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0249 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / 249 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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CH.1,XV CHINESE MANUSCRIPT ROLLS   175

managed to meet the conflicting requirements of the

situation. But, I confess, the strain and anxieties of the

busy days which followed were great.

The first bundles which emerged from that ` black

hole ' consisted of thick rolls of paper about one foot high,

evidently containing portions of canonical Buddhist texts

in Chinese translations. All were in excellent preservation

and yet showed in paper, arrangement, and other details,

unmistakable signs of great age. The jointed strips of

strongly made and remarkably tough and smooth yellowish

paper, often ten yards or more long, were neatly rolled

up, after the fashion of Greek papyri, over small sticks

of hard wood sometimes having carved or inlaid end knobs

(Fig. 191). All showed signs of having been much read

and handled ; often the protecting outer fold, with the silk

tape which had served for tying up the roll, had got torn

off. Where these covering folds were intact it was easy for

the Ssû-yeh to read off the title of the Sutra, the chapter

number, etc.

Buddhist literature lay wholly outside the range of

Chiang's studies, as indeed it is nowadays beyond the ken

of almost all Chinese literati. I myself, though familiar

to some extent with Buddhist scriptures in their original

Indian garb, laboured under a fatal disadvantage—my

total ignorance of literary Chinese. So what Chiang

could make out of the titles was of no guidance to

me. But on one point his readings soon gave me

assurance : the headings in the first bundles were all

found to be different. So my apprehension of discovering

here that inane repetition of a few identical texts in which

modern Buddhism in Tibet and elsewhere revels, gradually

vanished. I set the Ssû-yeh to work to prepare a rough

list of titles ; but as by and by the devout guardian of

these treasures took more courage and began to drag out

load after load of manuscript bundles, all attempt even at

the roughest cataloguing had to be abandoned. It would

have required a whole staff of learned scribes to deal

properly with such a deluge.

Mixed up with the Chinese bundles there came to

light Tibetan texts also written in roll form, though with