Reconstruction and Re-Designation of the Dunhuang Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra Manuscripts

The Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra Dazhidu lun 大智度論 is often regarded as the “king of commentaries”; a total of 574 manuscript scrolls have been identified among the Dunhuang manuscripts, many of which constitute dispersed fragments that can be reassembled. In addition to comparing physical features such as format, handwriting style, and paper dimensions, the presence of shared textual variants serves as a key criterion for assessing their potential for reconstruction. Advances in the work of rejoining fragments provide a crucial foundation for further research. However, since the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra is a commentary on the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśūstra and follows a format that first cites the sutra text and then provides an explanation, there is an overlap in content between the two types of texts. As a result, even after rejoining, 355 scrolls still cannot be definitively attributed to a specific source. Under such circumstances, shared textual variants become the key basis for reattributing these dubiously titled scrolls. Through an examination of three cases of rejoined scrolls exhibiting identical variants, along with three instances of scroll renaming, in this study, we demonstrate the crucial role of textual variant collation in the foundational research of Dunhuang manuscripts

Collation · Handwriting · Scroll · Chinese history and philosophy · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Indian and Buddhist Studies