[INDOLOGY] Pali Text Society : I. B. Horner Memorial Lecture

[Rupert Gethin]

Dear Colleagues,

PALI TEXT SOCIETY

Ingo Strauch (Université de Lausanne) will deliver the 16th I. B. HORNER 
MEMORIAL LECTURE:

"Gāndhārī, Pāli and the Buddhist ‘Urkanon’: The language(s) of the 
earliest Buddhist transmission in the light of Buddhist texts from Gandhāra"

Friday, 18 September 2015, 5.30 p.m.

Room B111 (Brunei Gallery)
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H OXG

All are welcome

ABSTRACT
Since Lévi’s article “Observations sur une langue précanonique du 
bouddhisme” (1912) and Lüders’ ground-breaking study on “Die Sprache des 
buddhistischen Urkanons” (1954) it can be considered as opionio communis 
that at least core texts of the Buddhist canonical traditions were 
originally composed in a language that can be described as a kind of 
North-Eastern Middle Indic dialect. Among these “core texts” are 
certainly the Prātimokṣasūtra and karmavācanā formulae whose composition 
seems to go back to the earliest days of Buddhism, if not even to the 
time of the Buddha himself. The later linguistic diversification of this 
literature is usually described in terms of the division of “Mainstream 
Buddhism” into various schools (nikāya) – each one with its own Vinaya 
in its peculiar language that was also paradigmatic for the language of 
other canonical texts. As recent research on early Buddhist manuscripts 
seems to show, this picture is rather simplistic and does not reflect 
the complex processes that accompanied the evolution of Buddhist 
canonical literature. Of crucial importance here are two manuscripts 
from the “Bajaur Collection of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts” that contain 
portions of canonical Vinaya material. Datable to the 1st or 2nd century 
CE, they belong to the earliest Buddhist manuscripts. In my lecture I 
will discuss their relation to known Buddhist Vinaya traditions and the 
implications for our understanding of the formation of the diverse 
Buddhist literary traditions.

Best wishes,

Rupert Gethin

-- 
University of Bristol
Department of Religion and Theology
3 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TB, UK