Place · route town & manuscript find · Pakistan

Gilgit

Also known as Gilgit — the manuscripts

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

35.920, 74.310

Worth knowing

The Gilgit manuscripts include a Lotus Sutra, a large part of the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya and medical texts, several in versions no other copy preserves. They were found by children playing on the mound, and a second lot came out of the same stupa in 1938.

Connections (6)

• TransmissionSrinagar

  The Gilgit manuscripts are in Buddhist Sanskrit of a kind associated with Kashmir, and the route from the Kashmir valley over the Zoji La and down to Gilgit is how texts and teachers moved north into the mountains and on to Central Asia and Tibet. Kashmir was the doctrinal source for Khotan and later for western Tibet; Rinchen Zangpo brought Kashmiri painters back over these passes in the eleventh century, and their work is on the walls at Alchi.

• Route adjacencyShatial & Chilas

  The Indus gorge carvings at Shatial and Chilas and the Gilgit manuscripts belong to the same corridor and the same centuries. The carvings are the travellers' register — stupas, ibex, names in eight scripts, cut where people waited to cross — and the manuscripts are what some of them were carrying: birch-bark Buddhist texts of the fifth to seventh centuries, found in a collapsing stupa near Naupur by children playing on the mound.

• Site adjacencyKargah Buddha, Gilgit

  The Kargah Buddha and the Gilgit manuscripts were found within a few kilometres of each other and are the two halves of the same evidence. The relief, cut about the seventh century high on a cliff in the Kargah nala, is what Buddhist Gilgit left standing; the birch-bark manuscripts recovered from a stupa in 1931 are what it left written, and they are the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent. The monastery that both presumably belonged to has never been located.

• Route adjacencyThe Wakhan Corridor

  The Wakhan is the western approach to the route the Upper Indus carvings record. Traffic crossing from Badakhshan over the Pamir passes came down toward Gilgit and Chilas and then along the Indus to Gandhara, which is why the rocks at Shatial carry inscriptions in Sogdian and Bactrian as well as Brahmi and Kharoshthi, and why the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in the subcontinent were found in a stupa at Gilgit. The 1895 boundary closed the corridor as a thoroughfare and left the carvings at the far end of a route to nowhere.

• TransmissionErdene Zuu, Karakorum

  The Indian Buddhism that reached Mongolia came the long way round. Gilgit's birch-bark manuscripts are the oldest Buddhist books in the subcontinent and sat on the road between Gandhara and the Tarim; from the Tarim the texts passed into Chinese and Tibetan, and the Tibetans translated the Indian scholastic corpus wholesale. Mongolia took its Buddhism from Tibetan Gelug teachers after Altan Khan met the third Dalai Lama in 1578, and Erdene Zuu was founded seven years later — so Nāgārjuna was read at Karakorum in Tibetan, two translation cultures and a thousand years from the manuscripts at Gilgit.

• Site withinKargah Buddha, Gilgit

  The Kargah Buddha rock relief sits within Gilgit in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, 10 kilometres from the Gilgit city centre on the Kargah Nala stream. The 3-metre standing Buddha carved into a cliff face in the 7-century documents the Buddhist cultural layer of pre-Islamic Gilgit. The adjacent Kargah Buddhist monastery ruins and the 1931 Gilgit manuscripts find (6-7 century Sanskrit Buddhist texts) tie this Gilgit outcrop to the Central Asian Silk Road Buddhist corridor.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• Baltistan and the Karakoram

Sources

Wikipedia, “Gilgit”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.

• Wikipedia — Gilgit