background, and the distinction between the background and edges the edges of the manuscript can be fuzzy. |
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But the photographs weren't sufficiently legible, Glass says, so the library and the university began to consider how digital tools might improve their access to the material. First the library tried taking colour photographs and scanning them, but the resolution wasn't high enough and the colours shifted. Scanning the fragments themselves wasn't a viable option, because the laser light might damage them, so the library captured the framed fragments using a 4 x 5 camera fitted with a digital back and provided 100-MB TIFF files to Glass and his colleagues on CD-ROM.
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| UW Professor Richard Salomon is studying these early birch-bark manuscripts for insight into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia. |
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| Andrew Glass, Salomon's research assistant, didn't anticipate that becoming an Adobe Photoshop expert would be part of his graduate studies Asian languages and literature. |
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| Members of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project are: (front row, left to right) Tim Lenz, Richard Salomon, Andrew Glass, Tien-chang Shih, (back row) Mark Allon, Collett Cox, and Paul Cooper. |
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