What do the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts tell us?

They tell us that Buddhist texts existed in written form by the 1st century BCE or the early centuries CE, and that these early manuscripts look familiar. The Gandhāran Buddhist texts are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. They date from about the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE, come from the northwestern outskirts of what is now Pakistan, and are written in Gandhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit, on scrolls of birch bark.

Their survival is a small miracle. The British Library collection, acquired in 1994, consists of some eighty fragments from the first half of the 1st century CE, preserved because the birch bark scrolls were stored in clay jars. Their contents are a mix: a Dhammapada, discourses of the Buddha such as the Rhinoceros Sutra, commentaries and Abhidharma texts. Richard Salomon attributes them to the Dharmaguptaka sect. Another collection, the Bajaur scrolls, found in 1999, mostly holds Buddhist texts but also a loan contract.

For historians the importance is twofold. First, many sutras have parallels in the Pali and Sanskrit and Chinese collections: the largest number of parallels for the Senior collection's sutras are in the Saṃyutta Nikāya and its Sanskrit and Chinese counterparts. Second, they are older than any manuscript of the Pali Canon, whose oldest known manuscripts date from late in the fifteenth century, apart from brief quotations and a two-page fragment of the eighth or ninth century.

The finds also include early Mahayana material: a Kharoṣṭhī manuscript of a Mahayana sutra is carbon dated to about 75 CE. Careful reading matters too: a word that looks like "Mahayana" in the Rhinoceros Sutra, mahayaṇaṣa, turns out, according to Salomon, to mean "there are calls from the multitude".