Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection: Buddhist Manuscripts V The Bhaiṣajyavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya

This book introduces a manuscript copied somewhere in the region ranging from present-day Pakistan to eastern Afghanistan sometime between the late seventh and eighth centuries.
 
Vinaya is a genre of Indian Buddhist scripture concerning monastic law. Apart from regulations for monks and nuns, it also includes various contents such as stories explaining the circumstances behind the establishment of regulations, thus revealing how the Buddhist monastic system worked, and what contemporary Indian society was like. Furthermore, vinaya is also an important source for the history of Indian literature. This book examines a manuscript that represents the “Chapter of Medicines” of a vinaya transmitted by a Buddhist school called Mūlasarvāstivāda. While this vinaya is preserved in Chinese and Tibetan translations, the original Sanskrit text survives only partially. Although the Chapter of Medicines belongs to the surviving portion, approximately half of the entire chapter has been lost due to damage to the Sanskrit manuscript excavated in the 1930s, which had been considered the sole Sanskrit manuscript of the chapter for decades.
 
At the end of the twentieth century, another Sanskrit manuscript was identified with the Chapter of Medicines. Written in a script called Gilgit/Bamiyan Type II, the manuscript seems to have originally consisted of 205 birch bark folios. It has come down to us in such a fragmentary state, each fragment ranging from those measuring 20 cm wide to extremely small ones measuring less than 1 cm square, that not a single complete line survives. Nevertheless, the manuscript provides invaluable text that fills the gaps in the other manuscript, thereby enabling us to identify clues about the originals used by the Chinese and Tibetan translators.
 
The book consists of an introductory section, transliterations of the manuscript fragments, reconstructed text, concordances of fragment numbers, bibliography, and plates. The introductory section outlines the research history, describes the present state of the manuscript and characteristics of its style and structure, and analyzes the text through comparison with other existing materials. The text reconstructed based on transliterations in the Roman alphabet is presented alongside the previously known Sanskrit manuscript, Chinese translation, and Tibetan translation in a comparative edition. In the plates section, 92 incomplete folios are reconstructed from 509 surviving fragments.
 
With its rich contents, the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya has attracted modern scholars’ attention for nearly two centuries. Despite significant progress in research on this vinaya, especially in the past three decades, many sections remain under study, and many details are still unclear. This book will serve as a foundational material for future studies on the vinaya and the culture and history of ancient Indian Buddhism.
 

(Written by YAO Fumi, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2026)