The aim of the project is to analyse the vocabulary of a particular group of Buddhist texts in the Sogdian language.

The texts in question are limited in time (7th-11th cent. CE) and location (Turfan region, nowadays Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China) and of very fragmentary state. This literature is the primary evidence for the existence of Sogdian-speaking Buddhist communities in this area and at this time. The study will clarify the peculiarities of this corpus of Buddhist Sogdian literature. At the same time it will make possible a comparison with the better-known vocabulary of the better-preserved Buddhist Sogdian texts found at another Silk Road site, Dunhuang in western China, a body of source material of widely different character. Such a systematic study is a desideratum in the field of both Iranian and Buddhist studies, contributing to research into the Sogdian language and into Buddhism in Central Asia and closing a major gap in the research landscape.

As a basis for the study a multilingual database of the lexicon of published and unpublished manuscripts will be compiled, thus allowing a philological analysis. Since this literature is largely translated from Chinese, it will be essential to present the Chinese equivalents of the Sogdian words systematically throughout. In parallel the reception of the relevant Indian terms and loanwords via other languages such as Tocharian will also be included.

Principal Investigator (PI): Dr. Christiane Reck

Mercator Fellow: Prof. Yutaka Yoshida (Kyoto)

Research assistant: n.N.

Duration: 3 years, start: September 2023

The project is funded by the DFG.