THE FRAGMENTS OF OLD UIGHUR PĀRĀYAṆAVAGGA

Abstract

The concept known as tripiṭaka in Sanskrit and tipiṭaka “three baskets” in Pāli is used for three genres of works that point to the religious sources of Buddhism. It consists of sūtras, vinayas, and abhidharmas. The sūtras containing Buddha’s discourses consist of collections called āgama in Sanskrit and nikāya in Pāli. In fact, while this collection has four collections in the Sanskrit Buddhist canonical scripture, a fifth collection called Khuddakanikāya has been added to the Buddhist corpus in Pāli. As far as it is known, there are fifteen works in Khuddakanikāya. One of them is Suttanipāta “collapse of the sutras”. Written in verse and prose, Suttanipāta consists of five vaggas, that is, five parts. The fifth and last part is Pārāyaṇavagga, which is also the subject of this study. Studies on Old Uighur Pārāyaṇavagga go back to 1997; however, today, it is not possible to say that this text is fully preserved in Old Uighur. The texts related to the Old Uighur Pārāyaṇavagga are in fragments. In this paper, the unpublished Old Uighur fragments of Pārāyaṇavagga, the fifth chapter of Suttanipāta, will be published. The fragments that constitute the subject of this article are preserved in the Berlin Turfan Collection with the following archive numbers: Mainz 699, U 1536, U 1539, U 1557 and U 2044. This paper deals with the transcription of the fragments in question, their transliteration, the translation of the text into Turkish, notes and glossary/index.