国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
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Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 | |
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2 |
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
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