Description

The present book is a result of the Turfan studies carried out at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since more than 100 years. The edition of Old Uyghur fragments that could be assigned to various texts about the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara provides an insight into the history of Central Asian Buddhism. The monograph is accompanied by commentaries to a large number of subjects related to Tantric Buddhism of the Middle Ages. Some of the manuscripts have illustrations of the 40 objects held in the hands of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara of thousand arms and eyes well-known from statues and temple banners from Turfan, Dunhuang as well as China, Korea, and Japan. The Old Uyghur manuscripts are mainly based on Chinese originals of the Mijiao section (T. 1057, T. 1060, T. 1064 and T. 1982). One booklet was translated from a Tibetan original. The book concludes with a word index as a complement for the study of the Old Uyghur lexicon.