The '''Gandhā
ran Buddhist Texts''' are the earliest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, and indeed the earliest Indian manuscripts yet discovered. They are written in Ghāndārī; using the Kharoṣṭhīscript.
In 1994 the British Library acquired a group of some eighty Gandharan manuscript fragments of the 1st or 2nd century. They were written on birch bark and stored in clay jars, which preserved them. A team has been at work, trying to decipher that manuscript: three volumes have appeared. One more manuscript, written on birch bark in a Buddhist monastery of the abhidharma tradition, also in the 1st or 2nd century CE, was acquired from a collector by the University of Washington Libraries in 2002. It is an early commentary on the Buddha's teachings, on the subject of human suffering.
There is evidence to suggest that these texts may belong to the Dharmaguptaka school, an offshoot of the Theravadins. (Salomon 2000, p.5) There is an inscription on a jar to that school, and there is some textual evidence as well. On a semi-related point, the Gandhā
ran text of the Rhinoceros Sutra contains what may be a polemic against the Mahāyāna. (Salomon, 2000, p. 127)
The Gandhā
ran texts are in a considerably deteriorated form (their survival at all is miraculous), but educated guesses about reconstruction have been possible in several cases using both modern preservation techniques and more traditional textual scholarship, comparing previously known Pā
li and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit versions of texts.
Scholarly critical editions of the texts are being printed by the University of Washington Press in the "Gandhā
ran Buddhist Texts" series, beginning with a detailed analysis of the Ghāndārī Rhinoceros Sutra including phonology, morphology, orthography, paleography, etc.
